Junto Boys

SANTORUM SPEAKS

Santorum took positions on the issues, fought the popular consensus the media helped create, and lost big, but he is still one of the only politicians talking about the real issues and making any sense. Now, heading out of office, he becomes Newt with opinions on foreign policy.

Following are excerpts from his recent interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Pittsburgh’s conservative answer to the Post-Gazette).

Trib: In an earlier interview, you were very confident when you said you would rather lose your seat than give up your convictions about Iran and the overall situation in the Middle East. On some level do you think that people do not get the potential gravity of the situation that is rapidly developing there?

We have faced the great secular threats of fascism and militarism on the part of the Japanese and the Germans in the Second World War, and the Germans in the First World War. Those wars were wars of secular powers. The Soviet Union, that was a secular power that wanted to dominate the world and impose either a fascist or Marxist society.

Here, you have an enemy that is indifferent whether they live or die. Their purpose is not necessarily to control the world, but to conquer the world and if they do die, well that is perfectly fine with them. Death is a desired aim, not a tragic consequence.

... (If) you do not understand the spiritual realm, then you don't have any understanding of what motivates and drives these people, and you have no idea on how to confront them and defeat them.

Trib: Do you think that, as a country, we are too detached from the war and that plays in with our disconnect and discontent with it?

I have thought about this a lot. How do you connect the war to the people without artificially imposing burdens upon people that are not necessary?

I have said this in a lot of my speeches: The enemy understands us better than we understand them. They understand that if that if they continue to do this, the American people will grow weary of it and want to stop.

And that is exactly what they want -- they want us to get out, they want us to stop, and they want an opportunity to gain resources and power around the Middle East and around the world. So that, in turn, they can become an even greater threat to us.

Trib: Explain the issue of energy security, why it is so critical.

The Left always says that we went to war for oil, and everybody on the Right always gets upset about that. But in many respects, it is true. It is not that we went to war to get their oil, but we went to war to make sure that oil and the energy markets were stable and available for the world.

These folks use oil as a weapon. Chavez, Ahmadinejad -- both have been very clear that oil is a weapon. And the fact is that we are sending over 60 percent of our money out to foreign nations, many of whom -- although not most -- are hostile to the United States.

That is not a good security posture to be in -- we finance your enemy either directly or indirectly. We don't buy directly from Iran, but the price of oil is greatly influenced by the consumption of Americans.

And the lack of production in this country has an impact on world supply and therefore on world price. Our lack of using alternative resource has the same impact. So I have gone from being a sort of traditional Republican on the issue of energy to somewhat more of a radical in terms of what we should be producing.

Trib: Are there any immediate, short-term solutions that we could apply?

... I mentioned during the campaign, just in Western Pennsylvania alone we drilled over 3,500 gas and oil wells last year. Thirty-five hundred! We go through floor debates to stop us from drilling less than 1,000 wells in all of Alaska for the next 25 years.

I just don't figure that: We have ten gas wells at Oakmont Country Club, and they are right there on the course. I mean, they are playing the U.S. Open there and we are drilling gas wells right there, and we can't drill them in Alaska? Where nobody lives? How does this make any sense to anybody?

Trib: Do you think that history will eventually be kinder to Rumsfeld than the media was?

... I did not see the Clinton administration doing the things that were necessary to transform the military to a force that can respond to these threats of terrorism, these asymmetric threats. The reason is because people make careers out of "fighting the last war." We are not going to have any of the "last wars" -- we are going to have wars like this, right now.

Rumsfeld understood that. I think Bush understood that. They came in there and they really started banging heads in the Defense Department, and he made a lot of enemies.

Did he consult everybody that he should have consulted? No. But did he have, in my opinion, the right idea? Yes. He had a lot of people disagree with him, and they were very public with their disagreements. I think that he did what he needed to do. I think that our military is going to be much better off for it.

Trib: The media -- how do you think they have played a role in the public's perception of the threat of Islamic fascism, the effects of the war in Iraq?

By [reporting the way our media reports,] all you do is accomplish exactly what the terrorists want you to do, which is to weary the American public of this war -- and eventually cause us to stop fighting it. That is the end result of what we are doing.

I have always said that if World War II was covered like this war, I really, very seriously doubt that we would have ever won that war. Certainly, we might have been willing, when the losses got so high, to negotiate a compromise or negotiate some sort of surrender. The death that went on -- I always remind people that we lost more people in a couple of hours on D-Day that we have in the entire war (in Iraq).

The amount of death and destruction that occurred in the previous wars, under the current media coverage, would not have tolerated by the American public.

The bottom line is, the media -- and I am not saying that they are intending to do this -- but simply by what they are doing, without question, it is aiding the terrorists and their objective.

Covering the bad things that are going on Iraq, and not covering the greater complexities that I have talked about in my speeches and highlighting the threat, is a disservice to the American public, and, I think, will have far-reaching consequences.

Trib: So is that what is next for you -- a book or an action plan based on your speeches about terrorism?

Well, I am working on that. No one has agreed to publish it, and I have just started putting my thoughts together. I feel compelled to sort of make the case.

It is not going to be a scholarly piece, it is not going to be 400 pages. It will be a book that will hopefully be around 200 pages, that will explain to the people of this country the situation that we are in, how we got there, and what we can do to extricate ourselves from this problem.

Trib: What is the next wave of reform for the Republican Party? Do they need to retake the reform mantle to win again?

I wrote a book about this, laying out an agenda for the Republican Party, and I worked very hard to try to be an idea guy. The alternative for us is to be a party that keeps our traditional bases -- fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, a strong national defense -- as well as a party that believes in life and the sanctity of marriage ... there are people on the margins of our society and that we have a responsibility to deal with them from a public-policy perspective, not just focus on the top-line economy --

Look, we have to be engaged in the culture, engaged in building a stronger society and building a stronger family. And if we are not, and if that is not what we as public officials feel is important to us, well, then the American public is not going to connect with us anymore.

Trib: Why do you think you lost?

(Laughter) I spoke up too boldly, too often and too loudly, on some of the things that my employer, the voters of Pennsylvania, didn't agree with me on.