Following up on Scott's post, Mike Huckabee's ignorance about the NIE actually isn't that surprising. His shoestring campaign, to my knowledge, doesn't have any foreign policy advisers, and Huckabee is more interested in reaching out to apocalyptic end-timers like Kenneth Copeland and Tim LaHaye, for whom the only sound Middle East policy is found in the Book of Revelation, or encrypted in various parts of the Old Testament, which many end-timers believe foretell Christ's birth, death, resurrection, and return.
You won't catch Huckabee talking about this stuff in mixed company, of course, and I suspect that he'll have something to say in response to the belittlement he's getting in reaction to his national security ignorance -- perhaps that Jesus was too smart to worry about intelligence agencies? In any case, for some Huckabee supporters, it probably doesn't matter. As one supporter, holding an American and an Israeli flag, told me at the Values Voters Summit in October, of all the GOP candidates Huckabee "is most likely to understand" Old Testament prophecy because he is "biblically literate, because he is schooled in orthodox, evangelical, biblical Christianity." That Old Testament prophecy, this man explained to me, is that "there was the first coming wherein [Jesus] was persecuted and crucified, the second coming is when he returns in glory as king of king and lord of lords in anticipation and fulfillment of all those Hebrew prophecies and will reign from Jerusalem a thousand years." Since Iran gets vanquished in that scenario anyway, probably the only intel that matters is God's.
--Sarah Posner
