Jim Antle makes a fair point that some antiwar voters don’t take Huntsman’s hawkishness on Iran seriously:

Certainly Ron Paul, with his actual opposition to the war in Iraq and any subsequent preventive war against Iran, has a stronger case to make to such voters. But I can tell you anecdotally there are still antiwar Republicans who think Huntsman’s comments on Iran are just positioning and like the idea of a candidate with a more mainstream image than Paul.

Whether this is a large enough group to mean anything is another story. It’s worth noting that Huntsman also has an anti-Romney ad, taking on two of the three candidates with a good chance of finishing in the top tier in New Hampshire while hoping the Iowa results take care of the third (Newt Gingrich). Larison should remember from the Chuck Hagel experience that respectable-sounding realists get all kinds of benefit of the doubt, even when they are not timely opponents of any large war.

The Hagel comparison is a good one. One could go so far as to make the argument that Huntsman is running Chuck Hagel’s presidential campaign four years after Hagel declined to run, and the two have more or less the same constituency among admiring journalists. There is a more recent example that also supports Antle’s argument. As both of us remember, the New Hampshire exit polls in 2008 showed that self-identified anti-Bush and anti-Iraq war voters supported McCain more than any other candidate. McCain actually beat Paul by twelve points among those who “strongly disapproved” of the Iraq war! That’s crazy, but it happened.

If these voters had judged McCain on his past and current policy views, one assumes that they would never have voted for one of the most reliable interventionists around. However, I suspect these people based their vote on the superficial, personal differences between McCain and Bush, and they ignored his long record of supporting military interventions and focused instead on his reputation for breaking with his party. He still enjoyed a lot of the goodwill he had earned during his first presidential campaign, and his relentless militarism never tarnished it. It may have also been that many self-described antiwar voters don’t give foreign policy issues priority when determining which candidate to support, which is what might make it possible for them to support a candidate whose foreign policy is completely antithetical to the one they would prefer.

I suppose it’s remotely possible that Huntsman’s Iran remarks are nothing more than positioning, but I’m not sure that is very encouraging. His “positioning” has locked him into opposing a nuclear-armed Iran by any means necessary, and he has repeatedly stated that he “cannot live” with a nuclear-armed Iran. Even granting that campaign rhetoric does not necessarily tell us how a person governs once in office, Huntsman has severely limited his options in the unlikely event that he should win the Presidency. He talks endlessly about rebuilding the American “core,” but in the next breath he proposes launching a war that would explode the deficit, damage the economy, and possibly escalate into the largest war the United States has had to fight in forty years. Which part of his message should we believe? No doubt some antiwar voters want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but what reason has he given them to do that? There is absolutely no reason to believe that his Iran remarks are atypical or unrepresentative of the kind of foreign policy he would conduct. Remember, he endorsed McCain during the 2008 cycle, so it isn’t hard to believe that he shares McCain’s views on Iran. He has rhetorically opposed the Libyan war, and called for a faster withdrawal from Afghanistan, but neither of those is incompatible with hawkishness on Iran, and they are just as likely to be mere “positioning” as his Iran remarks.

The more significant problem with Huntsman’s Iran remarks is that they reflect a lack of good moral and legal judgment. The war with Iran that Huntsman proposes so readily would be an unprovoked and illegal war against another sovereign state. There is nothing that would remotely justify such an attack, but that hasn’t stopped Huntsman from endorsing doing just that. This reminds me of Paul Pillar’s recent comments on Kroenig’s essay:

Related to that is a further disturbing thought, or rather a question: how did mainstream discourse within the American foreign-policy establishment come to include proposals to launch a war of aggression? That is markedly contrary to what had been American tradition.

Whether Huntsman “really” wants to attack Iran or not, he is contributing to the corruption of public discourse about foreign policy, and he is lending rhetorical support to an outrageous proposal. Huntsman has a reputation for “moderation” and foreign policy experience, so his support for attacking Iran is all the more harmful to the debate, as it lends a little more credibility to the pro-war side. If this is what is required to have a “more mainstream image,” perhaps it is better not to have one. Even if it is just positioning, it is obnoxious and antiwar voters shouldn’t reward him with their support.

Update: Matt Welch discusses how Ron Paul might replicate McCain’s success in winning non-Republican votes.