Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday that he would bomb
Iran’s nuclear facilities if the country failed to open them up to
inspectors.
Speaking in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, the former
senator said that he would send a clear message to the Iranians: “You either
open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to
inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air
strikes.”
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In response to the
interviewer’s statement that there is no good option against Iran’s nuclear
program, Santorum said he wants to “make sure Iran knows that when we say ‘Iran
is not getting a nuclear weapon,’ we will actually effectuate policies that make
that happen.”
“I would say to every foreign scientist that’s going into
Iran to help them with their [nuclear] program, you will be treated as an enemy
combatant, like an al-Qaida member,” he said. “Iran will not get a nuclear
weapon under my watch.”
The republican presidential hopeful emphasized
his record on Iran, while criticizing US President Barack
Obama’s.
Santorum cited the Iran Freedom-Support Act, which he sponsored
in 2005. The act, which passed in Congress with bipartisan support, appropriated
$10 million to supporting groups opposed to the Iranian regime.
“The Iran
Freedom-Support Act, which I authored, imposed tough sanctions on the Iranian
nuclear program and provided funding for the pro-democracy movement,” he
said.
“When Obama came into office, he cut that funding,” Santorum said
in a condemnation of what he viewed as Obama’s lack of support for the Green
Movement pro-democracy protesters of 2009. “The people in the streets were
rioting, saying ‘please support us, President Obama’... We want to turn this
theocracy that has been at war with the United States, that’s developing a
nuclear weapon, that’s killing [US] troops in Afghanistan and Iraq with IEDs.
And the president of the United States turned his back on them.”
