Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s views on Israel and Iran have been greatly misunderstood, his son Senator Rand Paul said in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post just hours before Iowans voted in the first caucuses for the GOP nomination Tuesday night.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who like his father espouses libertarian views, said his father’s positions on the threat of a nuclear Iran are in line with those of Mossad head Tamir Pardo and other prominent Israeli figures, who he suggested has questioned the wisdom of using a military option against Iran.
Pardo was quoted by Haaretz as telling Israel’s diplomats in a closed-door meeting that a nuclear Iran was not necessarily an existential threat to Israel.
“Nobody wants Iran to have nuclear weapons. It would destabilize the Middle East,” Rand Paul told the Post following a campaign event in a Des Moines high school, where hundreds of students cheered at his father’s appearance. “And yet, we have to ask, would it be worse to have a preemptive war with Iran or better? Or can we contain them? We contained the Soviet Union,” Rand Paul said.
He continued, “I liked Tamir Pardo’s comments in the sense that he said, we trap ourselves into saying this is the end of the world by making it the end of the world if they do get a nuclear weapon. We may not be able to stop them no matter what we do, and if we say it’s the end of the world, does that mean we have to become part of war that could be the end of the world?” On the campaign trail, Ron Paul has criticized sanctions on Iran as interfering with a free economic system, said it was not clear whether Tehran sought to acquire nuclear weapons and that even so it was understandable given its neighborhood, and echoed his son in suggesting that Iran could be contained as the Soviet Union was.
