Ron Paul and the anti-war Republicans

The Republican presidential field thinned last week with the withdrawal of Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. The weekend brought yet another candidates' debate as well as an opportunity for GOP hopefuls to parade before a convention of "values-oriented voters" and proclaim their loyalty to the Christian right.

But the question that has begun to intrigue me is whether the Republicans may have misread the country as a whole on the most important issue facing us: Iraq.

GOP rhetoric almost universally accepts the Bush administration's view of the war: Iraq as the central front in a "generational" global war against terrorism in general and "Islamo-fascism" (a term that manages the striking trick of being misleading, incendiary and slightly ridiculous all at the same time) in particular.

Make no mistake: there are a lot of Americans out there who buy into the idea that we must fight and defeat the "Islamo-fascists" "over there" to prevent their "following us home".

But are the Republicans right in believing such voters constitute a decisive majority not just of their party but of the electorate as a whole?

This question is important because it touches on one of the most basic rules of running for president: to win the Democratic or Republican nomination a candidate must play to the more extreme factions of each party's base.

Once nominated conventional wisdom says a candidate needs to move toward the centre in anticipation of the general election.

Senator Hillary Clinton has been using a variation on this logic over the last few weeks. Now enjoying, according to most polls, she is establishing her credentials for toughness by voting to declare Iran's Revolutionary Guards a "terrorist organisation" and refusing to commit herself to any far-reaching withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

It is a strategy designed to emphasise the senator's "inevitability" as nominee and, in turn, to get people to think of her as a potential president rather than a mere senator seeking higher office. Whether this represents brilliant and far-sighted tactical thinking or suicidal hubris we won't know until sometime in February or March.

But where Clinton seeks to sound presidential by both denouncing the war and indicating her willingness to continue it if necessary, all of the Republicans but one are convinced that leadership lies in taking as hard a line as possible.

Thus does Mitt Romney call for doubling the size of Guantanamo while Rudy Giuliani claims that any talk of pulling out of Iraq shows that the Democrats' are soft. When it comes to the war in Iraq conventional wisdom holds that Republicans want no talk of withdrawal or compromise - only of victory and the stomach to see our way through to it.

But do they?

A month spent driving across the country this summer reminded me that there are still a lot of people who see supporting the war and the president as something close to requirements of citizenship.

But it also brought encounters with lifelong Republicans who say they will call themselves "independent" until the present bunch clears out of the White House.

People like this have few places to go. They are unwilling to vote for a Democrat - any Democrat - but see in their party only a commitment to more endless war.

That is why the quirky Texas congressman Ron Paul is the Republican to watch in the coming weeks.

Make no mistake, Paul is not going to be the Republican nominee, let alone the president of the US. But as the only GOP candidate who denounces the Iraq War as an arrogant, ill-planned bad-idea-from-the-word-'go' he is a potential lightening rod for voters who define their Republicanism through something beyond blind support for the war.

Paul's message differs from his rivals in other ways. He is a libertarian who opposes most government spending on principle. In this he is closer to the leave-me-alone types who dominate talk radio than to the conservative ideologues the other candidates are so eager to line up.

Paul raised $5 million in the third quarter of the year. This put him far behind the "money primary" leaders Romney and Giuliani. It even put him a bit behind the faltering campaign of John McCain.

But Paul's campaign is a low-budget operation in which $5 million will go a long, long way. It is a fair bet that he will still be around to annoy his party's leadership long after the field has thinned to leave only two or three serious contenders.

The question the people who run the Republican party need to be asking themselves is what all that money flowing into Paul's coffers says about their base and what it really thinks about the idea of an open-ended "generational" war against a tactic.

The answer may not be as obvious as they appear to think.

Gordon Robison is a journalist and consultant based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades, including assignments in Baghdad for both CNN and Fox News.