The Gospel According to Mike Huckabee

So keep the number of troops there indefinitely for now?
I would listen to what the military commanders on the ground said we had to have, and I would make sure they could justify what they were telling me. But I wouldn't second-guess their every move because its their blood that's going to get spilled out there. I think that was one of our big mistakes: every military expert said that we needed between 300,000 and 500,000 troops to make this work, and yet the Defense Department under Rumsfeld was adamant. [It wanted] a light footprint, 180,000 troops on the ground and no more.

If we've got to win, and generals are saying we need more troops, and we don't have them—where are going to go from there? That seems like a pretty bad situation.
It isn't a great one. Part of what has happened is we've done so much of this on our own, and we haven't had the support of the other nations. [We] haven't had the support of, frankly, one group of people that ought to be financing most if not all of it, and that's the Saudis. Our purchase of their oil has made them obscenely rich, and the tragedy of it is that while the Saudis take our money for oil, most of the terrorism against us is actually funded by that very money, which is the ultimate irony. I don't think we've been nearly as forthright and tough on the Saudis as we should be.

But why would the Saudis want to fund or support the emergence of a Shia-led state that is in alliance with Iran right on their border?
Well, that's part of the problem. We didn't think that through very carefully because the Saudis are not as interested in helping the United States as they are in making sure that the Sunnis win. I mean, they have a different goal, and that's why I sometimes think that, even though I may not be a foreign-policy expert, I understand that there are complexities in these issues … Part of what our long-term national security [depends on] is completely ending our dependence on foreign oil. We've got to start thinking in terms of a 10-year-or-less plan to become independent of foreign oil, and if we don't, then we really don't have any national security. That's one of the things that troubles me most, I hear people talk about a 20- and 30-year plan to get to energy independence—too late.

Would you raise gas taxes?
I think it's more about creating an economy where you don't put taxes on energy production that gives you alternative sources of domestically produced energy … We're already beginning to see technology that didn't even exist, and I was trying to remember the exact figures but the difference in what it was costing and the return on solar energy like 20 years ago versus today is dramatically different, because we know much better now how to really harness solar energy than we did then. There's a greater use of not just hydrogen cells but actual hydrogen produced out of ammonia that has only a water byproduct. Wind is becoming increasing valuable.

You can't get much out of out of that alternative energy on the kind of timeline you're talking about—10 years, maybe. You've got to do something else.
In the interim, we ought to go ahead and use our domestic sources of oil. In the continental shelves and in ANWR [The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], not as a long term but as a short-term measure. It's not long-term because it's not sustainable and it's not renewable. But it's short term to buy some time.

[Regarding] conservatives and evangelicals and their disappointment with Giuliani … how do you feel about this idea of a third party? Who would be viable candidates for that and what would that do to you?
I think it's got to be looked at as saber-rattling at this point. I can't imagine that there's a serious effort to draft a third-party candidate, and my response to it is, why do you need a third party? You've got a candidate that you can coalesce around and win with. You know, here I am, send me to work. But a third-party candidate, if they were to find somebody and have any sort of push at all, probably solidifies Hillary's election.