Oct. 9 Republican debate transcript

Matthews: Congressman Paul, would you -- would we have gone to war in Iraq if we weren't so dependent on Middle East oil?

Paul: Probably not, but that should not be a reason. That's an old theory. It's mercantilistic. It's neocolonialism that you have to maintain your supply routes and your natural resources.

But I think there's still a lot of those kind of people around, and they believe -- you know, we were told it was about oil and jobs when it first started in 1990, and this is just a continuation of that war. Indeed, this war is a mistake; it was a mistake to go in. It's very costly, and it has a lot of economic ramifications. We're going broke. We have this huge deficit. We're spending nearly a trillion dollars with maintaining our empire overseas, and that's a cost. Right now we owe foreigners $2.7 trillion. No wonder they have money to come back in here and buy stuff up, and then we object; but that has to do with our monetary system, as well as our foreign policy.

So if we want prosperity, we have to change our foreign policy; we have to live within our means, but we can't maintain a reserve currency where all -- our greatest export today are paper dollars. We create money out of thin air, and they still accept it as if it was backed by gold. And that is the reason all this money goes overseas. And at the same time, we finance all this military activity overseas, and it's bankrupting this country. And not only that, it's a threat to our personal liberties here, and it's going to be a threat to our economy because we are beginning to live beneath our means. And that is a natural consequence of what happens when you live beyond your means.

So we must change our policy both overseas and domestically.

Matthews: Do you believe that, Senator Brownback, that we would (sic) have gone to war in Iraq if we weren't so dependent on Middle East oil?

Brownback: I don't believe that in the least. We went to Iraq -- on the war in Iraq, what I voted for was the war on terrorism.

And Afghanistan was where the Taliban was -- where al Qaeda was located; it was run by the Taliban. And we saw in Iraq what we thought was the mixture of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. And it was in 2003, this was in close proximity to 2001, when we had the 9/11 crisis, and I wasn't about to trust that Saddam Hussein wasn't going to mix terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. And we haven't found the weapons of mass destruction, but that doesn't mean we leave. And I think the Bush administration has generally done well military, and I think the military has done a fabulous job. (Applause.) I think we have done poorly on the political side.

And this Friday, Joe Biden and I are getting together in Des Moines, and we're going to be talking about the political side, a three-state solution in Iraq. This is what ultimately is going to happen. You're going to have a Kurdish north, a Sunni west, a Shi'a south within one country, federalism, with a weak federal government; the federal government headquartered in Baghdad. Joe and I don't agree on hardly anything, but this is what we need to do to get the political equation. That's what has been poorly done by the Bush administration starting with General Garner and moving on through the succession. It hasn't been well-handled politically. We've got to get a better bipartisan political solution -- we can.

Matthews: Senator Thompson, Senator Brownback made the point that we haven't been able to find the WMD. You made a statement a couple of days ago, I believe, that alluded to the fact: You believed that there were such weapons in Iraq. Do you believe they were there right before we got in and they were moved out somewhere?

Thompson: No, no.

Matthews: What do you believe?

Thompson: No, I didn't say that. I was just stating what was obvious, and that is that Saddam had had them prior. They used them -- they used them against his own people, against the Kurds.

Matthews: Okay.

Thompson: And of course, he had a nuclear reactor back -- I believe it was in '81 when the Israelis bombed that. And the Iraqi Study Group reported that he had designs on reviving his nuclear program, which he had started once upon a time.

So there's not question that he had had them in times past. And in my own estimation, there's no question that if left to his own devices, he and his son would still be running that place, attacking their neighbors and murdering their own people and developing a nuclear capability, especially in looking at what Iran is doing as their next-door neighbor and long-time adversary. And the whole place would be nuclearized.

Saudi Arabia would probably respond to that; other Sunni nations would respond to it. And you would have an entirely nuclearized part of the world that we don't have now. That would be extremely problematic for us from an oil standpoint, as well as a global stability standpoint.

Matthews: Thank you.

Governor Romney, that raises the question, if you were president of the United States, would you need to go to Congress to get authorization to take military action against Iran's nuclear facilities?

Romney: You sit down with your attorneys and tell you what you have to do, but obviously, the president of the United States has to do what's in the best interest of the United States to protect us against a potential threat. The president did that as he was planning on moving into Iraq and received the authorization of Congress.