6-19-07, 9:47 am

The Republican presidential candidates are a pretty incoherent, hateful, confused, and sometimes paranoid bunch of nincompoops. But they have made one thing clear: vote for them and the war in Iraq will go on and on and on.

One of the resounding themes of the Republicans' campaigns so far is how they are all so unlike Bush. But when you scratch the surface, they are planning to carry on with just about all of Bush's policies, and the war is no different.

Take, for example, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is despised by New York emergency workers for his bungling policies that they say may have caused greater difficulties on and after 9/11. Even as the vast majority of Americans want the war in Iraq to come to an end and the troops brought home, Giuliani now says, if elected, he'd probably send more troops to Iraq.

In fact, in an interview on Bloomberg TV (owned by current New York Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg), Giuliani said that he'd extend the occupation of Iraq, a country which he considers a 'strong ally of the United States.' He must have missed the most recent polls in Iraq that indicate growing support for insurgents.

To be fair, Giuliani's pronouncements came a day after he announced his 12 'commitments,' which failed to even mention the Iraq war. So he may have been covering his tracks with some extra bluster.

But Giuliani, contrary to what about 7 in 10 Americans think, says the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, and echoing Bush, it is the central front in the war on terror.

When asked how he reconciles his stated policy about continuing the war and strong public opposition to it, Giuliani adopted Bush's 'commander guy' posture and said, 'leadership is about sometimes doing the things you know are right, and then it’s your job to educate the public.' In the next breath, Giuliani rejected letting the people decide what our government's policies should be.

For his part, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney appears to either suffer from amnesia or be purposely distorting the history of how the Iraq war started. We report, you decide.

At the June 5th Republican debate, after announcing his full support for Bush's 'stay-the-course' Iraq war plan, Romney misleadingly claimed that if 'Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein, therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in.'

Of course, weapons inspectors returned to Iraq in November of 2002, and, incidentally, did not find the WMD that were also not found by US WMD hunters following the invasion.

Maybe Romney was just being coy. Maybe he really meant that because Saddam did let the inspectors in and because they found no weapons there, that we aren't in any conflict? Make sense to you?

TV star Fred Thompson appears to believe there isn't much conflict in Iraq either. In a staged interview for the ultra right think tank (using 'think' loosely) Hoover Institution, Thompson pledged himself to endless war on Iraq and appeared not to understand the full extent of the violence taking place in Iraq. Soldiers in Iraq are happy, he implied.

Giddy. Despite lack of equipment, poor leadership, unclear mission, no exit strategy, stop loss, endless tours of duty, torture scandals, growing casualties, and more.

And do we have to mention Sen. John McCain's April Fool's Day stunt of strolling through a Baghdad market – wearing a flak vest and surrounded by dozens of US troops and helicopters overhead – to prove how safe the country has been made by Bush's surge? What was not reported on as much was that the day after McCain's visit, a terrorist attack killed a number of the people who were known to work at that market, believed by some to be a retaliation.

Not to be outdone, Rep. Duncan Hunter, too, has asserted the need for endless war on Iraq, but added that he favors using nuclear weapons against Iran. Hunter's comment prompted the usually conservative USA Today to opine: 'But the tactical nuclear option is so extreme, and has such enormous potential ramifications, that it should not be discussed in the same breath as conventional bombs. In their haste to talk tough, Hunter and his fellow GOP aspirants lost an opportunity to show voters that they grasp the dangers and can be trusted to be responsible nuclear stewards.'

So while the rest of the country is debating how and when the troops will come home, the Republican wannabes are stuck in the past. That the GOP is so out of touch with what the American people want would be humorous if it wasn't so deadly.

Whoever wins the GOP nomination won't want to talk much about the war during the campaign, but voters should note now that voting Republican in 2008 means voting for endless war, and it might even usher in the world's first real nuclear war.

--Joel Wendland can be reached at