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Posted: June 20, 2007 4:48 PM
Thompson Touches on Foreign Policy
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Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin and a long-shot for the Republican nomination, said Tuesday that if elected, he would try to bring back Colin Powell as his secretary of state.

Thompson spoke about his foreign policy plans in a speech in Des Moines, Iowa. When an audience member asked him whom he would want as his top diplomat, he named Powell — although he said that he had not broached the subject with Powell personally.

Thompson also continued to criticize the current administration’s handling of the war, saying it had a “degree of insanity.”

“If you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, that has a degree of insanity stapled with it and that is exactly what we’re doing,” he said. “Eight and a half billion dollars a month and we still do not have a plan on how we’re going to win the war or win the peace.”

He continued to push his three-part plan for Iraq, in the speech and in an advertisement running on Iowa radio stations.

The plan includes a vote in the Iraqi parliament as to whether U.S. troops should remain in the country; creation of 18 provincial governments in which each major ethnic group can elect its own people, and an equal distribution of oil revenues among the federal government, provincial governments and individual citizens.

Meanwhile, Thompson continued to focus his campaign in Iowa, following up on last week’s promise to remain in the Iowa straw poll regardless of whether or not the other candidates take part.

But his campaign has yet to gain much traction. A University of Wisconsin survey found that even his home state prefers former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Sixty-four percent of Wisconsin Republicans had a favorable impression of Giuliani. Thompson came in second with 58 percent of voters saying they had a favorable impression of him.