When you look at President Putin, what do you see?
COOPER: Janet Hook from the Los Angeles Times.
Janet?
HOOK: OK. Governor Huckabee, we're going to shower you with questions now, OK?
HUCKABEE: Well, good. I'd like to be here tonight. Thank you.
(LAUGHTER)
HOOK: President Bush once said he looked into the eyes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and found him to be, "very straightforward and trustworthy," and that he "got a sense of his soul." Senator McCain says he looks into Putin's eyes and he sees three letters -- KGB.
When you look at President Putin, what do you see?
HUCKABEE: Well, I don't know that I can read people's souls that well, and I've spent a lot of my life looking at people and talking to them. But I look at people's actions, because you can look into their eyes and their eyes can lie, but their actions don't.
And when people take actions that cause us to give concern to human rights violations, to oppression -- and I don't care what their eyes are saying -- their actions are speaking a whole lot louder than their eyes ever will. And we need to be looking at what people are doing, not just what they're saying, and recognizing that our foreign policy needs to reflect an extraordinary strength.
We need to make sure that the rest of the world knows that we're going to have a military that they're not wanting to engage for any purpose. And I do believe that President Reagan was right, you have peace through strength, not vulnerability.
We've got to an Army that is well-staffed, well-trained, well- financed, and that is prepared for anything. And hopefully because it is so well-prepared, it never has to be used.
We can't continue to have one that is stretched and pulled, and particularly -- and I'm very sensitive to this having been a governor and watched some of our National Guard troops spend three out of five years in active duty -- if we're going to engage them, we have to make sure we've got enough troop strength of regular Army and our Air Force and Navy that we don't have to have extended deployments out of our guard and reserve units.