Rivals target Obama with hard line on Iran

Republicans say they would go to war to prevent Tehran getting nuclear weapons

The Republican Party's candidates for president have signalled that Barack Obama's success in hunting down Osama bin Laden and ending the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi would not stop them trying to paint him as weak on foreign policy.

Mitt Romney, the frontrunner to face Mr Obama in next November's election, even threatened to turn the poll into a vote on Iran's efforts to develop a nuclear programme, saying a vote for the Democrat would be a vote for a nuclear-armed Iran.

As Republicans tackled foreign policy issues at their second presidential debate in less than a week, the candidates ratcheted up the rhetorical pressure on Mr Obama, who was meeting Russian and Chinese officials in Hawaii to discuss Iran.

"If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon," Mr Romney said during the debate in Spartansburg, South Carolina. "And if you elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon."

All the candidates called for stiffer economic sanctions again Tehran, but Mr Romney went further in countenancing military action. "If all else fails, if after all the work we've done there's nothing else we can do besides take military action, then of course you take military action," he said.

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives who has moved up into second place in some of the latest polls of Republican voters, also took a hard line. "There are a number of ways to be smart about Iran, and a few ways to be stupid. The administration skipped all the ways to be smart... You have to take whatever steps are necessary to break its capacity to have a nuclear weapon."

The main issue in next year's presidential head-to-head is certain to be the economy, but the Iranian nuclear programme could become a critical element in some states. Republicans are aggressively courting Jewish voters, who fear Mr Obama has not stood firmly enough with Israel and cannot be trusted to protect the long-time ally against Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Anxiety about developments in Tehran flared last week because of a report compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said it had obtained significant and convincing evidence that Iran was seeking to acquire a nuclear arsenal and had sought to mislead the UN watchdog about its atomic programme.

Neither Russian President Dmitry Medvedev nor Chinese President Hu Jintao publicly echoed Mr Obama's push for solidarity over Iran after they met on the sidelines of a Pacific Rim economic summit in Honolulu.

A row also broke out during the Republican debate over the controversial use of waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists. Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann said they would reinstate the practice, while Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman said they saw the procedure as torture.