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"It Just Exploded on Us"Mike Huckabee explains why he's surging.

By John DickersonPosted Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007, at 8:14 PM ET

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Slate: The pro-life movement has always welcomed converts—Norma McCorvey being the most famous. Why isn't Mitt Romney's conversion on abortion a part of that tradition?

Huckabee: I welcome him to the fold. I think that's great. I also think it's great he's had an epiphany on the Second Amendment and the Bush tax cuts and the Reagan-Bush legacy, as well as on traditional marriage and farm subsidies. All of those are wonderful conversions, but anyone who doesn't think the Democrats won't use that video must have been out of the country and out of touch during the 2004 presidential campaign during the Swift Boat efforts on John Kerry.

Slate: How much of a threat is Iran, and what would you do about it?

Huckabee: The threat is real, and if they were to obtain a nuclear capacity, that would be a serious threat not just to us and Israel but to the entire world. The president has taken the right step imposing severe economic sanctions. Before we bomb them, we ought to try to bankrupt them. You take the military action as your court of last resort, but you have to keep that as an option, because what's unacceptable is the thought that they could obtain and possibly use nuclear weapons.

Slate: Why is it unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon?

Huckabee: They've already announced their intention to destroy Israel. They've already announced that they would love to invade Iraq and take its oil. If we really want to see the rest of our economy in a complete large pile of dust in the Middle East, I think just stand back and [let them] go unchallenged in their military buildup with nuclear weaponry. This is not a nation building up nuclear arms to defend against somebody, because there is no one threatening them.

Slate: You have said that one of the failings of the Iraq policy was that the American people were not sufficiently educated about the true threat from Islamofacism. What is that threat?

Huckabee: Osama Bin Laden was largely influenced by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, executed in Egypt in 1966, a true radical Islamic cleric who helped to further the most radical notion of the theocracy that the Islamofacists would love to install. Because of their sense of fervor and the fact that they have completely married government and religion, there is no negotiation with an organization that is not a nation-state, it's an ideology. They have no timeline in which they have to accomplish it. Where we want our wars to be finished in a thousand days, they're quite willing for this to go a thousand years. It's not about obtaining a particular border or boundary, and once they obtain it, they'll be satisfied. They really believe they have to destroy everyone who does not help them bring about the purity of what they believe is their version of Islam.

Slate: Rudy Giuliani suggested recently that water-boarding might not be torture. What's your view?

Huckabee: I'm going to defer to Sen. McCain. Of all the people standing on the stage, he's the only one who has experienced torture. I'm certainly not endorsing him for president, but it's silly for some of us to talk like we know more about the effect of torture than John McCain does. He and every military leader are quick to say that the information that is obtained from true torture—and that's an issue that has to be decided by the military experts—but once you cross into that line—the information is not very reliable, and two, whatever we do to them, we invite them to do to us.

Slate: Barack Obama has been criticized for campaigning with a gospel singer who has called homosexuality a curse. Critics have claimed it's as if a white candidate campaigned with David Duke. What's your view on the equivalence of homosexuality with skin color in the civil rights debate?

Huckabee: Most of the African-American leaders with whom I'm familiar are very, very unhappy with tying the two together. First of all, because a person is black and discriminated against by sight. It's not a matter of a relationship. It's not a matter of even getting to find out that someone has a sexual preference other than hetero. If a person walks into a room and is black, you know it. You don't necessarily know that a person might be homosexual. There is a different level of bigotry and discrimination. Most African-American leaders I'm familiar with believe it's a huge jump to try to equate the two.