GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul got the neocons up in arms again with his statements during this Thursday night's GOP primary debate on Fox News when he told one of the moderators, Bret Baier, why he thought all the hyping of Iran's potential nuclear threat was so dangerous.

The LA Times summed up this segment of the debate quite nicely -- Ron Paul: Strike against Iran would risk a repeat of 'useless' Iraq war:

Ron Paul did it again. The libertarian-minded Republican separated himself from the pack of candidates at tonight's debate by urging restraint in response to a possible Iranian nuclear threat, saying the U.S. can ill afford a repeat of its now-concluded war in Iraq.

Paul said there was "no U.N. evidence" that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program, calling claims to the contrary "war propaganda."

"To me the greatest danger is that we will have a president that will overreact, and we will soon bomb Iran," he said. "We ought to really sit back and think, not jump the gun and believe that we are going to be attacked. That's how we got into that useless war in Iraq and lost so much."

Paul said it "makes more sense" to directly engage with Iran diplomatically. And he even praised President Obama for "wisely backing off on sanctions" against Iran, which he called overreaching.

"We have 12,000 diplomats in our services. We ought to use a little bit of diplomacy once in a while."

As they noted, he was immediately attacked by some of his fellow primary contenders and the talking heads on Fox proceeded to go after him for this portion of the debate as well. It's really a shame we've got the only candidate in the GOP primary race who is probably in the same place most thinking Americans are when it comes to our military interventions and a good deal of our foreign policy, but who is at the same time so terrible on civil rights and so far to the right on so many other issues.

I do look forward to watching the collective freakout by our corporate media if Ron Paul actually wins the primary race in Iowa. As I already noted here, we got our first glimpse of that and what the talking point from them is going to be with Fox's Chris Wallace's admission of how they're going to dismiss him if he wins on Cavuto's show this week.