Likely Republican caucusgoers sent a strong message to GOP presidential candidates in an Iowa AARP survey released Thursday, showing they’re strongly opposed to cuts to Social Security and Medicare and would much rather reduce military spending to address the federal deficit.

That message could be made stronger by the fact that more than 20 percent of those surveyed are still unsure who they’ll support in the Jan. 3 presidential contest, the survey found.

The survey of 400 likely Republican caucusgoers by GS Strategy Group shows 64.5 percent are opposed to Social Security cuts, and 67.3 percent to Medicare cuts. Another 86 percent of those surveyed said Social Security benefits are important to their monthly income, and 87 percent said Medicare is essential to seniors’ health care security.

Those surveyed would much prefer withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan to cutting Medicare (67.3 percent to 9.5 percent) or Social Security (65 percent to 8.8 percent).

Of those surveyed, 76.8 percent identified themselves as conservative and 50.5 percent as very conservative.

“Opposition to these benefit cuts among Republicans across the ideological spectrum confirms what AARP has been hearing from Iowans throughout our campaign to protect Social Security and Medicare:  Whether Republican, Democrat, Independent or Tea Party supporter, voters overwhelmingly oppose cuts to these programs,” said AARP Iowa State President Tony Vola.

Businessman Herman Cain led all GOP presidential candidates in the survey, with support at 25 percent. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had 21.5 percent support, and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) had 8.3 percent.

But more than 22.8 percent of those surveyed were still undecided, suggesting the race for the Republican nomination is still wide open, at least in the Hawkeye State.

The margin of error for the survey, conducted Oct. 17 and 18, is 4.9 percent.

Businessman Herman Cain came in second with 14 percent. Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and Texas Gov. Rick Perry each got 1 percent or less. Former Utah Gov. Jon Hunstman and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney received no votes.

It was clear from the beginning of the event the majority of attendees came to see Paul, who spoke first. Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum also spoke at the event, while former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed the crowd briefly by video.

Ron Paul speaking at NFRA in Des Moines (Andrew Duffelmeyer/Iowa Independent).

Paul got a warm reception from the audience of several hundred, saying what the country needs is less government intrusion, more openness in government, a focus on dealing with the national debt and a foreign policy overhaul.

The federal government has invaded peoples’ lives, Paul said, especially through the Patriot Act. He called for repealing the law put in place following 9/11, saying it undermines liberty.

He also wants investigations into the federal reserve, the war in Iraq, the Fast and Furious operation and government loans to Solyndra.

“If there’s any one thing that would benefit us, it is to get more openness in government,” Paul said.

On foreign policy Paul delivered a strong anti-war message, calling United States foreign policy “deeply flawed” and saying “it’s time for us to come home and mind our own business.”

And on the economy, Paul said lowering the national debt, cutting the budget and auditing the federal reserve would go a long way toward putting the country back on track.

“This country needs to wake up and quit lying to itself, whether it’s on the economics or the foreign policy,” he said. “What we need is a healthy dose of renewal of the spirit of liberty.”

Rick Santorum at NFRA straw poll in Des Moines (Andrew Duffelmeyer/Iowa Independent).

A small crowd of about 50 remained by the time Santorum spoke about an hour later. He said the 2012 election is about “the heart and soul of America,” and described himself as a candidate that can win, can govern and can be trusted. He also attacked President Obama on a number of fronts, saying he’s hurt America’s security, expanded government and undermined the family.

“It is an election about whether we’re going to be a free people who believe in limited government, who believe in the free enterprise system, who believe in the dignity of human life, who believe in the central building block of our society which is the family,” he said.

President Rod Martin described the NFRA as believing in “a more libertarian strand” of conservatism than the Republican Party as a whole. The tagline for the group is “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.”

“We believe our country has been overrun by people who don’t share those values, and we think it’s time to give them the pink slips they’ve been giving all of us,” Martin said.

The tycoon and the candidate talked about the Occupy Wall Street protests, fiscal issues and petroleum policy. But Bachmann made sure that callers knew that Trump was not endorsing her.

“He is not on the call this evening because he is endorsing my campaign for Presidency, he’s on the call this evening because he’s admired, he’s respected,” she said.

One caller wanted to know, “Where is the Republican leadership in regards to what appears to be a Marxist group down there on Wall Street?”

Bachmann dissed the Occupy Wall Street protesters before agreeing with part of their message.

“I think people are looking at this and try to figure out, is this a George Soros inspired protest down there? Are there legitimate grievances?” she said. “I think people look at Wall Street and they see a $700 billion blank check. I voted against that $700 billion blank check.”

Trump admitted that some protesters might have valid reasons to be scornful of Wall Street, but questioned the movement.

“I was in New York recently where you had—I wouldn’t call it a riot, but it got—you had thousands of people marching down Wall Street,” Trump said. “This is a group of in many cases very well-dressed, and I look at it and I say something has got to be done to break it up.”

The bulk of the conversation involved oil, both tapping U.S. oil and being smarter with OPEC. And both Trump and Bachmann thought it would be a good idea to demand the Iraqis, Afghanis and Libyans give oil to the U.S. for free for “liberating” them.

“Constantly it’s the United States that are the chumps,” Bachmann said. “We constantly clean up everybody else’s mess. Look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, we should be getting paid back from these countries we have liberated.”

Trump agreed with Bachmann.

“In Libya, the rebels—that’s a very glamorous term, the rebels—they probably come from Iran,” he said of those opposing the Gaddafi regime. ”We are spending billions and billions of dollars. If six months ago, if they came to us and said we need help. if we would have said, ‘You know what? We are going to give you help but for the next 20 years, we get the 50 percent of your oil,’ you know what they would have said? ‘Absolutely! We will give you 75 percent.’”

Trump accused anti-Gaddafi fighters of opposing the United States in the Iraq War.

“They come from Iran in many cases and here we are spending billions of dollars and what do we get out of nothing,” Trump said. “In Iraq with the second largest oil fields in the world, we fight, we spent a trillion and a half, lost thousand of lives, great, great young people, what do we get?

Trump added that when the U.S. leaves Iraq at the end of the year, Iran will take the oil that should belong to the U.S.

“Now Iran, when we leave and you know we are not getting along with the government, Iran will come in and take over those oil reserves they are just waiting, waiting to take over the oil reserves because our leaders are just stupid. We are not smart people we have very pathetic leadership.

He concluded, “I have suggested we should have kept a percentage of the oil but also pay back the families who lost lives. In the old days to the victor go the spoils. Well, we don’t do that anymore. We spend a trillion and a half dollars and they are practically throwing us out of Iraq.

Bachmann added that it wasn’t fair for Iraqis to ask American forces to leave without giving the United States its oil. “We have just been kicked on this deal. We were trying to train their people. Iraq they spit at us and said we are not going to give immunity to the 5,000 Americans who were going to stay in Iraq and now all the money we have poured into Iraq, the lives we have poured into Iraq.”

She added, “This is a complete travesty, this is a complete disrespect for the United States.”

The selection of two outsiders — Petraeus has no experience in the realm of pure intelligence work, while Panetta hasn’t had military experience, other than tangentially in his two years as CIA director, since his discharge from the Army in 1966 — to fill the posts may seem an odd choice. The two men’s backgrounds, however, may provide clues as to why each was chosen for the job.

Petraeus’s popularity, spanning both party lines and the civilian-military divide (at least among members of the public who know who he is), is sure to be an asset in the position, as it has been in his capacity as the head of military operations in Afghanistan. More pointedly, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman theorizes that Petraeus’s endorsement of unmanned drone strikes and special operations raids like those undertaken in Afghanistan and Pakistan hews closely to the Obama administration’s preferred methods of using the CIA in counterterror efforts, with drone strikes and shadow operations.

Panetta, meanwhile, got the CIA post to begin with in part because of his success steering President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget through the fat years of the mid-‘90s. Panetta later became Clinton’s chief of staff. His experience with budgets — he also headed up the House Budget Committee for years prior to leaving the world of elected office for Clintonian pastures — could be a sign that the administration is looking for a numbers man to justify bloated defense spending. Until the administration officially confirms its picks, however, it won’t be forthcoming with explanations for its choices.

The news hasn’t inspired a uniformly optimistic reaction from intelligence or defense insiders. Ackerman reports in Wired that Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the left-leaning National Security Network, contends that Panetta, at least, will be entering a no-win situation once he takes over the Defense Department:

“He’ll never live up to what building wants or has come to expect,” Hurlburt says of Panetta. “Gates tried to prepare them that this is coming, and cushion the building for what’s coming, but that’s not tenable. It’s an unenviable task.”

The response from the right has been similarly lukewarm:

[H]e’s generating cautious, first-blush optimism from defense watchers, even among the administration’s political opponents. “Safe choice,” says James Jay Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has accused Gates and Obama of cutting defense too deeply. With both Petraeus and Panetta, “no one is going to question whether they are qualified.” Even Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, no fan of Obama, tweeted that Panetta and Petraeus are “outstanding leaders.”

Ackerman does not mention, however, that Rumsfeld’s tweet on Panetta and Petraeus was qualified by a followup:

…5 DCIs 5 US ambs & 7 mil cdrs in Afg over 7 yrs: No matter how capable the individual, musical chairs makes it impossible to find footing

Rumsfeld’s un-self-conscious criticism of the U.S.’s handling of the war in Afghanistan comes despite his role as the U.S. Defense secretary during the initial invasion, as well as the invasion of Iraq.

“Now, President Bush got a lot of grief from a lot of different angles for the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War,” Paul said. “But you know what? In both instances, he came to Congress and Congress at least voted on it before we went.”

President Obama sets a terrible precedent with committing to military involvement in Libya, Paul said, and went on to assert the President cares more about the United Nations than Congress.

Even though Congress did vote on military action, many people remain critical of Bush for not asking for a formal Congressional declaration of war. One of the most critical voices of Bush’s handling of the wars in the Middle East has been Sen. Paul’s father, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). In January, at the beginning of the current session of Congress, Congressman Paul entered evidence of alleged war crimes Bush was responsible for into Congressional Record via a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ron Paul’s supporters heckled Vice-President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, calling them “war criminals.”

Bush had to defend himself against Congressman Paul’s consistent criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, as Paul called for a non-interventionist approach. Paul was one of six Republicans to vote against the Iraq Resolution and consistently said both wars were illegal partly because Congress never declared war.

Sen. Paul was speaking at the Iowa GOP‘s “Night of the Rising Stars” event Saturday. The Senator said the most important vote Congress ever takes is whether or not to send armed forces to war, and pledged to fight against it in the coming weeks.

He also told a story about the former owner of his congressional desk, Henry Clay, who was known as the “Great Compromiser.” Paul said there were some deeply held beliefs Congressmen should never compromise on, such as slavery, on which Clay did broker compromises.

“Now some would say the issues we deal with today have no moral equivalency today as slavery,” Paul said. “But I would say that when we think about things, there are questions we should ask. Can a civilization long endure that doesn’t respect life? Will we be judged at some point in time on whether we stood up and said that the law and the land should respect the unborn?”

That remark earned Paul’s most extended round of applause of the night.

He said the country was facing fast approaching a “day of reckoning,” to reach the point when the U.S. can no longer pay its bills and destroy its currency as a result of the deficit and the debt owed to other countries.

Paul pledged deep cuts in the federal budget. He said while Congress debates cuts near $32 billion, people in his home district tell him cutting $500 billion would be “a good start.”

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced Paul and said he’d like to see spending levels back to 2008 numbers, although the federal deficit grew under Bush.

Paul also took a shot at U.S. Sen Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) as he opened his speech, describing a debate he had on the floor of the Senate with him.

He said he told Harkin there could be more investment in infrastructure and education if people didn’t have to pay “Chicago union scale wages” in Iowa or Kentucky, to which he said Harkin told him, “You can’t have any kind of quality products made unless they’re made by union workers.” The crowd groaned, and Paul said you would have to throw out 95 percent of the products you consume if Harkin’s statement was true.

Paul didn’t make any references to his own speculation of a White House run, but said Iowans needed to find the right Republican to run in 2012. Senator Paul will return in the summer for a Faith & Freedom Coalition event, alongside other potential 2012 candidates.

Though Obama’s 2012 budget remains in legislative limbo, the figures offered within provide a meaningful glimpse into the sorts of costs government programs are expected to incur. Hellman’s breakdown sheds light on just how much money the U.S. really spends on national security.

Last week, Hellman wrote an article for political blog the Tom Dispatch in which he explained that the $558 billion Pentagon budget and the $118 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t come close to depicting the whole picture of national security spending. Nuclear program maintenance, additional war and terrorism-related operational costs and homeland security all drive up defense expenses by nearly $90 billion. Intelligence, veterans programs, miscellaneous peacekeeping and counterterrorism efforts and military pensions push national security spending yet further, tipping total costs just over $1 trillion. Hellman caps that figure off with the $185 billion the U.S. must pay in 2012 in interest on standing defense debts and arrives at a sum total of $1.22 trillion. To put that number in perspective, Hellman says that a country with a gross domestic product that high would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ahead of Indonesia, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

This is a good deal higher than the number typically reported in the media — a report on defense spending that appeared on The Economist’s infographics blog today, for example, uses the base Pentagon and Iraq/Afghanistan figures to arrive at a total of $693 billion in 2010 American defense spending. The Economist uses that figure as part of a calculation determining that the ten biggest defense budgets in the world add up to more than $1.1 trillion — a number that is in fact smaller than the actual defense budget of the U.S. alone, using Hellman’s calculations.

The news that well over a trillion dollars are spent on defense every single year would likely not sit well with the general American public. Recent polls report that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of slashing defense spending to deal with the federal deficit.

Listen to Christopher Hellman breaking down the numbers from the Tom Dispatch’s regular podcast here:

Five months after its scheduled parliamentary elections, Iraq is still at a political impasse in negotiations for a governing coalition. Some assume this means the U.S. must scale back its withdrawal, or at least simply reclassify combat troops as military support troops in order to meet the deadline, but Obama is expected to signal a continued commitment to the administration’s goals:

“Make no mistake: Our commitment in Iraq is changing, from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats,” Obama said in excerpts released ahead of the speech.

Obama will also have to address goals for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, about which the Administration and House leadership voiced different expectations on the Sunday shows. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, following the administration’s recent line, downplayed the significance of the July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing troops, saying that it “will be of fairly limited numbers. … [I]t will depend on the conditions on the ground.”

House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who’s had to contend with an increasingly discontented Democratic caucus — 102 House Democrats voted against the most recent war funding bill last week — said Americans would not be satisfied with a mere symbolic show. ”Well, I hope it is more than that,” she told ABC’s “This Week.” “I know it’s not going to be, ‘Turn out the lights and let’s all go home on one day.’ But I do think the American people expect it to be somewhere between that and a few thousand troops.”

The Central Intelligence Agency has hired Xe Services, the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, to guard its facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to an industry source.

The previously undisclosed CIA contract is worth about $100 million, said the industry source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the deal, which is classified.

“It’s for protective services … guard services, in multiple regions,” said the source.

That’s the second nine-figure contract Blackwater has pulled down this week. The State Department gave the company — whose guards have killed unarmed Iraqis and Afghans, taken guns from the U.S. military without authorization, and established shell firms to win contracts – $120 million to guard consulates in Afghanistan. And that’s outside the more lucrative Worldwide Protective Services contract that Blackwater still wants to bid on. It might even get a piece of a contract to train the Afghan police, after taking rifles intended for those very cops and signing the receipt slip “Eric Cartman.”

“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”

Marc Ambinder has more.