From Friday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On the Obama administration pulling all remaining troops out of Iraq:
The reason that the Pentagon wanted to maintain a force of between, say, 20,000 or more, is because they wanted to maintain a strategic relationship with Iraq in the heart of Mesopotamia, which would have been extremely important — the same way that we retained forces in Korea, Germany, and Japan 50 years ago to our advantage. …
And it isn’t as if the deadline sprung up on this administration out of nowhere. It had three years to negotiate this. It failed at two junctures. It did not help to put together a coalition government of Allawi (representing the Sunnis) [and] Maliki (representing the Shiites) which would have been a grand coalition. All the major parties in the country want Americans except Sadr, who’s the Iranian agent. But he’s a relatively small minority. And we yet failed with that large majority in parliament who wanted us to stay to work out an agreement.
It is a monumental diplomatic failure for an administration that had bashed the previous administration for wielding a heavy military axe and priding itself on being sophisticated and [undertaking] smart diplomacy.
On whether the Iraq war was worth it:
Well, look, we will argue decades over that. In the same way that you can argue, ask whether the 10 times as many Americans who died in Korea was worth it for half a peninsula that did not affect the outcome of the Cold War.
But whether you thought at the beginning, like Obama, [that] we shouldn’t have gone in or not, the fact is in 2011 the losses, the blood, and the treasure was already spent. The question was: Given that that had all happened, would we garner the strategic advantage that all that sacrifice — and the success of the surge — had bequeathed us, or just squander it and give it away? Obama gave it away.
On Herman Cain’s abortion comments:
I saw him on “Stossel,” on abortion — entirely incoherent. On the one hand, he’s [saying that] people ought to have choice. On the other hand, life is sacred from the very beginning, and abortion ought to be illegal.
This isn’t a complicated issue. It’s either one or the other. It can’t be both. Stossel was simply stunned.
And if you combine it with the 9-9-9 stuff, it’s not just [that] he hasn’t thought it out. He’s winging it. And that’s a real problem.
On Hillary Clinton’s reaction to Muammar Qaddafi’s death: “We came. We saw. He died”:
I thought it was right on.
Look, this man, Qaddafi, had a choice. He could have had due process. He could even have had a free pass, asylum in a third country. He was offered all of that. He decided to fight and kill, knowing that as a result he probably would end up the way he did.
I wasn’t around, but when Mussolini was strung up upside down, I don’t think anybody was upset. When the Ceausescus were shot like a dog, they died the way they deserved to die.
No sympathy.