Following the right wing freakout over the new Robert Gates memoir, Fox's Megyn Kelly invited on Mr. Let's Nuke Iran Rep. Duncan Hunter for some "fair and balanced" commentary on how things are going for President Obama on the foreign policy front, and I'm fairly sure that Kelly and her producers got exactly what they wanted from Hunter when it came to criticism of this administration.
Not surprisingly, the topic of George W. Bush and the fact that he's the one who set the timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq never came up. Hunter on the other hand had plenty to say about how President Obama had somehow squandered our great "victory" in Iraq and was to blame for everything that's gone wrong to date in the Middle East.
From Fox's Politics page: Rep. Hunter: Obama has abandoned everything US fought for in Iraq:
Marine veteran Rep. Duncan Hunter said on “The Kelly File” Tuesday that new revelations by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and troubling developments on the ground in Iraq are evidence President Obama has abandoned what the military is fighting for in the Middle East.
Hunter, who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly he is outraged over the Al Qaeda takeover of the Iraqi city of Fallujah last week, which threatens to undo gains made by American troops before the withdrawal in 2011.
“What I see here is a political squandering of military victories and an abandonment by this administration of everything we did in Iraq,” Hunter, R-Calif., said.
Hunter said he is “not surprised” that Obama, according to Gates, appeared to doubt his own strategy in Afghanistan to the point of being “outright convinced it would fail.” He said he believes Obama abandoned the War in Iraq for “purely political reasons.”
Yeah, if we just stay there forever, everything will be wonderful. And lord knows right wingers never use issues of war and peace for political reasons. They only invade countries that weren't a threat to us because they want to "spread freedom." He followed that with more flame throwing:
We won in Iraq. My dad wrote a book called ‘Victory in Iraq.’ My dad was congressman too, and he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee while the war was going on. He wrote a book called ‘Victory in Iraq,’ how America won the war.
We had won the war by 2010. This president left for purely political reasons. If we had left 10,000 or 20,000 troops there, like we have in every other war zone that we've been involved in, except for Vietnam, so let’s say post-Vietnam, this would not be happening whatsoever. So what this president did was abandon everything that we fought for, because Iraq could not sustain itself without some American involvement.
It would be like leaving Afghanistan right now. And sometimes it's not the most popular choice, but I think that this president has shown that he does things purely for political reasons. This president has not only abandoned Iraq, he's abandoned the Middle East, Megyn. He's out of everywhere.
This is a juvenile foreign policy president when it comes to hard-nosed foreign policy in the Middle East. This administration are like little children. And so what we have then is, I was over there fighting, my Marines were over there fighting, and what do we have now? Nothing to show for it because of political reasons -- not because we didn't win, but purely political reasons. And god bless all the men and women who spent time in Iraq and fought there.
We all know what his definition of "hard nosed" is. Nuke 'em all and let god sort them out. It looks like Hunter has earned himself a spot as one of Fox's new "foreign policy experts" with his love of permanent military intervention and his willingness to insult and disrespect the President of the United States in ways that would have had the wingnuts at Fox screaming treason if someone had talked about their hero George W. Bush in the same way.
