Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty said Wednesday President Barack Obama is timid when it comes to national security and he is “subjugating our security interests to his political agenda.”
“When the ‘green revolution’ began to unfold in Iran in 2009, and you had people asking where the United States stood, our president — leader of the Free World — stood mute because he didn’t want to offend the mullahs. That’s not the strength and decisiveness we need,” the former Minnesota governor told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “In Libya in early March, when the rebels had the momentum geographically and tactically, instead of threatening or enacting the no-fly zone he dithered.”
Pawlenty’s comments came following a speech he made Tuesday to the Council on Foreign Relations, where he slammed Obama’s foreign policy. Pawlenty devoted most of the speech to the Middle East and the citizen uprisings throughout the region and he continued the theme with Van Susteren.
“In Syria, we have a situation to this day [where] the president won’t utter the words that [President] Bashar al-Assad should go — he’s a terrorist now killing his own people,” Pawlenty said. “We have the president and his administration up until recently holding him out as a possible reformer. Those are all examples — and there are many more — that show this president, I think, is lacking in that type of decisiveness.”
Pawlenty said Obama’s first calling for Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster and then saying the U.S. mission in Libya was not regime change was “another example of this president subjugating our security interests to his political agenda.”
“You saw it in his speech about Afghanistan — he didn’t reference victory or success — he talked about ending the war there responsibly,” Pawlenty said. “That’s a nice word — but when America goes to war America needs to win
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