Expanding on her statements during Saturday night’s foreign policy debate, GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann attacked President Obama for fully drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq, and claimed incorrectly that his war policies have left the country with a choice between releasing terrorists or killing them.
“President Obama was given a war that is won in Iraq, and he’s choosing to lose the peace,” Bachmann claimed on Meet the Press. “That’s a desecration of the memory of forty-four-hundred Americans that gave their lives to liberate Iraq.”
Obama is removing all troops from Iraq by year’s end, pursuant to an agreement between the two countries that dates back to the Bush administration. U.S. and Iraqi officials had discussed allowing a small number of troops to remain in Iraq past the deadline, but those discussions deadlocked over U.S. concerns that American troops would not be given immunity in Iraqi courts.
Bachmann also claimed that the country needs a jail for terrorists, or else we’ll be stuck with an unpleasant choice: “either we kill them or we release them.”
When host David Gregory pointed out that was false, Bachmann added a few caveats. “We aren’t adding any new terrorists to Guantanamo Bay. We only have Khaled Sheikh Muhammed the admitted mastermind of nine-one-one, who is at Guantanamo Bay and others as well. But we don’t have a place to put Al Qaeda when we pick them up. It’s either catch and release, which is a terrible idea, or we have to kill them.”
