Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Tuesday he believes President Joe Biden is “shellshocked” at how “terrible his judgment” proved to be in withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Cotton called Biden’s speech Monday defending the troops withdrawal “dangerously detached from reality.”
“On the first major foreign policy crisis he has faced, you see the disastrous consequences of his terrible judgment,” Cotton said. “I mean, Joe Biden in the last five or six days has been essentially holed up in Camp David, I think shellshocked at how terrible his judgment has proven in the real world."
“He came to Washington for a couple hours yesterday to give a speech in which again he blamed everyone but himself, and then retreated back to Camp David once again," he said.
According to Cotton, the troop withdrawal, which sparked a chaotic evacuation effort in the capital of Kabul, leaves America “dangerously exposed.”
“So much of our security depends on the credibility and the resolve of the president, in particular,” he said. “And in the same way that when Barack Obama erased his red line in Syria, it had cascading effects all around the world."
“The world can now see that Joe Biden is impotent and incompetent,” he asserted.
He also said he doubted Biden’s ability to react to information, calling his speech a “dangerous detachment from reality” and accusing Biden of being “totally oblivious to the conditions on the ground that he alone had created” in Afghanistan.
“He repeatedly overruled the best military advice of his commanders,” he said. “This was not about just the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, a question on which reasonable people disagree, but how that decision was executed,” he said.
Cotton acknowledged it was former President Donald Trump who worked out the deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
“Here’s what I don’t think President Trump, or for that matter, almost any other president with an ounce of common sense, would have done, is proceeded with any kind of withdrawal while the Taliban was on the offensive, violating its commitments, and withdrawn American troops, and especially American air support, during the middle of the withdrawal,” he said.
“When Joe Biden insisted they withdraw, too, over the last few weeks, we’ve totally pulled the rug out from underneath the Afghan national army,” he added.
“So it’s hard to rerun history and think about what would have been different under different leadership or different circumstances, but it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have bungled this operation more so than Joe Biden has.”
Cotton dismissed the decision merits invocation of the 25th Amendment, which deals with presidential succession and disability.
“Given what the alternative is with Kamala Harris, I’m not so sure about that,” he said.
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