In an interview set to air on CNN’s Sunday broadcast of “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz sharply criticized the White House for its lack of response to the turmoil unfolding in Libya.
Wolfowitz, currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said, “I’m mystified by the way the administration has handled this one.”
“It’s mystifying to me how, when you have a killer like Gadhafi who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans,” Wolfowitz said, “for 270 people onboard Pan Am 103, for Lord knows how many of his own people and is now slaughtering his own people, that we can’t come to a position that it’s long since time for him to go.”
According to Wolfowitz, the slow reaction by the president casts the United States in a negative light around the world.
“We’ve been just way too slow,” Wolfowitz said. “And that slowness, we’re going to pay a price for, for a long time. Al Jazeera, which is no friend to the United States but which has become, with some justification, a hero of these revolutionary movements is taking the – showing a picture of the White House or the president, why is the U.S. being so silent? Why is it being as silent as these people? And then it shows pictures of the people who have been killed in the protests. It’s a devastating image.”
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