Pete Buttigieg on Soleimani Strike: ‘Taking Out a Bad Guy Is Not Necessarily a Good Idea’

Appearing Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg criticized President Donald Trump for directing the deadly strike that killed Iran’s terror-military mastermind Qasem Soleimani, stating that “taking out a bad guy is not necessarily a good idea.”

A partial transcript is as follows: 

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Mayor Pete, we’ll start with your take on the killing of Soleimani and what can and should be the way forward dealing with that fact that Iran has made it clear it will respond.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: There’s no question they’re going to respond. There are lots of questions about how, but we have some questions to ask of our own president. Look, there is no question that Soleimani had American blood on his hands, that he was a bad actor in the region, but if there is anything that we have learned in the last 20 years about the Middle East, it’s that taking out a bad guy is not necessarily a good idea. And what we’ve seen here is no evidence that there’s been proper consultation with Congress, and more importantly and more dangerously, no evidence that they’ve really thought about the consequences. Right now, my mind is with the troops, who are moving to the Middle East. And knowing what it’s like to be in the inside of one of those airplanes, you need to be able to trust that everyone up your chain of command has thought through what’s ahead. We’re just not seeing a lot of indications of that. Already certain things are happening, including the fact that it is even less likely that Iran’s nuclear ambitions can be controlled, we have a suspension in our counter-ISIS operation, and evidence that we’re moving toward a scenario where we’ll be expelled from Iraq.