The United States is "losing the war with radical Islamacists," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Saturday, and former Ambassador John Bolton says he would give President Barack Obama an 'F' when it comes to protecting the country from the threat of terrorism.
"I want to say to you, flatly, that almost 14 years after 9/11, the United States today is losing the war with radical Islamacists," said Gingrich, one of several speakers at Saturday's Iowa Freedom Summit, which attracted key conservatives and potential presidential candidates to speak to a capacity crowd in Des Moines.
Bolton and Gingrich said Obama has failed to defend the United States and that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be "no more up to the job than he was."
"For the past six years we have waited for Obama to lead, to defend our country, and he has consistently failed," said Bolton. "Two more years of danger remain until 2016, and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is no more up to the job than he was."
Gingrich insisted terrorism is a global war, and "the State Department was about as equally bad, frankly, under [President] George W. Bush. People all around the planet, this is a global war, yet they insist about talking about it through geography."
Currently, the United States is focused on northern Syria, said Gingrich, but last year, "Boko Haram killed more people than Ebola. There are 10,000 in Nigeria [alone]."
Gingrich said he looks at suicide bombings and beheadings as forming one common pattern: "radical Islamists who hate our civilizations and are prepared to cut off our heads and are determined to impose their religion by force."
And, he said, President Obama has a "pathologic incapacity to deal with reality. There is no point in trying to get him to learn how to say the words radical Islamists because he has a speech impediment which blocks him from being able to say the words."
Even the U.S. Army is "so corrupted by the intellectual dishonesty we now live with, they described it as a workplace incident," said Gingrich, referring to the Fort Hood shootings.
The war can't be won if the truth isn't told and the president won't admit there is a war.
But Gingrich denied that he wants the United States to occupy numerous countries, but instead "this is a campaign that should be fought with the largest number of allies."
And Gingrich said that he has no problem with Muslims who want to live peacefully, but "if you are a Muslim who believes that you are going to impose Sharia [law] by cutting off my head, I have a desire to kill you before you cut off my head."
The fight against terrorism, said Gingrich, "is as significant a fight as the development of anti-communism was between 1945 and 1950."
Bolton said the United States is much less secure now than it was six years ago.
"Americans are very practical people," he said. "They delegate to the leaders they sent to Washington the job of mastering the intricacies of national security issues. They expect that the president will alert them when there are threats and lay out a program to deal with those threats."
But Obama doesn't consider national security a priority, but instead, his agenda has been to transform the country.
"I believe he is the first president, Republican or Democrat, since the attack on Pearl Harbor, who does not wake up every morning and think, what threats does America face today?" said Bolton.
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