President Barack Obama should tell Americans the United States needs to send troops back into Iraq, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol said.
"[President Obama needs to go] on TV saying, 'This is a strategic crisis, for the reasons I'm going to lay out here. We have to do something that no one wants to do, which is to go back in with a lot of air power and with special forces, and maybe a few conventional troops, to help stabilize the situation,'" Kristol told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Tuesday.
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Kristol said the president needed to make the case that the United States "cannot allow an al-Qaida-backed group to dominate one part of the Middle East, and Iran and Iranian-backed groups to dominate another part of the Middle East."
Kristol was an advocate of the 2003 war in Iraq.
John Heilemann, writer for Bloomberg News, took issue with Kristol and called it "fantastical" to send U.S. troops back into Iraq. He questioned whether Obama would "override the will of the people" by sending forces back into conflict.
"You want to send people into another intervention in which most people in the country believe that this is a century's old sectarian violence that we have no place and no ability to solve," Heilemann said. "If we're going to put American blood on the line, there should be some kind of public support for it. And there is not for this."
Kristol called Heilemann's defense of "American blood" a "nice rhetorical line," and said it was important to consider the blood already spent by the "4,500 American soldiers who died in Iraq, or the 2,000 who died in Afghanistan."
The current crisis may have been prevented if the United States had left residual forces in Iraq, Kristol said.
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