Newt Gingrich says President Barack Obama's
admission that "we don't have a strategy" to deal with ISIS may not be such a bad thing.
In a
column for CNN.com Thursday, the CNN host and former House speaker writes that the president's "recent epiphany" actually marks an "improvement" in Obama's "disastrous foreign policy."
"We're better off with a president who doesn't have a good strategy and knows he doesn't than with a president who has a bad strategy but thinks he has a good one," Gingrich writes. "For most of his administration, the president was firmly in the latter category…"
"If there is a silver lining in President Obama's disastrous foreign policy, it has been in awakening Americans and perhaps even the president himself to the need for a profound rethinking of our approach to radical Islamism," he adds.
Obama's surprising admission — which he later amended to say he was referring to ISIS in Syria,
not policy as a whole — was criticized even by allies, including former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, who told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" it was a "winceable moment."
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But Gingrich suggests the remark may not have been a blunder.
"The truth is that 13 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States does not have an effective strategy for dealing with radical Islamists and their deep commitment to waging war against us and against our civilization," he writes.
"Much like the man who has a hammer and therefore assumes every problem is a nail, our bureaucracies have tried for 13 years to redefine the problem into something they are comfortable dealing with."
It hasn't worked, and America and its allies aren't any stronger, Gingrich writes, adding the emergence of ISIS "is a further reminder that the analysis and predictions of the intelligence community, the military and the State Department have often been just plain wrong."
"We need a new analysis with new language and new strategies that relate to defeating a viral system that spreads across national boundaries," he writes.