Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich rejects the idea he’s had an inconsistent position on how the U.S. should deal with Libya. On March 7th, Gingrich said if he were president he would impose a no-fly zone over Libya, then after President Obama made that order, Gingrich said he would not have intervened. Today, Gingrich rejected the idea he has flip-flopped.
“You can take different dates and piece them together and say, ‘Boy, Gingrich changed.’ Well, yeah, the facts changed,” Gingrich said this afternoon during an interview. “As somebody once said, when the facts change you sort of have an obligation to rethink it and I think at each stage I’ve tried to be very clear in that context with what I ideally would have done and what you do with the circumstance as it’s evolved.”
Gingrich, who is inching closer to a run for the Republican party’s 2012 presidential nomination, instead accused the Obama administration of being all over the map when it comes to Libya.
“I think if you look at the series of events from late February to now and you look at the president’s flip-flopping, you look at the confusion with the Arab League, you look at the confusion in the administration where at one point you had the Defense Department, the State Department and the White House saying three different things, that when people would ask me on a given day what was my response — as of that day — I would give them an answer that was conditioned on the facts of that day,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich made his comments this afternoon during an interview with Iowa reporters.
Listen: GingrichLibya (mp3 runs 3 minutes)