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Chris Christie on War & Peace |
CHRISTIE: You know, I'm the governor of New Jersey. There a lot of people who are significantly better briefed on this than I am. And I think when guys like me start to shoot off on opinions about this kind of stuff, it's really ill-advised. So I'll leave it to Secretary Kerry and the folks that are in charge of this to make decisions about where we go. And then once they put something together, if they do, then I'll make a judgment on that. But it's just I'm not the right person to be asking that question to, with all due respect.
Q: But you're a national political figure. You're a leader in the Republican Party. You may someday run for president. Do you have a view about whether Iran should continue to enrich uranium?
CHRISTIE: Like I said, I think the folks who are involved in this on a day to day basis should be making those kind of opinions known publicly. I'm just not going to engage in that.
Americans and Israelis both believe in free enterprise, accountability, in transparency, and in rewarding excellence. We both believe in the rule of law and limits on the power of the state. We both believe in peace through strength.
Since September 2000, 1,218 Israeli civilians have been killed in terror attacks. That would be the equivalent of over 48,000 Americans murdered by terrorists in the same period.
[Washington policymakers should] tell the truth about the difficulty of the solutions. We need to speak that truth out loud. It makes us uncomfortable. It is a difficult set of words to string together, but we know that ignoring it will not make it go away, any more than ignoring our problems at home will make them go away either. America needs no introduction, but it is time that we start to live up to our greatness again, by telling the truth to each other and being willing to listen to those hard truths. There is simply nothing more important if America wants to continue to lead a free and hopeful world.
A: You know, as the governor of New Jersey, I got to tell you, I'm not going to put my judgment in place of the president of the United States who is briefed on this much more extensively than I am. And so I'm just not going to go there with that.
Q: You said that you wouldn't have pulled troops out.
A: I'm not a nation-building guy. And I do think that we have achieved a lot of what we wanted to achieve in Afghanistan, especially after the murder of bin Laden. But he knows a lot more about this than I do. I'm not going to go down that road.
A: You know, I wouldn't do it now, but I would be guided by what our military advisers told us to do. But I do think that capturing bin laden and killing Bin Laden was one of the real goals of the original Afghanistan intervention. and I'm not a nation-building kind of guy.
Q: But Americans have to be by default the world's policemen. and a lot of Americans I talked to are getting a bit fed up with spending all this money when there are so many problems at home, on being the world's policemen. There are other superpowers emerging. Would you like to see a spreading of that load going forward where America's not the go-to country? For military support, for helping out with despotic regimes and so on?
Q: Well, America's always got to be the leader in that regard.
Q: Does it have to be?
A: I think it does.
