Pete Buttigieg on Soleimani: ‘Taking Out a Bad Guy Is Not Necessarily a Good Idea’

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg weighed in on the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on Monday. Speaking to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Democratic presidential hopeful said that the decision to hit Soleimani was a poor one.

“There’s no question they’re going to respond,” Buttigieg said of Iran. “There are lots of questions about how, but we have some questions to ask of our own President. Look, there is no question that Soleimani had American blood on his hands, that he was a bad actor in the region, but if there is anything that we have learned in the last 20 years about the Middle East, it’s that taking out a bad guy is not necessarily a good idea.”

“And what we’ve seen here is no evidence that there’s been proper consultation with Congress, and more importantly and more dangerously, no evidence that they’ve really thought about the consequences.”

“Right now my mind is with the troops who are moving to the Middle East, and having known what it’s like to be on the inside of one of those airplanes, you need to be able to trust that everybody up your chain of command has thought through what’s ahead, and we’re just not seeing a lot of indications of that.”

“You know, already certain things are happening. Including the fact that it is even less likely that Iran’s nuclear ambitions can be controlled. We have a suspension in our counter-ISIS operations and evidence that we are moving towards a scenario where we’ll be expelled from Iraq. So if they were thinking about this in terms of the 3D chess it is and not checkers, we’ve not seen evidence of why they felt this was the only or best decision.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.