Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, skewered Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team on Monday, saying their policies make his stomach turn.
Wilkerson took particular aim at John Bolton, former President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations—and now an adviser to Romney.
“The man scares me to death,” Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz. “He would defeat all the enemies in America and the world—and believe me they’re plentiful—and he’d do it with everyone else’s blood. John is like Dick Cheney, never served a day in his life and wouldn't serve a day in his life … These people make me sick.”
Wilkerson’s harsh rhetoric comes on the heels of Romney’s foreign policy speech earlier in the day, in which the former Massachusetts governor laid out a hawkish approach.
Without offering much in the way of specifics, Romney vowed to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, go after terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate in Libya, and work to ensure Syrian rebels obtain arms to defeat Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
"Utterly unbelievable, Wilkerson said, blasting Romney as “operating on a Cold War music sheet.”
Asked about former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s endorsement of Romney’s speech, Wilkerson declared that Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of the Iraq War “has zero credibility with me and he’ll never regain it again.”
