Bob Woodward: Obama Missteps on Bergdahl a Product of 'Isolation'

On Tuesday’s “The O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel, veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward offered his thoughts on why the Obama administration struggles from a management standpoint in certain situations involving U.S. foreign policy.

The discuss was between host Bill O’Reilly and Woodward keyed in specifically on the handling of the deal that resulted in the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held captive by the Taliban for five years, in exchange for the release five Taliban the United States had detained at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

O’Reilly asked whether the missteps of the Obama White House could be tied to arrogance or ignorance. Woodward said neither and attributed it to “isolation.”

“I think it’s isolation,” Woodward said. “I think it is ‘Oh gee, this is humanitarian gesture, let’s do it.’ And no one sits and thinks it through and as you well he know, when you do something like this, you want to sit down and say, what’s the second bounce, the third bounce, the fourth bounce? What are people going to think? What are the arguments against it? How are we going to explain it? And they just rush to act on sometimes like in this case, I think it is a genuine humanitarian impulse. But it doesn’t work.”

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