How can you prevent an attack by returning foreign fighters if you are not cognizant of their names and links to ISIS?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Actually, if you look at the essence of ISIS, how it came about, it's the product of foreign invasion. Foreign invasion in Iraq led to removal of Saddam Hussein, and we're not unhappy with that, but the point is that foreign presence in any territory has created dynamics. And you cannot avoid those dynamics.
'Know your enemy, name your enemy' is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders.
I'm over here with the French counterterrorism experts talking about the 'Charlie Hebdo' case, how we can stop foreign fighters from coming out of Iraq and Syria to Europe, but then we have this phenomenon in the United States where they can be activated by the Internet, and, really, terrorism has gone viral.
We have to defeat ISIS. We have to make certain that we destroy them and that we push them back.
Under our rules of engagement, if I were ISIS, what I would do is collocate my headquarters next to a school or a hospital and ensure that there would be collateral damage. They know our rules of engagement as well as we do. They operate with impunity.
Any time you have someone's first-hand account of the sheer terror that ISIS can provoke... that's powerful.
There are very few fighters in the ISIS organization in Iraq and Syria coming from the United States; most of them have either come from a region of the Middle East or from Europe.
ISIS is not an existential threat to something happening to someone in the United States of America. It's a serious problem overseas, but it's confusing and frightening.
If your goal is to destroy ISIS, there needs to be a ground force. It could be American or foreign.
The best way to avoid warfare is if no one shows up.
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