Dem Rep. on Obama’s ISIS Strategy: ‘I Don’t Think We Have This Long Term Strategy’

‘We are not going to defeat ISIS just by killing their fighters on the ground’

GEIST: "Congressman, what were your impressions as you watched the president of the United States speaking about this crisis around the world in Turkey yesterday?"
MOULTON: "Well, look, I've said for some time that ISIS is a national security threat to the United States and to our allies and we need to have a comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS. I'm not confidence that we have that right now. We're putting troops on the ground, we're dropping some bombs, but we need to talk about how we're going to fill the political vacuums in the Middle East that have allowed ISIS to flourish. I have last served in Iraq during the surge and we actually got Iraq to a relatively stable place. But then we pulled out, we pulled out those political advisers out of the ministries, out of the prime minister's office and the Iraqi government went off the rails so much so that its own army didn't even trust them. As a result we're now sending troops back into Iraq five years after we left. I went back to Iraq in February as a member of the Armed Services Committee and it was disheartening to see so much of what we have fought for and frankly achieved just gone to waste just because we didn't have a political plan for the aftermath." [crosstalk] 
SCARBOROUGH: "Were you concerned by the president's tone yesterday, congressman? 
MOULTON: "I was just concerned that we're not doing more. I don't think we have this long term strategy. We're not going to defeat ISIS just by killing their fighters on the ground. We have to have a diplomatic and political plan and we've got to be clear to the troops we send into combat what their long term mission is. I don't think we've made that clear."

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