Abdul El-Sayed: America Has Created ‘So Much Collateral Damage’ that Push People in ‘Pain and Frustration’ into Terrorism

EXCERPT:

EL-SAYED: "I think the approach that we’ve also taken to terrorism has been to figure out how to leverage the might of the U.S. military to go in and root out, right, certain terrorist organizations, etc. And where that’s necessary, that's necessary. But I also think we need to be curious about why those things happen in the first place. Like, what drives somebody to want to commit such a heinous act? Like, you know, I happen to be a student of people's pain. That's what I did in medicine. That’s what I try to do in politics. Like, what — what happens when people are in pain? And I think that part of what we have to understand is that sometimes, when we move, we create so much collateral damage because too often we have been on the wrong side of our own policies. That's not ever to say the terrorism is okay, because it’s wrong, it’s never okay and we have to address it when it happens. But I think we have to make sure that when we say there’s a rules-based international order, that we are the principal follower of the rules, not just the principal enforcer of the rules.”