Sen. John McCain said the U.S. is “not winning” the battle against ISIS Monday morning, and the president will need to send more troops to the Middle East, adding that the world has “dramatically shifted in favor of the forces of radical Islam. His comments, made on “Fox & Friends,” followed President Barack Obama’s interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer Sunday morning, where Obama said he would “never say never” to more troops to fight ISIS.
MCCAIN: Whether they’re combat troops or troops on the ground or — look, he’s going to have to send more. We are not winning and it’s just a fact — we’re not winning there. We are going to have to have more boots on the ground because the only way you can really identify targets is to have boots on the ground. You’re going to have to have more trainers in there. Gen. [Raymond] Odierno has said, the chief of staff of the Army, and others have said you may need many thousands more as far as trainers are concerned, special forces. ISIS continues to win. This is a failed policy. It cannot succeed. They’re looking at Iraq as one conflict in Syria as another. Do you think ISIS looks at it as two separate conflicts?
Every one of our leaders who were there at the time say we could have had a residual force behind us, a stabilizing force behind, which this whole scenario wouldn’t have been repeated. By the way, we’re going to see the same movie in Afghanistan unless we leave a stabilizing force there.
In 2008, the reason why the president of the United States is president today is he voted against the Iraq War resolution. Hillary Clinton voted for it. That helped him get the nomination. So he came to the presidency saying he was going to get out of everywhere and look — and he has been, I got to hand it to him, he’s done that to a degree — look at the world in 2009 and look at the world today. My friends, it is dramatically shifted in favor of the forces of radical Islam, forces of terror, and they are now direct threats to the United States of America.