Hoekstra
Talks Failing U.S. Policy Toward Defeating ISIS
by Pete Hoekstra
Lars Larson radio show
November 16, 2015
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Larson: Welcome back to the Lars Larson show. Glad to get your
phone calls and your emails, and always a pleasure to welcome back to the
program former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Pete
Hoekstra. Congressman it's good to have you on the program again.
Hoekstra: Hey great. Thank you. It's nice to be back with you
also.
Larson: Hey tell me this. The President of France has said that
he would like to declare war on the Islamic State. And I guess I got one
email from a former military listener who said, 'Well if he does that the
NATO treaty effectively forces the United States to be part of that.' And
I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad idea. What do we need to do to fight
the Islamic State?
Hoekstra: Well first we need to recognize that it's a real threat
and then the president said today. 'Well my strategy is working but maybe I
need a little bit more intensity.' Number one, the strategy is not working.
Number two is we need a whole lot more intensity against ISIS and against
radical Islamic jihadists. Take a look at what's happened in the last three
years Lars. You've got Yemen is now an ungoverned state; Libya is an
ungoverned state; Syria and Iraq are ungoverned states. Syria and Iraq
provide people with an easy access to Europe as does Libya. The threat is
closer. I'm getting to the point declaring war is not a bad idea if maybe we'd
give our military the right kind of rules of engagement to actually fight
ISIS and defeat them.
Larson: It's funny today just a moment ago I was talking to
Sebastian Gorka from the Marine Corps University and I mentioned to him
that military.com is reporting late today that there's been an airstrike by
US jets on a convoy of 100 ISIS oil tankers. Apparently they're moving a
lot of the oil from the fields to where they can turn it into cash with
actual tankers rather than pipelines, and probably because their
conventional ways of selling it have been shut off. So they're selling at
the old-school way, you know by hauling it somewhere and then selling it
and they've been doing that ever since before the last war in Iraq. That
sounds to me like the first time I've ever heard of that. A-10 warthogs
going and wiping out one of these convoys, and Gorka said that
nonclassified stuff he's been provided with says our guys and gals are
operating under such tight rules of engagement they get up in the air and
they loiter and they aren't allowed to hit anything.
Hoekstra: That's the same thing I'm hearing. Lars, we got ask the
question - how come there are still 100 tankers even available after a
year? And you know it might be laughable except there are people dying. Yesterday
and today the French, they go out and they say they take out a recruiting
center, they take out of training camp and they take out a munitions dump
among some other targets, and you sit there and say, 'I thought we were
bombing them for the last 12 months. Why are these building still
standing?'
Larson: Well and if they move play whack a mole. So they move
their command-and-control to the next building over, the next town over,
you flatten that one. Isn't that the way you win a war? It sounds like President
Obama does not want to win this war. He said today in that news conference
in Turkey, 'The only way to win the civil war in Syria,' which I assume
he's applying to ISIS as well, 'is though diplomacy.' Is diplomacy going to
settle this?
Hoekstra: It's not. You've got to have an element of diplomacy to
pick up the pieces once ISIS is gone, but the first thing is you have to
defeat these folks and that means you probably got to kill most of them.
But getting back to the rules of engagement, I met with a former special
ops guy that just spent some time up in the Kurdistan region and he said,
Pete I can't help these Kurdish folks even though they're going to the
front line they just took Sinjar back. Sinjar mountains, the city of
Sinjar. They're taking casualties. He said I can't help them in those kinds
of situation because my rules of engagement are so limited. You send 50
special ops - and I think this is almost criminal - 50 to Syria. 50 of
them, and they're there for 60 days at a time. That doesn't give them
enough time to actually help whoever we're trying to help there by
understanding the enemy, understanding how they're fighting, the terrain,
build the relationships to actually win a war. 60 days is an embarrassment
to our military and to our soldiers and for what we expect them to do.
Larson: Well and the President says that, you look at what
happened in Paris and they say that at least a quarter of those eight
people -25% of them - may have come in with other refugees, but the
President says he's sticking to his plan to bring tens of thousands of
these refugees to the United States. I know it gets a little outside of
your lane when you were chair of the House Intelligence Committee but he
says these people can be properly vetted. It sounds to me like we're going
to be importing to our country within those 10 to 60,000 people, if they're
even a few dozen of them who are like the folks who carried out the attack
on Friday night, then we can just expect which city is it going to be in
America that gets hit.
Hoekstra: This is not outside my lane; this is exactly the lane
that we have in the intelligence community. I know what kind of resources
we had in Syria and in Iraq and some of these places, the intelligence
capabilities we have. I have a good understanding of how good our vetting
is. Do we really know who we're allowing into the country, do we have
access to the records in Syria as to who the bad folks are? And if we have
access to the records are they any good? I don't know if you saw Ben Rhodes
over the weekend.
Larson: I did, I did.
Hoekstra: Bottom line Lars, this guy is lying to the American
people. He is saying we have a good vetting process. I'm sorry, Syria is a
ungoverned state. The records don't exist and whatever records do exist we
probably don't have access to. We don't know who these people are coming
into Europe, these people that want to come in to the United States. They
are from all over the place and we have no idea what they've been doing for
the last five years. Remember the civil war has been going on in Syria for
a long time and they're not keeping detailed records of who the bad guys
are and who the good guys are. It is awful to have someone that high in the
administration trying to tell the American people, 'Oh yeah we vet these
people, we have a good vetting process and so we know exactly who's coming
in and what they've done in the past.' That is totally untrue. I've been in
these kinds of environments where there are refugees and I can tell you
that in those kinds of situations the intelligence on individual actors is
not very good.
Larson: Congressman Pete Hoekstra is with us right now, former
chair of the House Intelligence Committee and the Shillman Senior Fellow at
the Investigative Project on Terrorism. One last thing, congressman. There
was a reporter from the Daily Mail who went out and spent $2,000 of the
boss's money and bought a passport with his name and his face on it, but it
was a Syrian passport, and he took it to a passport expert and the guy said
this is as good as anything the government is producing. So it sounds to me
like if ISIS has control of the kind of money they have from oil and stolen
from banks, that they're going to have no problem putting plenty of people
on the ground in the United States, with the help of the President. So how
do we stop that?
Hoekstra: Well a couple of things. Number one, the average
passport is not going to cost $2,000 because it was somebody from the UK
going in and have $2,000. If you're in Syria you're going to be able to get
one a whole lot cheaper than that. They'll do that for 100 bucks. What I'm
hoping they're going to do is, there's now talk about it, they do the final
appropriation bill, this omnibus bill at the end of the year, that they're
going to put in there restrictions on the President not allowing these
Syrian refugees, and refugees – remember, not all of them are coming from
Syria. There's others coming from Afghanistan, they're coming from Iraq,
they're coming from Libya. Put real strict regulations and requirements
before any of these people get into the United States.
Larson: Congressman it's a pleasure as always. Thank you so much
for your service in the Congress and I appreciate your time. Congressman
Pete Hoekstra, the Shillman Senior Fellow at the Investigative Project on
Terrorism. You're listening to the Lars Larson show.
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