Breitbart News National Security editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, appeared on Fox News’s The Kelly File Friday evening to debate Center for American Progress senior fellow Larry Korb. The debate was on the anti-terrorist strategies of presumptive presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Asked what Trump’s plan to defeat ISIS consists of, Gorka noted that he was not a member of the campaign staff, but he did advise Trump on some national security issues last year. With that in mind, he described Trump’s comments on combating the Islamic State as “a little bit cagey,” with only one major foreign policy speech in the campaign to date.
Gorka said there was clearly one big difference between Trump and Clinton: Trump “actually believes we are at war, and he wants to win and destroy the enemy.”
He said that would be “very, very refreshing” after “the last seven disastrous years.”
Korb was critical of Trump because “he’ll say one thing and then do something else.”
“He’s very impulsive. He came out right after the plane went down, and said ‘we know it’s terrorists.’ You just had a report on there that said it could have been a critical malfunction,” Korb continued, referring to the crash of EgyptAir Flight MS804.
“He said he wants to defeat ISIS, but he doesn’t want to get involved in places overseas. I mean, one of the reasons we have ISIS is because of the Syrian civil war. He said he wouldn’t get involved in it,” added Korb:
Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, he can’t keep playing these games where he says, “well, I’m not going to tell you.” No, he needs to tell the American people and the world because people around the world listen to him. He’s now the nominee of one of our major political parties.
Gorka countered that Trump did give some answers to specific questions, “and they’re very important ones.”
“He said in his foreign policy speech that the Muslim Brotherhood is inimical to democracy and is a threat to the United States, and he is prepared to put it on the foreign terrorist organization list — just as Egypt, where it was created, has already done,” said Gorka. “The Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of all jihadi groups: al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Nusra, you name it.”
“So he’s made some statements that are very reassuring, things that, after the last seven years, simply are a breath of fresh air,” Gorka said of Trump. “It’s disastrous, whether it’s Benghazi, whether it’s betraying the Iranian people in the Green Revolution, whether it’s the events of Libya — you couldn’t imagine a worse foreign policy than the last seven years, so whatever he does, I think it would be a big improvement.”
Asked if Clinton would have a difficult time overcoming the Obama foreign policy legacy Gorka described, Korb argued that “ISIS came into being because of Bush’s mindless, needless, senseless invasion of Iraq, which he was not honest about.”
“Everybody’s blaming Obama for getting out of Iraq in 2011. Bush signed an agreement with them in 2008 that said we had to get out,” Korb continued. “I remember asking [then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki this, and he said, ‘you signed an agreement.’ And basically, that’s what created this situation. Had we not done that, we wouldn’t be having these problems today.”
Korb quoted Maliki saying, “We have repelled the invaders” when signing the agreement to withdraw troops under President Bush.
“I think we have to stop blaming Bush,” Gorka countered. “That’s just so hackneyed. Let’s talk about the future. Let’s talk about San Bernardino, Brussels, and Paris. Let’s talk about the fact ISIS is the most powerful jihadi organization the world has ever seen, and it was facilitated by our withdrawal in 2011 when Secretary Clinton was the Secretary of State.”
“There would be no ISIS, and no caliphate, if we still had American troops in Iraq, and President Obama hadn’t pulled them out, and Secretary Clinton hadn’t supported that decision,” Gorka declared. “That’s the truth. Let’s stop blaming Bush.”