Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says the Islamic State is just as much a threat to the United States as it is to France and the rest of Western civilization.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Daily on Monday, Bolton says:
If you look at what just happened in Paris you can see that allowing ISIS a safe haven in what used to be Syria and Iraq has given them the ability, as Taliban and al-Qaeda had previously in Afghanistan, to train terrorists, to send them back to Europe and I fear to send them to the United States to carry out these kinds of attacks. ISIS is a direct threat to the United States and our allies in the West.
Speaking with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon in a wide-ranging interview, Bolton addressed the need for a commander in chief who has a different worldview than Barack Obama’s and who realizes the critical necessity of implementing strong national security measures in order to protect the United States from the same dangers that have become a reality for its European allies. Regarding the battle against the Islamic State, Bolton said “[Hillary] Clinton is wrong to state, as she did, that it is not America’s fight.”
Bolton explained that while countries such as Turkey, the Kurds and the Arab states will take the lead on the ground to destroy ISIS, that their lack of ability to work together predicates the need for America to lead that effort. “It’s not a threat to them alone. It’s a threat to us.”
“As of now I have not seen indications that [Obama] understands how wrong his worldview has been,” Bolton said, calling Obama out for saying that ISIS had been “contained” less than 12 hours before the tragedy in Paris took place. He also condemned all three Democratic presidential candidates for their performance during the debates on Saturday for “being unwilling to call this problem what it is, which is radical Islamic terrorism.”
He said it was jarring that a socialist French president declared the Islamic State’s attack as an act of war, while the president of the United States still refuses to call it for what it is. Still, Bolton described both the Obama Administration and too many of our European allies as living in “a parallel universe of denial” for refusing to say that the Paris attacks were carried out by radical Islamic terrorists.
French President Francois Hollande responded to the terrorist attacks on his civilian population by ordering retaliatory strikes on the stronghold and capital of the Islamic State’s so-called Caliphate in Raqqa, Iraq. However, Bolton called those strikes weak. “This threat clearly is at at new level.”
Bannon asked Bolton why he thinks the United States had not previously attacked the ISIS command and control center in Raqqa, despite having known its location and that it took a devastating terrorist attack in France for Hollande to go in and bomb them.
The point your’e making just speaks for itself. We knew where this target was and we didn’t do anything about it because to do so would require the same kind of admission from Barack Obama that the war on terrorism continues, and indeed is expanding, that he didn’t want to make after the Bengahzi attack of September 11, 2012.
Bolton explained that America going in and bombing those strategic locations would require Obama to admit that the international terrorist threat is much more than simply a “law enforcement matter,” which Bolton posited “is the way he wants to treat it.” Obama’s delay in taking action against the Islamic State has only propelled the Islamic State’s advancement of their Caliphate which they have been spreading across the Middle East.
French authorities discovered that several of the Islamic State terrorists had snuck into France allegedly using fake ID’s and arriving on European shores on boats along with Syrian refugees. To this effect, Bolton said the United Sates is on its way to a European-like disaster if they abandon the screening mechanism for refugees and immigrants coming into this country the way that the Europeans have, nothing “the White House if fantasizing when it says it has robust vetting capabilities… There’s no reason for us to make the same mistake Europe has.”
Bolton drew upon Winston Churchill’s wisdom and strength in his objective to destroy the Nazis shortly after he became prime minister, calling for absolute victory, and suggesting this same ideology was employed by President Ronald Reagan and is necessary in order for the west to defeat the Islamic State and other strategic national security threats it faces. “Because without victory, there is no survival.”
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