Presidential Strategy to Defeat ISIS

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I want to talk about the speech the President gave on the Islamic State, or ISIS. He spoke about this to the Nation last Sunday night. I read all the newsclips after having listened to what the President had to say, and I think the universal reaction was that the President did not come up with anything new. Basically, the message was that we are going to stay the course.

Of course, this is the same President who called ISIS ``contained.'' I don't know of any other person--any other person with any knowledge of the subject matter--who would share the view the President expressed, that ISIS was somehow contained. Indeed, we have learned that the threat of ISIS is threefold: We have the battle raging in the country, what started out as a civil war in Syria. Now the borders between Iraq and Syria have essentially been erased, and ISIS is controlling large portions of those two countries. It is also about the foreign fighters who come from Europe and other places within the region and even from the United States. There have been examples of people who come from the United States over to the fight in Syria and Iraq in order to help ISIS. Then, as we sadly learned again, just as we learned in Paris recently, we have seen in San Bernardino, CA, the radicalization of people already in our country, using things such as social media and the Internet.

It is troubling that the President did not choose to tell us what new strategy he was going to use in order to actually make sure we were able to accomplish his own stated objective of degrading and destroying ISIS. Instead, we heard that he had no interest in changing course. As I said a moment ago, this has dangerous and dramatic consequences right here at home too. In light of the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino--one that killed 14 people and wounded more than 20--you would think that the President would reconsider whether the course we are on needs a midcourse correction.

We saw that, for example, in Iraq. President Bush saw the war in Iraq going poorly, despite our best efforts--and then took a huge chance, upon advice of General Petraeus and other military leaders, to conduct a surge. It was a big risk, but it paid off.

President Obama, on the other hand, does not seem to want to learn from his experience or his mistakes. This ``wait and see'' approach has served only to strengthen the stranglehold ISIS has on the Middle East, and it has enabled the recruitment of thousands of jihadists from all over the world.

What we really need from the President is to listen to his military and national security leadership and to formulate a comprehensive strategy against ISIS and bring additional military means against them. The President likes to say this is a choice between what we are doing now and American boots on the ground. That is a false choice. That is not the choice. Those aren't all the options available to the President. But we need to bring means against ISIS that would inflict sizable losses, shatter their false narrative about their actually prevailing and making advances in their effort to reestablish or establish a Caliphate in the Middle East, and stop them from spreading their hateful ideology and their violence--not only in Syria, Iraq, and in that region, but around the world.

In short, what we need is a dramatically different approach. This concern for our current trajectory in the fight against ISIS is not shared only by folks on this side of the aisle. A number of our colleagues across the aisle agree that the President's strategy isn't working, but some of their solutions are pretty puzzling. Just this week, the Democratic leader and some of the other senior leaders across the aisle said that the solution is for the President to appoint another czar--a czar that can eliminate ISIS.

We don't need another appointed bureaucrat. We need a Commander in Chief who is willing to recognize the reality on the ground, one who will step up and lead, and one who will lay out for Congress and the American people a strategy that has a reasonable chance of success.

Because of the President's refusal to change course and develop a serious and aggressive strategy to eradicate ISIS, several of my colleagues and I have sent a letter to the President with some hopefully constructive suggestions. We have urged him to take commonsense measures that are designed to accomplish his own stated goal of degrading and ultimately destroying ISIS.

It is evident that any way forward must inflict significant territorial losses to ISIS. Right now we are engaged in bombing missions, which are necessary but not sufficient to actually hold any territory. That takes people on the ground. It takes military advisers. It takes the United States' leadership--not our U.S. military on the ground--but it takes somebody there to reclaim territory that Americans fought to secure just a few short years
ago, such as in Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul.

I said before that I think the President made a terrible mistake when he precipitously pulled the plug on the American presence in Iraq, because what happened is we simply squandered the lives and the treasure lost in securing cities such as Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul. It breaks my heart to think about the Gold Star Mothers and other people who lost family members in those fights only to see now that territory squandered. Think about our veterans who perhaps lost a limb from an IED, a roadside bomb. It is really a terrible thing. Now the President does have a chance to try to change his strategy in order to reclaim the territory from Iraq and, again, to undercut this false narrative of ISIS invincibility.

First, in this letter that we wrote to the President we suggested that the United States should embed military advisers alongside of the Iraqi Security Forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and Sunni tribal forces to strengthen their hand on the battlefield. These are some of the people who can be the boots on the ground and not American soldiers and service men and women. This could include additional U.S. troops to serve as joint terminal attack controllers--or JTACs--who can help ensure that our airstrikes against ISIS are much more accurate, timely, more lethal, and avoid collateral damage to innocent civilians.

We know the United States has the most powerful military in the world--equipped with the most advanced aircraft and the best trained pilots to fly them. But in order to leverage the advantage in the air, we need to work more closely with those on the ground. Again, this isn't going to happen without American leadership. By deploying additional close air support platforms--including Apache attack helicopters--for use in coordination with embedded JTACs, we can bring real support to those who find themselves in close contact with ISIS.

Again, the President likes to say ``no American boots on the ground'' but the fact is there are about 3,500 or so U.S. service men and women in Iraq, and the President recently announced he was going to deploy a contingent of special operators to help do exactly what I described here. But he has not yet come up with a strategy that will actually help them accomplish their goal.

The President also needs to understand the real need for a thorough review of the current approval process for coalition airstrikes. By making this review process less unwieldy, we can remove barriers that inhibit our pilots from striking strategically significant ISIS targets and doing it in a timely manner. On the battlefield, seconds matter. Our pilots who are engaging ISIS and putting their lives on the line should be allowed a shorter strike-approval timeline.

Finally, the letter my colleagues and I sent to the President asks him to establish safe zones inside Syria to protect the Syrian refugees. I have had the occasion to travel to some of the refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan, for example. Ever since the Syrian civil war occurred a couple of years ago, there have been massive dislocation of people from Syria into adjoining countries, further destabilizing those countries and, obviously, being a huge burden upon them. But what we need is a no-fly and no-drive zone so Syrians can stay in Syria rather than having to flee to adjacent countries or Europe or now come to the United States, for example. It would help safeguard innocent men, women, and children who are getting caught up in the crossfire.

We can do this. We have done it before in Northern Iraq. It takes a plan, and it takes American leadership. We can help take a lot of pressure off of Europe and surrounding countries in the Middle East, as well as our own country, by people who understandably are fleeing the devastation and the danger in their own country. Of course, the President and the United States can't do it alone. That is why we also encourage the President to leverage our partnerships in the region and hopefully find ways to mobilize NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in the planning and implementation process. NATO is very much engaged in Afghanistan, for example, and there is no reason why NATO, with American leadership, can't make a big contribution to what is happening in Syria and Iraq.

I hope President Obama reads our letter, and I hope he seriously considers how the United States can move forward with our partners in a much needed direction to accomplish the goal that he himself stated of degrading and destroying ISIS. Unfortunately, the current plan is not ever going to succeed. Just bombing, as I said earlier--airstrikes--is not sufficient.

Unfortunately, the recent attack in San Bernardino reveals that the extremist ideology of ISIS is not contained in the Middle East, as I mentioned earlier--the radicalization of people already here in the United States. We saw that, for example, in 2009 with MAJ Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood, TX. We saw it earlier this year in Garland, TX. Unfortunately, we saw that in San Bernardino last week.

By the way, this is another item on the President's and on our to-do list. The FBI Director this morning testified that before the attacks in Garland, TX, where two people traveled from Phoenix in full body armor and with automatic weapons and tried to attack an exhibit in Garland, TX, one of the attackers sent 109 encrypted messages overseas to a terrorist contact there. But because they are encrypted, even with a court order, the FBI has not been able to see the contents of those messages. The FBI Director and the Deputy Attorney General have said this is a big problem for the United States because many technology companies are marketing their ability to encrypt their messaging and, thus, keep it out of the eyes--away from the eyes--of law enforcement, even with a court order.

Again, recently we voted to eliminate the bulk data collection at the National Security Agency. To remind everybody, this was about taking a known terrorist's phone number overseas and comparing that against call records here in the United States that don't reveal content but do reveal the domestic phone number so that the law enforcement authorities can go to a court and ask the court to allow them to look into the content of that communication. But, of course, this was misrepresented by some who claimed the privacy interests trumped national security interests.

Certainly, we have to find the right balance between privacy and security. But this encryption technology, which, again, is being marketed by certain companies in order to increase their market share, is being used by terrorist organizations. In fact, the FBI Director said this has now become part of the terrorist tradecraft--that is the way he put it--to use these encrypted devices.

My point is that whether it is the fight in Syria and Iraq or whether it is the foreign fighters traveling from the United States or Europe to Iraq and Syria and returning to the United States or whether it is radicalization of people already in place here in our own country, this is a war we cannot afford to lose. In a way, it seems like we are not using all of the resources available to us to fight a war against the terrorist threat when clearly they are using every resource they have available to fight a war against the United States and our freedom.

I hope the President will reconsider his course of action dealing with ISIS. I am sorry to say that unless the President does, I think we are going to see other attacks--not just in Europe, not just people dying unnecessarily in Syria and Iraq, but further attacks here in the homeland.

The President has some very talented military advisers. General Dunford and General Milley, the Army Chief of Staff, and others can provide him a strategy that actually will have a better chance of succeeding if he will listen and if he will reconsider. I know that sometimes when people like me have criticized the President for having no effective strategy, people have said: What is your strategy? Well, it is not our responsibility. It is the Commander in Chief's responsibility to come up with a strategy. But taking that challenge on, my colleagues and I have sent this letter where we list some options for the President that I hope he will consider.

We need a more focused, a more effective, a more robust strategy--one that is undergirded with a political framework that can sustain a lasting rejection of the bankrupt ideology pedaled by ISIS. We don't have time to stick to a plan that has proven not to work.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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