A Quote by James Mattis

Once ISIS is defeated, there is a larger effort under way to make certain that we don't just sprout a new enemy. We know ISIS is going to go down. We have had success on the battlefield. We have freed millions of people from being under their control.
Instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter we ought to hunt down our enemies and kill ISIS rather than creating opportunities for ISIS to take control of new countries.
Constraint theory argues a number of things. First, that the impossible has to be identified. Second, that the actor is then constrained by circumstances to act a certain way. For example, should we invade ISIS? Can we invade ISIS? What would it take to invade ISIS? Once you ask that question you discover the price of that option and then you take a look at American politics and see that the country is probably not prepared to invest the 2 to 3 million people that it would take to defeat ISIS and the insurgency afterwards. All right, so that's not going to happen.
The survival of ISIS's ideology is success enough for them. We must spare no effort in denying ISIS this success.
We saw that, as Syrian troops went to Aleppo, ISIS took Palmyra. But ISIS' days are numbered. The Donald Trump administration has said that they're going to concentrate on ISIS and they're going to work with Russia. Now, we don't know whether they really will work with Russia or not, but it's clear that ISIS is going to be pounded.
[People] are tired of being out-negotiated on every front. Whether it is militarily, with ISIS where we can't stop ISIS, where we have 2,300 Humvees, the latest and the greatest, armour-plated, stolen because one bullet is shot in the air and the allies run and the enemy takes over our weapons.
You can't call ISIS the JV team. You can't say that they're contained. Sure, we've had some success, but we have not defeated them.
Iran is not an enemy of ISIS; they have a lot to gain from the turmoil that ISIS creates.
ISIS have to be defeated. They have to be defeated militarily. How are we going to do that if we continue to weaken our military?
Secretary Clinton is talking about taking out ISIS. "We will take out ISIS." Well, President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq, because they got out - what, they shouldn't have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster. And ISIS was formed.
It's important that we keep our priorities straight. And we believe that the first priority is the defeat of ISIS. That by defeating ISIS and removing their caliphate from their control, we've now eliminated at least or minimized a particular threat not just to the United States, but to the whole stability in the region.
We have to do one thing at a time. We can't be fighting ISIS and fighting [Bashar]Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS.
ISIS is recruiting through the Internet. ISIS is using the Internet better than we are using the Internet, and it was our idea. What I wanted to do is I wanted to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they're doing.
It plays right into the hands of ISIS. And that's why Americans need to know that Donald Trump's words are being used in recruitment videos that ISIS is putting out. I think that is a very serious problem.
We need to focus our energies there, not these broad, blanket, kind of statements that will make it harder for us to deal with ISIS. We need to deal with ISIS in the caliphate. We need a strategy to destroy ISIS there. You can't do that without the cooperation of the Muslim world because they're as threatened as we are.
We should be using our brilliant people, our most brilliant minds to figure a way that ISIS cannot use the Internet. And then on second, we should be able to penetrate the Internet and find out exactly where ISIS is and everything about ISIS. And we can do that if we use our good people.
The United States wanted to send its trained rebel groups to Syria to fight ISIS. Out of twenty-five hundred rebels they had trained, only seventy accepted to go to Syria to fight ISIS. Everybody else wanted to go to Syria to fight the government. So you've got to wake up and smell the coffee... The rebel groups have not fired a shot against ISIS.
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