Political Quotes

“First of all, I want to thank Congresswoman Gabbard. She has a practical battle-tested basis of experience to propose this amendment. She served a tour in Iraq, and she served in Kuwait. This is not a question about whether the proponents of this amendment reserve any desire to go after ISIS in any way that we can, nor does it mean that we want to restrict our help to responsible partners, like the Kurdish Peshmerga. What this is about is identifying a program that was designed for failure. It was predicted by Congresswoman Gabbard that this train and assist program for unidentified Syrian allies, so- called, would fail. It would fail because we didn't have a nation-state that we were dealing with. Train and equip is a good program when it is with a responsible government, or one trying to be a responsible government--maybe in Afghanistan, maybe in Iraq. What we have here is a civil war. We have al Qaeda, we have al- Nusrah, we have people fighting Assad, we have people fighting each other. The CIA identified 1,500 different groups. And we are asking our military, our CIA, who don't really speak the language--some do--to identify who will be ``the good rebels'' in what is a caldron of conflict. The problem here is that we spent $500 million and basically ended up training 100 people. They drifted off into the battlefield and were quickly killed or captured or defected.…”