Jim Mattis, the former Marine Corps general and Pentagon chief, has lashed 2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden for fueling the rise of ISIS by insisting on the total withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq.

“You may want a war over. You may declare it over. You may even try to walk away from it. But the bottom line is the enemy gets a vote, as we say in the military, and we simply have got to understand that terrorism is going to be an ambient threat,” he said in an NPR interview.