Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said President Obama is “not providing the resources” to defeat the Islamic State in and that United States ought to send “a few thousand more” troops into Iraq to combat the terrorist group in that country.
“That’s really a question, though, for our commanders to provide their best military judgment to the president to make a decision about the number and the types of troops that we need,” he said. Cotton, who served in the Iraq War as an Army captain, added that there’s “no doubt” the military needs more “specialized assets” in Iraq. “Whether they’re special operations forces or intelligence experts to help defeat the Islamic State. That’s the president’s stated goal. He’s not providing the resources to achieve it.” Watch the video below:
Cotton also took aim at the recent question dogging Jeb Bush and other presidential candidates about the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“There’s been a lot of talk over the last two weeks about what we would have done in 2003 knowing what we know now,” he said. “I think what’s even more tragic is Barack Obama, knowing what he knew then in 2011, made the decision to withdraw all of our troops. Those troops were a critical component to training the Iraqi army, to maintaining its pluralistic nature, and preventing sectarian warfare from breaking out.”
In a second segment, Cotton also discussed the debate over the PATRIOT Act and its provisions for the National Security Agency to use cell phone metadata to track potential terrorist communications in the United States. His fellow GOP senator Rand Paul took to the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon to protest the PATRIOT Act’s reauthorization.
“What I believe is that a lot of the NSA’s telephone metadata program is the result of misinformation spread by a traitor, Edward Snowden,” Cotton said. “The NSA is not listening to anyone’s phone calls. They’re not reading any Americas’s emails. They’re collecting, simply, the data that your phone company already has and which you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy so they can search that data quickly in the even of a terrorist plot. And there is no doubt that this program has stopped terrorist plots or helped investigate them.”
“So basically, you totally disagree with Senator Rand Paul on this,” CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked.
“I firmly disagree,” Cotton said. Watch that video below:
