Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina says the United States is “not making progress” in its fight against ISIS. In a recent interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Fiorina said President Obama “understates the significance of the situation” with the terrorist group that has taken over large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq.
“It’s more than a tactical setback,” she said of Ramadi, a critical town in Iraq’s Anbar province that fell to ISIS forces last week. “It demonstrates that we’re not making enough progress in degrading and defeating ISIS.”
Asked if the U.S. is losing the fight, Fiorina said she didn’t know. “But I know we’re not making progress, and so if you’re not making progress, you’re arguably falling back.”
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO was campaigning in Columbia, South Carolina Wednesday, where she told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an on-camera interview what the country ought to do to defeat ISIS.
“Instead of having a Camp David conference to talk our Arab allies into a bad deal with Iran, I would have a Camp David conference to talk with our Arab allies about how we can support them to fight ISIS,” Fiorina said. “The Kurds have been asking us to arm them for three years. We still have not. The Jordanians have been asking us to provide them with bombs and materiel.” Watch the video below:
“There are a whole set of things we’ve been asked to do by our allies, who know this is their fight, and we’re not doing any of them,” Fiorina said. “So I would hold a summit and talk about that.”
Asked by TWS if part of the American strategy ought to be sending more troops to Iraq, Fiorina demurred.
“I think it’s premature until we have a conversation with our allies,” she said. “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘Okay there are all these alternatives in front of us that our allies who are there have told us will help, and we’re just going to leap over all of those and talk about boots on the ground.’ And I think President Obama has created this dichotomy where basically what he says is, if you don’t agree with me, the only option is to go to war. It’s just false. It’s a false choice. So we shouldn’t fall into that trap.”
