paris. what is it that you guys have gotten wrong in underestimating isis? well, chuck, i think we very clearly understand the threat from isil, and the fact of the matter is when we launched our air campaign, the president was very clear that this would be a long-term effort. this is a different type of terrorist enemy that aims to hold territory, that is drawing thousands of recruits and that s why we ve been in this effort launching again thousands of air strikes. recently targeting isil leadership including jihadi john in syria, the leader of isil in libya. we re in this for the long haul. we re very clear-eyed about the threat we face and that s why we have a coalition of 65 countries with us in this countryer effort, many of whom are in turkey at the g-20 who the president will be seeing in the next two days. do you believe the strategy the president is implementing is working? because to a lot of people, democrats and republicans, there s not enough of a sense of urgency.
that s my big concern. if you listening to the democrats debating. so you agree with governor o malley. about what? that this is america s leadership role, that they have to this is america s fight more so than it is the world s fight. it s both, and i think governor o malley probably agrees with me that we need to lead. if he s suggesting that, kudos to him. we need to lead. we cannot lead from behind. we have to take a leadership role to inspire our arab partners in the european countries, nato allies, all of them together, create a strategy, act on it, unleash a strategy on isis and we will be successful. let me go to the refugee issue. would you do you believe we should still try to accept some of these syrian refugees and if not, what do you do with them? the great majority of refugees need to be safely kept in syria which means the safe zones need to be serious. we need to build a coalition
officials told me they thought it was going to be al qaeda because they thought al qaeda was the kind of organization that looked abroad, looked to carry out complex attacks. remember, the president once described isis as the jv team. if it was the jv team, it is no longer the jv team and probably hasn t been for quite some time. and when you underestimate that probably means you re getting bad intelligence. what is our situation? we re not getting good intelligence about isis because if we were, wouldn t we have a better assessment of their capabilities? reporter: when you talk to investigators here, it s not a question of not getting good intelligence, it s that there s too much intelligence. there are simply too many people. there are probably 3,000 to 5,000 people just in france that officials are concerned about. you have thousands of people a day moving along the migrant trail.
fighter travel. congressman, thanks very much. michael lighter, let me start with you. we thought only al qaeda was capable of some sort of global reach. what did the intelligence committee that you are a member of consistently underestimate about isis? well, it s not actually clear to me on a strategic level the intelligence committee did get this wrong. i think there have been a lot of warnings that isis wasn t just going to stay in its caliphate in syria and iraq. i think tactically the intelligence committee in france and the u.s. missed this attack, clearly missed the attack in egypt. people who have been watching terrorism for a long time knew isis would never be satisfied staying in the levant. how do you explain the obama administration s policy here? that s where we have the real delta. you have the intelligence community saying they won t be satisfied staying there. they will ultimately come to the west, but then you have a policy which, frankly, isn t sufficiently robu
experience. do you think what happened in paris should change the mindset of the republican voter and what s your case to them to make them do that? look, i think as we get closer to the primaries, people want to know who can sit behind the big desk? who has the judgment and the temperament to lead this country? and if you listen to some of the candidates speaking about syria, for example, they are all over the map. i laid out a strategy two plonts ago at the reagan library and it s the proper strategy i think to destroy isis and to have change in the regime related to assad so that there can be peace and security in the region and lessening the threat to our own national security. would you trust donald trump or ben carson as commander in chief right now? i don t know. the words that i hear them speaking give me some concern, but that s why we have campaigns, chuck, as you know. everybody will have a chance to lay out their visions. i m more concerned about hillary clinton think