operations have been hampered by the geography of these densely populated areas and cold waters. isis being eliminated but a huge alarm about the high rate of civilian casualties in doing so. the men from iraq s elite scorpion unit is pushing back. but look at this. this building is held by government forces. the rounds hitting it are from islamic state fighters. they re firing over our heads despite being outnumbered by the troops, they re not giving up.
exactly the tactics that isis describes in its propaganda. they talk about how much clearance you want and truck you hijack to crush as many bodies as possible. it s a textbook attack. so richard haass had said a few days ago we could expect more attacks like these because of the fall of aleppo and what was happening in mosul and isis being pushed back in iraq and syria. do you expect more of the same? it s the holiday season so there s public gatherings and isis said don t wait. just do it. i think in some ways they probably are at 100%. when there is more attacks like this happening publicly like nice, there s also people who learn from each other and learn how much damage they can do with weapons at hand and how effective even the most basic
happen even as territory is shrinking and people not being dissuaded from carrying out these attacks. i don t think shrinking the territory, even fully defeating the so-called caliphate will stop this altogether. but we have seen a reduction in the amount of people being recruited to isis because, frankly, not everybody is suicidal. they don t want to be guaranteed to die for a cause. the other thing is, right now without isis being totally defeated, there is still going to be an argument in that circle that, in fact, hey, we can have difficulties, we can lose some territory but we re still going to ultimately prevail. a new caliphate doesn t guarantee that you ll have no losses. i think defeating them in total, which could take some time, is what s necessary to deprive that recruiting ground. again, the idea that you defeat isis, you still could have isis too someday, al qaeda three. i wish i had better news. i believe this is the new reality. we can prevail. we should prevail. we w
continue to gun down people in plain view. it was the summer of 2011 when president obama said it s time for assad to go. summer. at that point there were 2,000 dead. now we re up in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands dead and not only has assad not left, he has the upper hand. he just took aleppo. he s won. and you actually have isis being pushed back on the eastern part of the country. the northeastern part of the country. is that going to be turned over to a tyrant who has committed acts of genocide while we have all watched on tv? do you think trump would have push pushed him out? more toward letting the arab spring die. if assad wouldn t have been threatened, this wouldn t have happened but you would have a
out on the road and that s how he stays connected to the people while his secretary of state and secretary of defense and secretary of treasury run policy? is there anything about donald trump that makes you think he would change the way he s behaved over the course of the campaign? people say once he s president, he ll stop tweeting. why? what makes you believe that? the problem with that line of communication people say this is just how it s going to be. you re going to have to hear what he has to think through twitter and through rallies. there s nobody on the other side of the rally or twitter asking him questions so he can just get up there and talk about things he wants to talk about. if he were on this show or meet the press or something else, we would ask him drilling down deep on syria. what are you going to do? we ve heard your going to bomb the hell out of isis. what does that mean specifically? we can t sit back and say we ll just have to study his tweets. he did a su