say assad you know, we shouldn t pay attention to him because assad is an international criminal and we should not be part of an effort to allow assad to stay in place. but our priority here, our main focus now, ought to be in going after isis and making sure we defeat them. they re the clear and present danger. they re the ones we have to defeat if we re going to be successful at protecting the american people. secretary panetta, former director of the cia, always good to hear your wisdom on this, thanks for joining me this morning. thank you. much more on how we confront isis coming up. the politics of fear. how do we remain safe and still not give in to islamophobia. i want to surveil, i want surveillance of these people that are
effort. secondly, we need the arab countries, the moderate arab countries, saudi arabia, uae, jordan and others to be part of that effort. we ve got to focus on that effort because that s doable. when we went into libya we had over 50 nations that were part of that effort. we had a joint command center at naples. that s the effort we need to put together and focus on our objectives and what we re trying to achieve. russia, obviously it would be nice to have them as part of that effort but, frankly, i don t trust them in this effort at this time and i certainly don t trust iran to be part of that effort as well. we ve got to focus on our allies and the countries that work with us to try to achieve the mission that we need to go after. and very quickly secretary panetta, would you somehow prioritize isis over assad at this point or do they have to be pursued simultaneously? i think we ve got to go after both of them. i don t think we can suddenly
that we re not afraid. to not elevate them. that somehow buy into their fantasy that they re doing something important. they re a bunch of killers. this morning we ll look at the isis threat from all the angles. how do we build an international coalition against isis? does the u.s. strategy in the region have to change? and if so, how? how serious is the threat of isis to us here in the united states? how do we remain safe while not giving into islamophobia? and how will all of this impact the campaign for the white house in 2016. we have the top names on all those issues with us this morning. we ll begin with efforts to keep america safe. this morning in new york city, a counterterror exercise took place and right now you ve seen simulating how the authorities would deal with an active shooter situation in the new
prevent radicalization how do you do that when you re viewed as an invasive force and you re killing more and more people, it just i don t know how you well the tricky part is we re not going to send the 82nd airborne against isis on the ground, that s not going to happen but the fact is the president was what i would call benign to go about continuing expansion of isis, the more sophistication, it has to come to a halt. it s a generational conflict. you wrote about the greatest generation. do we need more people with skin in the game, more service? we need to have this country understand they have to sacrifice some as well if we go to war, not just 1% of the population over there. i ll make that the last word because we needed 90 minutes and we tried to squeeze it into an hour. we ll be back next week. have a terrific thanksgiving. maybe our greatest american holiday. if it s sunday, it s meet the press.
we re at war. this has changed. paris has changed the place of america in this war against isis and it s now a war and it won t be a ground war with the united states sending 20,000 to 40,000 troops up against isis. it s very complicated. we ll have a greater presence in iraq to protect the iraqi government so it doesn t fall and then we have the same kind of division that we had in the past. we have to have more special forces in iraq to go against isis. we ll have to control aerospace, no question about that. we won t get help for from our european allies this time. it s not like bush and baker when they went to iraq one. i would say to that that we re not only at war against isis. i think what happened in mali on friday shows that we also are at war against al qaeda and there s a war, there s a battle going on right now between isis and al qaeda for supremacy and that is very scary. a lot of that has been i would say we re da when we talk about trying to