Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, said Friday that every member of President Obama’s national security team should lose their jobs.
“Everyone in the national security team, they have been a total failure,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
While the president said he is considering airstrikes to try to restabilize the conflict in Iraq, Mr. McCain said no one on the president’s current team should be making those decisions. He said the president needed to call Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of forces in Iraq, and Gen. Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army.
“There are no good options right now, I’m sorry to say,” Mr. McCain said. “These are the guys who won the war and get them to devise a strategy and then implement it.”
Mr. McCain said the devolving situation in Iraq is the greatest threat to American national security since the Cold War.
“This has turned into one of the most serious threats to American security in recent history,” he said. “There is now this Syria/Iraq area, the largest area ever of Islamic extremism.”
Mr. McCain had a bit of an I-told-you-so moment, pointing out that he said in 2011 that the situation in Iraq would worsen if we did not leave behind some U.S. troops.
“The fact is we had the conflict won, and we had a stable government,” he said. “But the president wanted out and now we are paying a very heavy price, and I predicted it in 2011. You can go back and look at the quotes.”
Mr. McCain made further predictions that the same thing would happen in Afghanistan if we don’t leave behind residual forces to keep the country stable.
“We’ve made great sacrifices in order to stabilize the situation and now by pulling out, we are leaving a vacuum, and all those sacrifices will have been made in vain,” he said.
• Jacqueline Klimas can be reached at jklimas@washingtontimes.com.
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