John McCain: We Must Take the Fight to the Enemy
Sen. John McCain told Fox News today that the reason Americans should pay very close attention to what happened today in London is because "This is a grim reminder of the war that we continue to fight against people who want to destroy everything we and our friends across the Atlantic stand for and believe in."
Regarding our own homeland defenses, McCain told interviewer Shepard Smith, "We have made progress, we have a long way to go, and if we fail to take the fight to the enemy, the enemy will take the fight to us."
Smith pointed out to the senator that if someone wanted to take a weapon in a backpack onto any subway in the U.S., there would be no way to stop it. So, he asked, how do we remedy this?
McCain said that there is more we can do at our ports and rail stations, "but the moral of the story is, you can't fight them here.
"You've got to go where they're bred, and that happens to be in these madrassahs that are funded by the Saudis, where the [terrorists] are taught to hate and destroy the West and everything we stand for.
"We've got to go where these terrorists breed ... in the Middle East, with the followers of extreme Islamic fundamentalism.
"We can take preventive measures, but the best way to prevent these attacks is to go after them where they breed."
McCain also defended current U.S. foreign policy that is pushing democracy all over the world, saying, "Repressive and oppressive governments also provide the incentives for this kind of extremism and that's why we're fighting hard for Democracy in the Middle East, whether it be in Egypt or Iraq or any of these other Middle Eastern countries - that's why Afghanistan was so important."
McCain also doesn't believe the convoluted notion that we are somehow creating more terrorists by fighting them.
"These people were bent on our destruction [before] September 11 ... we had not had a war in Iraq at that time. ... It's clear that there is a breeding ground of radical Islamic extremism that predates anything the U.S. has done."
He added, "If you believe that Iraq is a breeding ground, then we should do everything we can to further the process of democracy and stability in Iraq." |
