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Rubio: “It would be deeply demoralizing to this effort to allow them to take territory. And for John Kerry to say that, proves to you how out of touch they are about this reality. They are doing anything they can to disengage us from this process by doing the least amount possible. And it’s leading to this terrible outcome.”
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio
FOX News’ “America’s Newsroom with Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum”
October 13, 2014
http://youtu.be/QKzOJ39U8IQ
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FOX News’ Martha MacCallum: “We’ve been talking to Turkey. Turkey now says that they will allow us to begin missions from Turkey. Do you think we should be pressuring them as well to put ground troops on the line in this fight?”
Senator Rubio: “Yeah. In fact, we shouldn’t be pressuring them at all. They should be wanting to do this. Kobani is on their border. In essence, all of those refugees, and the people fleeing a certain massacre, they are all going to go into Turkey. The problem with Turkey is that this whole issue has become enmeshed into their own domestic politics. I mean, they view the Kurds on the other side of the border as equally bad. So, in their mind, they’re not quite sure what to do from a domestic political perspective.
“But the bottom line is in the short term, the Turks have more at stake here than we do. And they’re members of NATO. They should act like a member of NATO.”
MacCallum: “We are sending an assessment team to begin the training process. The belief is that there’s about 4,000 fighters, perhaps, that are ready to be trained from the moderate forces in Syria. Are we really at this stage where we’re beginning to assess how many people are available, and that we’re going to send in an American assessment team to start working on this?”
Rubio: “I support all those things. That would be great. The problem is that this conflict is moving much faster than our ability to identify, train, equip and place in the field these rebel elements, or anybody for that matter. ISIS is not going to sit around and wait for us to train the rebels. By the time they’re ready to go, it may be too late. As you can see from the progress they have made. And it’s not just in Kobani. It’s the progress they’ve made now on the outskirts of Baghdad and other parts of the country.
“Let me tell you – if they succeed in Kobani, it will completely demoralize our ability to rally any sort of forces on the ground to confront them. That’s when people strip off their uniforms, they abandon ship, they abandon their post. It has a psychological impact.”
MacCallum: “Well, John Kerry is singing a very different tune. Here’s what he said about the potential fall of Kobani.”
Secretary Kerry: “Kobani does not define the strategy of the coalition with respect to Daesh. Kobani is one community, and it’s a tragedy what is happening there. And we don’t diminish that. But we’ve said from day one it is going to take a period of time.”
MacCallum: “Sounds to me like he is preparing everybody for failure there.”
Rubio: “That’s an absurd statement. I’ll tell you why. Imagine for a moment if you are a Sunni or a Shia, for that matter, on the ground in Iraq, who’s preparing to go out and fight and confront ISIS, and you’re all fired up because the U.S. is hitting them from the air. And yet despite these airstrikes, they keep winning.
“Now you’re thinking to yourself, ‘You know, these guys are unbeatable. They’re invincible. Despite airstrikes, they’re taking major cities. Why would I join a losing side? It’s better for me to flee into Turkey, or Jordan, or Lebanon or anywhere for that matter.’ It would be deeply demoralizing to this effort to allow them to take territory. And for John Kerry to say that, proves to you how out of touch they are about this reality. They are doing anything they can to disengage us from this process by doing the least amount possible. And it’s leading to this terrible outcome.”
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