Thornberry Talks Iraq Announcement, President's NDAA Veto Threat On Fox News

Jun 11, 2015
Defense Drumbeat
"Half measures taken too late are not going to make a difference..."

WASHINGTON - Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-TX), of the House Armed Services Committee, appeared on Fox News this morning to talk about the additional troops being sent to Iraq, lack of strategy to deal with ISIL, and President Obama’s threat to veto the annual defense bill. 

Thornberry on lack of coherent anti-ISIL strategy: 

"[The President’s] not willing to take the action to start to deal with this problem…Exactly a year ago the city of Mosul fell. Nine months ago, the President said we wanted to degrade and destroy ISIS. And we'll start bombing them. ISIS controls more territory in Syria and Iraq than they did before.  But, even more disturbingly, there are more people from Pakistan and all the way across the Middle East to north Africa that are pledging allegiance to ISIS. So their ideology has spread as their territory has spread and we don't have a strategy to deal with it. "

Thornberry on President’s threat to veto the annual defense bill:

"We are battling ISIS. Russia and China are more aggressive.  We are in the midst of negotiations with Iran where we’re trying to convince them that they need to voluntarily give up their weapons or we could take military action, and what does the President do? He threatens to veto the defense bill that gives him exactly the amount of money he asks for because he's trying to force Congress to give him more money for the IRS and EPA. That just cannot leave Putin or ISIS quaking in their boots with a president who takes that approach. He's threatened to veto defense bills before, I hope he doesn't. But it does not help what we were talking about with ISIS or anybody else for the president to be against a defense bill that he asked for."

You can watch the entire interview here


114th Congress