It's time for President Barack Obama to "take the handcuffs off" America's military in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS), Rep. Steve Russell tells
Newsmax TV.
"The secretary of defense can't be endorsing plans that say, 'I don't have your back if it gets screwed up,'" Russell, an Oklahoma Republican said Wednesday on "Newsmax Prime" with J.D. Hayworth and Miranda Khan.
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"We need to take handcuffs off our existing Special Operations Forces . . . Our existing air power. They have the targets and they can strike and do damage now, while we debate what it should look like in the future. We have options."
Russell, a combat veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, added:
"When it comes to the pain and suffering of soldiers in there, I get that. I've lived that. I've had to do horrible things myself as a combat soldier.
"But Patrick Henry did not say, 'give me safety or give me death.' He said, 'give me liberty.' And if we're going to have liberty, we have to be willing to defend it. Civilized man and his future is at stake."
Russell believes the United States needs to deploy more ground troops in the fight against ISIS.
"A hammer without an end is useless. You cannot win anything, with a defensive wait out the clock posture. If you do want to play defensively and wait out the clock, you better be ahead almost full board and we're not," he said.
"We need to absolutely destroy ISIS. It's barbarity like we've not seen in our lifetimes and America has the goodwill and the capacity to build a coalition to put an end to this.
"It can't be a unitary effort, but we do have the capacity and the intelligence and the goodwill of leadership, especially on the hills of what happened in France to make this stop."
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