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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Interview with New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte; Mother of James Foley Speaks Out; ISIS Threat; What Will It Take to Defeat ISIS?

Aired September 11, 2014 - 16:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: On this, the 13th anniversary of that horrible day, the U.S. stands on the brink of another potentially open-ended military mission in the Middle East.

I'm Jake Tapper, and this is THE LEAD.

The world lead: Polls show Americans want to take stronger action against ISIS, and now President Obama has outlined a plan to expand the fight into Syria. How soon could an air campaign begin there? Well, we have got some breaking news on that front.

Also, her son was one of the two Americans that ISIS beheaded on video. Now the mother of James Foley is speaking out to CNN and she has some critical words for the Obama administration.

And the sports lead, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell claimed no one in the NFL saw the Ray Rice tape before the rest of us did, but now there are reports claiming that is not true. And former head of the FBI has been tasked to get to the bottom of it all.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We're going to begin with the world lead today. On this day in 2001, as you likely do not need any reminding, the United States was provoked into a war with radical Islam and now 13 years later, the president who ran on the promise of ending a war stands ready to open what amounts to a new front, this time in Syria.

Today, as we have done every year since the 9/11 attacks, we listened as the names of the 2,977 innocent people killed on that day were read aloud during memorial services at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Now, the enemy since 9/11 has been scattered. It has regrouped. It has mutated. You can draw a jagged line from al Qaeda, the terrorists who murdered Americans on U.S. soil on 9/11, to ISIS, the former al Qaeda offshoot which grew in the anarchy that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and thrived after the U.S. pulled its last combat troops in 2011.

ISIS traffics in atrocity. ISIS slaughters the innocent. ISIS kills children. ISIS has beheaded two Americans. But there is, President Obama says, no specific known ISIS plot to attack the U.S. homeland. Still, the American military has been already hitting ISIS targets in Iraq and now the president who refers to these terrorists as ISIL wants to lead a coalition to take the fight to that other ISIS stronghold.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency. If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Now, dropping bombs on a sovereign nation and offering to arm and train rebels who not only oppose ISIS, but oppose the regime that ostensibly rules Syria, to some people that might sound a lot like a war, but apparently not to Secretary of State John Kerry.

Here's what Kerry said in an interview just hours ago with our global affairs correspondent, Elise Labott.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ELISE LABOTT, CNN FOREIGN AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Is the United States at war with ISIS? It sure sounds like from the president's speech that we are.

JOHN KERRY, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: I think that's the wrong terminology. What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counterterrorism operation.

And it's going to go on for some period of time. If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL, they can do so, but the fact is it's a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: All right. So it's not a war. It's a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts.

So, how soon will this not a war with ISIS begin in Syria? Seems as if the groundwork or more accurately the air work is being already done, according to some information that we're going to break right here, courtesy of our chief national correspondent, Jim Sciutto.

Jim, what have you learned?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: A U.S. official tells me that U.S. surveillance flights, surveillance aircraft are now flying over Syria.

To this point and earlier, they had been flying just purely over the border close to Iraq. Now they're flying over Syria and this is, of course, intended to gather the intelligence that the Pentagon needs to build the target sets, the target lists of ISIS so that when the president is ready to order those strikes, they know what to strike. TAPPER: How imminent are the strikes do you think?

SCIUTTO: I'm told my U.S. officials that the Pentagon continues to refine and improve its target list based in part on those surveillance flights and other means of communication and intelligence-gathering that they're using right now.

Of course, targets of opportunity could come up. And if they do, they are prepared to strike at any time.

But as far as a broader air campaign that the president announced last night, I'm told that that in particular is not imminent. You know, as we discussed this campaign and we discussed other steps that the president has discussed, including arming Syrian rebels, I have been speaking to commanders, former U.S. commanders involved in the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, and they have been giving us very sobering assessments of just how difficult the president's plan will be.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO (voice-over): The fight against ISIS is the latest chapter in a long American war against Islamic extremists. But it brings its own particular challenges, each of them problems that had kept the president from launching a broad campaign until now.

With military action inside Syria, the U.S. is plunging itself into a brutal and confusing civil war. ISIS is the enemy today. But so is ISIS' chief rival, Bashar al-Assad. America's allies on the ground both in Syria, the moderate Syrian rebels, and in Iraq, the Iraqi army, are unproven fighting forces. Neither has made any significant headway against ISIS on its own.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D), CALIFORNIA: The moderate rebels in the past haven't been proven to be a cohesive fighting unit. In many cases, they're also not very moderate and sometimes they make league with groups like al-Nusra, which we are dedicated to fighting against.

SCIUTTO: And into this confusing war, the president is sending an additional 475 U.S. military advisers to Iraq, raising the total number of U.S. forces there to 1,700. They won't be in combat, but they will face risk in the air and on the ground. And the president's pledge to limit that risk by ruling out a combat role greatly limits the effectiveness of airstrikes.

COL. PETER MANSOOR (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: An air campaign can be highly effective if you have targeters on the ground embedded with the combat units.

SCIUTTO: On the home front, military action that many believe will last years will cost billions of dollars, disrupting, if not destroying, the president's attempt to shrink the Pentagon budget.

MANSOOR: It will be up to Congress to come up with the resources to make sure that the U.S. military's not encumbered by lack of funds, lack of resources. SCIUTTO: At stake, U.S. security at home and abroad. U.S. officials

now estimate ISIS has more than 10,000 fighters, including 2,000 Westerners, among them about a dozen Americans, the fear, that those Western fighters being encouraged to carry out terror attacks when they return home.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: There's one more challenge for the president at home. Most presidents experience a surge of popularity when they take the nation to war. President Obama does not. While polls show that Americans support military action against ISIS, they do not approve of the president's handling of ISIS.

So, in effect, Jake, the American public supports the policy, but not the president and as this drags out, how much of a danger is that going to for him to keep spending the money, sending the troops in harm's way, et cetera?

TAPPER: It's flabbergasting, what's going on here. All right, Jim Sciutto, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

President Obama said he would "welcome" congressional support for his ISIS strategy. And for once, it seems as though he may have Republicans on his side, though that support does sound like it's mixed with a fair amount of skepticism.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: An F-16 is not a strategy. And airstrikes alone will not accomplish what we're trying to accomplish. And the president's made clear that he doesn't want U.S. boots on the ground.

Well, somebody's boots have to be on the ground. And so I do believe that what the president is asked for, as the commander in chief, has the authority to train the Syrian rebels and, frankly, we ought to give the president what he's asking for.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Let's bring in Senator Kelly Ayotte, Republican from the Granite State of New Hampshire. She's a member of both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Senator, good to see you as always.

House Speaker John Boehner said today that airstrikes alone will not be enough. He said, somebody's got to have -- have to be the boots on the ground. Who should that somebody be? Do you have faith that moderate Syrians, Kurds and the Iraqi military such as it is can handle this?

SEN. KELLY AYOTTE (R), NEW HAMPSHIRE: Well, first of all, Jake, I think we need to understand that, in Syria, the Free Syrian Army, the president is very late to this in terms of the support for the moderate opposition in Syria.

So that's something that he's announced that he's going to do. It's obviously much more challenging that we're late there, but we have got to do it because there has to be a group that we can deal with in Syria. On the Iraq side, the Kurds are probably our most reliable partners.

In terms of the Iraqi security forces, we have already seen that they have been in many instances run over by ISIS. So, their capacity is questionable. So, that's why, if you look at where we are now, the president has put close to 2,000 Americans in Iraq. I believe it's about 1,700.

And he said last night that he was going the use some of those to train the Iraqi forces to have this capacity. But it is a big question mark in terms of the effectiveness of airstrikes without having people on the ground that are actually calling in the locations.

Now, we know that we have had some success with the Kurds. The question is whether some of this moderate opposition in Syria is capable of giving us that type of intelligence. So I think it's too soon to tell whether we're capable of doing this without actually having some of our special forces there to assist.

TAPPER: How important is it to you, how crucial is it for the president to come to Congress for official authorization?

AYOTTE: Well, I think it's important for the American people because as he's described it, this isn't going to be a short conflict where we immediately defeat ISIS.

And so, first of all, he said that this conflict has to go to Syria, expanded airstrikes there, which does make sense. Seems inconsistent that when he was previously going to strike Syria, that he felt he had to come to Congress, but he's not coming now. Bottom line is we're always stronger when people weigh in on a bipartisan basis.

And I do think that he's going to be better off if he gets the buy-in from Congress, not just on the resource issue, but on the authorization for force.

TAPPER: Daniel Benjamin, who you know, he served as a top counterterrorism adviser for the State Department during President Obama's first term. He has been very critical about what national security officials and others have been saying about ISIS. In fact, he called it a farce in "The New York Times."

He said -- quote -- "It's hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas, or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems, all on the basis of no corroborated information."

The president also last night said there is not a specific plot against the homeland. Is there a danger that this threat of ISIS is being overhyped?

AYOTTE: I would say this, Jake.

I think, actually, the president understated the threat last night and here's why. I was part of a briefing yesterday in the Homeland Security Committee. We know that the estimates are in that committee that over 100 Americans have either tried to go to Syria, have gone and in some instances have actually become suicide bombers.

But here's the more important number. We don't know that 100 is it. In fact, we can't say that that is it. In fact, there may be more. Then there's also at least a couple thousand Western passport holders. Countries like Great Britain and France, they are part of our visa waiver program. And what we know about Americans, we even know less about tracking all of those Western passport holders.

So it seems to me that we need to have a deep concern about this group and its impact it could have on the homeland. Another important component of they're getting about -- the estimates are about a million dollars a day. Let's put this into perspective; 9/11, the estimates are from the commission, that it took half-million dollars to conduct that strike. So they're well-funded.

They have a sanctuary. They're quite sophisticated. And we know that there are some Western passport holders that have joined this group. So, I don't think we should underestimate the potential of this group.

TAPPER: Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Republican, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

AYOTTE: Thanks, Jake. Good to be with you.

TAPPER: Coming up on THE LEAD: He says the last thing a president should do is give the enemy a heads-up, so does President Obama's former national security adviser think the president said too much last night? I will ask him next.

Plus, he admits he did not do enough in the Ray Rice investigation, but does NFL commissioner Roger Goodell deserve to lose his job over it? My guest ahead says no. And he will explain coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We're going to continue with our world lead. The battle against the terrorists of ISIS and the new mission in the Middle East, and whether this is a new war or not. Painful numbers cast a long shadow over everything that's happening in the region right now. They bear repeating.

Our country endured nine years of brutal, costly warfare in Iraq, 4,486 U.S. troops died or killed between 2003 and 2011 in Iraq. More than 30,000 were wounded and, of course, the countless thousands of innocent Iraqis. Plus, all that human agony came with a price tag of more than $800 billion. Now, there are new questions about the origins of this latest threat,

and just how long the fight against the terrorist group ISIS will last.

Let's bring in retired U.S. Marine General Jim Jones. He's the former NATO supreme allied commander and, of course, former national security adviser to President Obama. He's currently president and CEO of Jones Group International.

Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.

GEN. JAMES JONES, FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: Thank you, Jake.

TAPPER: There had been a lot of questions, mainly from Republicans, but also from the media and others and Democrats, too, about how we got here. Especially about what role the 2011 combat troop withdrawal from Iraq played and how capable the Syrian Free Army actually is. Things got very heated last night when President Obama's former opponent John McCain got into something of a shouting match with Obama's former spokesman Jay Carney about exactly those questions. I wanted to take a listen and then I have a question for you on the back end.

JONES: Sure.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: I'm astounded that Mr. Carney should say that the Free Syrian Army is now stronger. In fact, they have been badly, badly damaged --

JAY CARNEY, FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: That's not what I said, senator. If I could, if I could, sir, what I said is that we know a great deal more about --

MCCAIN: Come on, Jay. We knew all about them. You just didn't choose to know.

I was there in Syria. We knew them. Come on. You guys are the ones, it's your boss is the one that went -- the entire national security team wanted to arm and train them he turned them down, Mr. Carney, after a --

CARNEY: Well, Senator, look. I'm not -- I think we have to agree to disagree on this.

MCCAIN: No. Facts are stubborn things, Mr. Carney. And that is, his entire national security team, including the secretary of state, said we want to arm and train and equip these people and he made the unilateral decision to turn them down. And the fact that they didn't leave a residual force in Iraq overruling all of his military advisers is reason why we're facing ISIS today.

CARNEY: Well, again, Senator, we will have to agree to disagree. And I think that the question of the residual force, you know, there was another player in that which was the Iraqi government, A. B, it was the fulfillment of the previous administration's withdrawal plan. C, and it was also fulfillment of the president's promise to withdraw from Iraq and not maintaining a troop presence in perpetuity, which I think was pretty consistent with what the American people wanted and believed was the right approach.

MCCAIN: You know, Mr. Carney, you are again saying facts that are patently false.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: It went on from there. You get the point.

Now, here's the thing.

JONES: It's interesting.

TAPPER: Let's just focus on whether or not there could have been a residual force left in Iraq after 2011, and let's posit that Maliki was very difficult, has been a horrible ruler of Iraq and his leadership or lack thereof is one of the reasons we're in the fix we're in right now.

You were there. Did President Obama push hard enough for a residual force to be left in Iraq after 2011?

JONES: We tried to -- we tried to treat the Iraqi government as a sovereign state. And every other relationship we've had, we have insisted on a status of forces agreement.

TAPPER: Which would give U.S. troops immunity among other things?

JONES: Which gives U.S. troops immunity. And my recollection is that that was procedurally, legislatively, bilaterally not in the cards.

TAPPER: Not in the cards because Maliki said no and that was it, or was there also an eagerness for the U.S. just to get out and President Obama didn't want to push too hard?

JONES: I think we -- I think we pushed hard. I believe that -- that at the end of the day, we decided to treat the Iraqis after billions of dollars of investment in their armed forces as a sovereign country. I personally was a little bit uneasy over Maliki simply because we were warned early on in the administration that he was going to be exactly what he turned out to be.

TAPPER: And Obama, the Obama administration stayed with him too long?

JONES: We stayed with him but, you know, there wasn't really -- we set -- the government was duly elected, all of those things that we live by. I think we gave it a good try to get the status of force agreement to make the case. And it failed.

So, we behaved as though the Iraqi government was like any other government. If you don't do it, we're going to leave. But -- and -- but I really think that over and above this discussion that the real failure here was Maliki.

TAPPER: Last question, sir. And that is, this campaign against ISIS, how long do you think it will take? We have heard from a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, it could be at least three years. What do you think?

JONES: It's going to take --it's going to take a while.

TAPPER: Is that a decade? Is that five years?

JONES: I -- here's -- I mean, I believe that, you know, as a military person, that no military man likes to telegraph your punch. In other words, when you tell the enemy what you're not going to do, in other words, you're not going to put American troops on the ground, that's enters into the equation of how ISIS reacts to things. I understand why the president did that.

On the other hand, if you want this to be shorter, because the air campaign would be very effective. ISIS occupies territory. They have fixed positions and they're going to get clobbered and they know that. So, they will react to it. How they'll react to that is probably to scatter, you know? And make it more difficult for an air campaign to be successful.

If you want to accelerate this, the combination of air and ground forces working together is what's going to make it shorter. But it's -- you know, it's hard to say how long this is going to last because the president mentioned North Africa. I completely agree with that.

And the other thing that I really liked and I completely support is the idea of coalition building. It cannot be that the United States is the only country that's willing to put troops on the ground at each and every instance. This is a mortal danger to the region. It's a mortal danger to Iraq and Syria. It's a mortal danger to the region. And, ultimately, it's a very, very serious threat to the United States and our allies.

TAPPER: General Jones, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

JONES: Thank you, Jake. Good to be with you.

TAPPER: Coming up, her son was kidnapped and beheaded by the terrorist of ISIS. Now, she's criticizing the Obama administration for not doing enough to save him. James Foley's mother sits down with Anderson Cooper. What she said, coming up.

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