Fox contributor Marc Thiessen: The lesson of Iraq is America should keep its military in the Middle East
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From the September 11 edition of Fox News' The Daily Briefing
DANA PERINO (HOST): You mentioned 9/11, I do want to remind everybody about your service in the Bush administration. You were at the Pentagon on 9/11, what you all went through was quite amazing. But I do want to point this out, I think there has been some policy success.
Look at this new poll, a Fox News poll asking which is the biggest threat: a mass shooting by a U.S. citizen, now that's at 60%, and an attack by Islamic terrorists, 17%. What I mean by progress is that 17 and a half years ago, everybody was so concerned about Islamic terrorism. And while we still have to be concerned, we have put America on a better footing in order to be able to prevent another attack.
MARC THIESSEN (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): That is exactly right. And look, we take it for granted now that the terrorist threat has receded. It's not that the terrorists gave up or lost interest in attacking us. It's because we sent the men and women of our armed forces to fight them over there so we didn't have to face them over here, as we said in the Bush administration. And we've been doing that for 18 years. And what we found in Iraq when President Obama withdrew all of our forces from Iraq -- that was, when you take your boot off of the terrorists' necks, they come surging back. And so the lesson of that experience and the fact that we're not being threatened right now in the same way, is that we need to keep our boot on the necks of the terrorists. We need to do it in Iraq, we need to do in Syria, we need to keep pummeling them in Yemen and other places.
PERINO: Wherever it is, that's right.
THIESSEN: And in Afghanistan too, we cannot pull out all of our troops and let those people come back in the country where they planed the 9/11 attacks.