Ted Cruz Quotes

The success of ISIS is largely tied to the safe haven it has in Syria.

There is no doubt ISIS poses a clear, direct threat to the United States, and decisive action is badly needed.

ISIS filled the vacuum in Iraq and Syria created by a lack of effective governance.

To destroy the Islamic State, you have to fix Syria. You have to look at the reasons that created the Islamic State. This is a huge task.

I think that ISIS is a threat to our embassy, to our consulate, as well as potentially to the American people.

There is no question that what we are seeing - the horrible advance of ISIS - goes back, if you will, to the original sin of the invasion of Iraq.

If anything caused ISIS, it was the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

I've often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be.

The rise of ISIS is a result of - Obama and Clinton making a decision to pull our troops out without preparing Iraq is a colossal mistake.

When we toppled [Muammar] Gadhafi in Libya, I think that was a mistake. I think ISIS grew stronger, we had a failed state, and we were more at risk.

We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt and in Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terrorism and doing it now, doing it quickly.

Unfortunately, the state of national security under the Trump administration is far from strong.

What happened in Iraq and Syria was that the world remained silent as ISIS expanded.

Da'esh and Assad are not separate problems.

Iran is not an enemy of ISIS; they have a lot to gain from the turmoil that ISIS creates.

The Turks have not been historically good about keeping pressure on ISIS.

I have long argued that ISIS and Assad are not separate problems to be chosen between, but are action and reaction, cause and symptom, chicken and egg: impossible to untangle no matter how much we might like to.

We're facing an enemy today in the Islamic State that knows no national boundaries. It doesn't have a moral code of conduct.

ISIL presents a growing threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and now in the United States as well. Terrorists and their enablers will continue to receive the unwavering attention of law enforcement and the intelligence community.

If you don't win and the terrorists win, Syria wouldn't exist anymore.

We need a president who stands up, number one, and says, we will defeat ISIS. And number two, says the greatest national security threat facing America is a nuclear Iran.

Iraq broke our back in terms of counterterrorism. There's no doubt about it. The first thing, though, that hurt us was the fact that the U.S. military was absolutely unprepared to do anything on 9/11 - or 9/12 or 9/13. And by the time we actually attacked Afghanistan, al Qaeda and the Taliban had dispersed.

What we have done is when the threat has been directed at the United States, i.e., the terrorist threat from ISIL or Al-Qaeda in Syria, is to go after them.

There is nothing in common between al-Assad and ISIS, they fight against each other.

There are still people - the majority on the stage, they want to topple [Bashar] Assad. And then there will be chaos, and I think ISIS will then be in charge of Syria.