Heeding the calls of politicians like President Barack Obama for resilience is not enough in the face of terrorist attacks like the one that killed nearly 100 people in Nice, France on Thursday, the fight must be done in such a way that it puts an end to the threat, former FBI deputy assistant director Danny Coulson said Friday.
"One of the talking points here in the counterterrorism community and among politicos is we need to be resilient," Coulson told Fox News'
"Happening Now" program. "I found that to be callous to the people who died yesterday in France. I find it calloused to the people who died in Baghdad before that or around the world.
"It's not about resilience, the west is resilient. We need to fight back in a way that puts an end to this threat."
There is not much information yet known about Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhel, 31, a Nice resident born in Tunisia, who was driving the truck in the Nice attacks, said Coulson.
On Thursday night, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton called for increased intelligence, but Coulson said the issue may actually be immigration.
"I call it invasion," said Coulson. "When you overwhelm your intelligence services, your law enforcement agencies with too many people that have this same ideology, you're not going to win.
"You can put your finger in the dike and stop the trickle, but you can't stop a tsunami of people that invade countries under the ruse of immigration when in fact they're not assimilating."
Instead, there needs to be limits on immigration, as "intelligence is only effective if you act on it," he continued. "We can have all the intelligence in the world, but if we are not willing to act on it, wipe out the enclaves in the Middle East, to go after them in the United States, to unleash the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to do the job they are trained to do without restricting them to get worse, what happened there is coming here.
"You will see a truck driving through the streets of the United States in a couple months."
Tom Johnson, senior editor of
The Long War Journal, and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, was also on the program, and said that the United States is "definitely at war" with radical Islam.
Back in 2010, al-Qaida would have possibly been behind such an attack, but it backed away from that sort of thing after Osama bin Laden said "indiscriminate slaughter, don't do that type of thing."
And al-Qaida has become more discriminate, he continued, conducting "very precise military style operations" while ISIS is openly encouraging its attackers to attack more indiscriminately, like the incident in Nice.
"We don't know a lot about this guy yet, I don't know a lot about this type but it fits the MO of what we see them calling for," he said.