President Barack Obama's strategy in the battle against the Islamic State (ISIS) needed to take advantage of the Middle East countries that were intensifying their attacks against the militant group, former New York City Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik told
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"We have something now that we didn't have in the past, and that's a real movement on the Arab side, with the king of Jordan, the president of Egypt, and the [United Arab] Emirates supporting Jordan. We've got a lot of movement now that we didn't have in the past that we really need to be using. We need to make sure that these guys are getting the resources they need," Kerik said Monday.
Story continues below video.
Note: Watch Newsmax TV now on DIRECTV Ch. 349 and DISH Ch. 223
Get Newsmax TV on your cable system — Click Here Now
Jordan launched airstrikes against ISIS after a video was released Feb. 3 that showed a captured Jordanian pilot burned to death in a cage. And,
Egypt launched attacks against ISIS on Monday after a video was released Sunday that appeared to show the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya.
"These guys know the enemy. They have incredible intelligence services, and they can get into places that we can't. But, they need resources to do it, and I strongly urge Congress and the president to push for those resources," he said.
Pete Hoekstra, former Republican congressman from Michigan who served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, agreed and told "America's Forum" on Monday the added support from Arab countries had "the making of a very effective coalition," but cautioned Obama had yet to provide enough arms to Kurdish, Sunni, or Libyan fighters.
Hoekstra also said it was "absolutely crazy" that the White House was "pushing the Egyptians to the Russians." He said Obama's request to Congress for war authorization called for less authority than what he now had, adding it sent a message to ISIS about how determined the president was in the battle against them.
"The action here is a conviction by the president that he is going to use the tools necessary . . . to put the fear into ISIS. They just don't see it. They've watched us lose Yemen. They're watching as we lose Nigeria, and that expands into Chad, and they're successful in Libya. They're not afraid of us. They continue to expand the fields where they're playing in getting the initiative," Hoekstra said.
Kerik, who was former interim interior minister in Iraq, maintained the war authorization could not include time limits, and that restrictions impeded the ability to "go to battle and do it right."
"All these groups, whether it's ISIS or al-Qaida or any of the others, they look at something like this and they say 'It's restrictive by three years. We can wait.' They have enormous patience. We've seen this dating back from the mid-90s, early 90s, right on into 2014. They just wait us out," Kerik said.
Hoekstra said he was "very suspect as whether [the war authorization] will get congressional approval," because lawmakers wanted something "much more robust."
"The key thing here is not whether the resolution is robust, it's whether the president's actions have been robust enough," he said. "All the trend lines and the battle against ISIS are going in the wrong direction."
Kerik warned ISIS could launch attacks in the U.S. "like what happened in Denmark and Paris," where terror assaults in January and this past weekend occurred in public places and offices. Among those who died were a number of Jews, thought to have been targets.
"They're going to do exactly what they were doing abroad, decapitating people and mass slaughtering innocent children, women, and men," Kerik said.
Hoekstra explained ISIS was expanding its reach to include an area that was surrounding Israel, calling it a "a serious threat to the nation-state of Israel."