Sen. John McCain said Wednesday that the Obama administration knows that Islamic State has a chemical weapons factory in Syria but that "I'm not sure they know where it is."
"We have information, public information, that they have established a chemical weapons factory there in Raqqah," the Arizona Republican told Wolf Blitzer on
CNN. McCain is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"That brings us back to this root cause, which is our failure to take out Raqqah and Mosul, because as long as they have a geographic base to export terrorism, then they're going to do it," he said. "It goes back to our failure to address the issue seriously of the Islamic State having a geographic base."
Besides not knowing specifically where the plant is, the administration would have difficulty taking it out with airstrikes because ISIS terrorists are "capable of digging underground and protecting themselves," McCain said.
"It's not so easy to take it out from the air. Air power alone does not win conflicts.
"You're going to have to have boots on the ground," he continued. "Some of those boots, like 10,000 out of a 100,000-person military, would have to be American boots on the ground.
"You're going to have to go in on the ground to take them out."
He told Blitzer that the remaining soldiers would have to come from Arab countries, ranging from Turkey to Saudi Arabia — among others.
"Right now, that's very difficult because there is a failure and a vacuum of American leadership," McCain said. "If there was American leadership, we could lead these other countries into what is clearly their interest and that is to destroy ISIS at their headquarters."
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