That was one of the key themes of Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney’s Headliner lecture today in Asheville.
The general offered the John Locke Foundation and its guests ideas for winning the war against Islamic extremism:
It’s this nexus of terror and nuclear weapons that is so dangerous to us. We cannot ignore it. We must hold those nation-states to a higher degree of accountability than we have in the past. Right or wrong, we don’t have any choice.
What do I mean by that? I mean we want to tell these … nation-states that if one nuclear weapon goes off in the United States, then we’re holding them accountable.
But we’ll give them an option to get off our target list. By being accountable, I mean 15 minutes later after the first one goes here, we will strike them.
McInerney also said of the worldwide conflict, “There’s no way we can lose this fight except if we don’t have the will to defend ourselves as a nation.”
