CNN Newsroom: Interview with Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO)

Interview

"Well, Jim, it always has to be a realistic possibility, because the United States does not leave people behind. We will always, always endeavor to bring people home, whether that's through direct action raid, hostage rescue missions, like our Special Operations Forces do, whether it's through diplomacy, or intelligence, and working through our partners as well.

In a situation like this, the best avenue is either diplomacy, or working through the Israelis. You know, we never want to take anything off the table, we never say that our Special Operations Forces will not go do something. But in a dense urban terrain like this, that's highly saturated with enemy forces, you have Israeli Forces working, you have airstrikes, you have missiles, you have rockets going off. It's very, very hard to safely insert a Special Operations team to conduct a hostage rescue mission. So by diplomacy and working through our Israeli partners are probably the best two avenues at this point.

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Well, I'm not ruling it out either. You know, it has to be an option on the table, I'm just illustrating the high risk of doing that, and the points of failure, if you were to do it directly. And that there are there are lower risks to working diplomatically, and working through our partners and actually getting that done.

But again, we never take anything off the table, and we will do everything possible to get our people home.

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Well, I think surging additional forces as a show of force and strength to Iran and Hezbollah that says that if they want to escalate this, if they want to take advantage of this crisis that Israel is experiencing right now and try to spark a broader regional war, that that would be a massive mistake, that we have the capability and our allies have the capability to make that a massive mistake.

So certainly a show of force is no doubt the primary purpose of the surge of this type, but we have to be ready. We have to make sure that we're protecting our own people, our own assets. You know, we have thousands of troops permanently stationed in places throughout the Middle East.

Hamas has called for, you know, regional and even worldwide strikes against Americans and American assets and forces. So we are upping our posture and making sure we're doing all the right things and this administration is doing exactly what we need to be doing.

We're being aggressive, but we're also being intentional and looking at the various risks.

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I think so. When you look at the barbarism that occurred last weekend, the acts that have been well-documented on this show and others, you don't negotiate with those people. They must be eliminated, period.

But the president made a really interesting point here. He pointed out one of the greatest lessons learned of our 20 years of the global war on terror. And frankly, some of the biggest mistakes that America made over the last 20 years, you can't eliminate a threat like this only with military power, you have to make sure that you're pushing in humanitarian aid, that you're being very careful that you're not overreacting, if you're taking innocent civilians out of harm's way. That is actually in many instances, just as important as how you respond militarily, sometimes even more important to make sure that we are not creating more blowback to our partners into the United States into Israel.

So we have to make sure that you have a military response, we have to make sure that we're doing it in accordance with our values, and making sure that humanitarian resources are there as well.

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Thank you.

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