Sure, Mr. Speaker. I guess that is a pretty fundamental question. Why does bombing work in some cases?
Not to be overly pedantic, it is because it destroys the enemy, because if we have ISIS fighters trying to kill innocent people and if we can stop those ISIS fighters, if we can take out their supply lines, if we can undermine their ability to operate, that obviously provides a strategic advantage to our allies, who are then more able to effectively challenge ISIS, who are more able to fight them and, thus, weaken them.
If the implication is that no intervention has ever worked, I think that is clearly incorrect. We can look at plenty of examples of countries that were previously not democratic and that subsequently became democratic, including some examples from this region.
The situation in Afghanistan is of course complex and far from perfect. However, before western intervention, it was run by the Taliban. There were great human rights abuses and it was a state that was able to support terrorist activity around the world, most notably of course on September 11.
The defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the bringing in of a democracy, albeit imperfect, was a positive move, a positive development.
There are other examples, of course. As I said in my remarks, there are examples in which this has not gone as expected. However, there are also cases—arguably Syria for the first two years of the civil war—in which we chose not to intervene, and things did not get better. They continued to get much worse.