“We have spent billions on homeland security. You can always find more you can spend funds on, but the fact of the matter is, I think we have done a pretty good job. And I don’t know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of defeating the efforts of al Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans. You have got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right. I think we did. I think we did a lot right.

And I think part of what we did right was to take the fight to the enemy, to treat this as a war, not a law enforcement problem, which is the way these kinds of things had been treated before we arrived. To actively and aggressively go after the state sponsors of terror, as we did, for example, in Afghanistan and Iraq. To aggressively go after those places where the terrorists might be able to lay their hands on that deadly technology they’d like to use in that next attack.

I think we got it right. I can’t say it’s perfect. Obviously, you can always look back and find things you’d like to do differently or do better. But on the broad overall strategic sweep of what we did, what we set out as our objectives, the strategy we pursued to get there, I think we have done a pretty good job.”