State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf was a guest on Hardball with Chris Matthews last night to talk about the Islamic State. Here’s what she had to say:

MATTHEWS: “If I were ISIS, I wouldn’t be afraid right now. I would figure there’s no existential threat to these people. They can keep finding places where they can hold executions and putting the camera work together, getting their props ready and killing people for show and nothing we do right now seems to be directed at stopping this.”

HARF: “I think there is few stages here. Right now what we are doing is trying to take their leaders and their fighters off the battlefield in Iraq and in Syria. That’s really where they —”

MATTHEWS: “Are we killing enough of them?”

HARF: “We’re killing a lot of them and we’re gonna keep killing more of them, so are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians, they are in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the longer term, medium and longer term, to go after the root causes that leads to join these groups whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether it’s —”

MATTHEWS: “We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime. Or 50 lifetimes. There’s always going to be poor people; there’s always going to be poor Muslims, and as long as there’s poor Muslims the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join.”