Obama rejects calls for change in anti-ISIL strategy

By Nick Gass

If there’s a good idea out there, then we’re going to do it,’ Obama said. ‘I don’t think I’ve shown a hesitation to act.’

President Barack Obama on Monday pushed back against calls for a dramatic rethink in the operation against the Islamic State, ruling out U.S. ground troops despite the “terrible and sickening setback” of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
Obama, speaking during a G-20 press conference in Antalya, Turkey, at times appeared to lose patience with repeated questions about whether he underestimated the threat of ISIL. Obama has been on the defensive after saying last week that Islamic State’s ground operation had largely been “contained,” a comment that came hours before the brutal attack in France that claimed the lives of more than 130 and injured hundreds more. He also infamously referred to the terrorist network in the past as the equivalent of a junior varsity team.

“It is not just my view but the view of my closest military and civilian advisers that that would be a mistake,” Obama said about the possibility of sending more U.S. ground troops. “Not because our military could not march into Mosul or Raqqa or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL but because we would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before, which is if you do not have local populations that are committing to inclusive governance and who are pushing back against ideological extremes, that they resurface, unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”

Slamming the door in the faces of refugees fleeing conflict in Syria would be a betrayal of our values.

In answering to criticism that he has not done enough to fight ISIL, Obama said he hasn’t seen a sound alternative. “If there’s a good idea out there, then we’re going to do it,” Obama said. “I don’t think I’ve shown a hesitation to act.”
At times, he responded to reporters’ repeated questions with mild irritation. “All right, this is another variation on the same question. And I guess, let me try it one last time,” he told one.
If “folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan,” Obama remarked, an implicit rebuke of some Republican presidential candidates. Ben Carson told reporters last week that he had better intelligence on the ground in Syria than the White House.
“If they think somehow that their advisers are better than my joint chiefs of staff or my generals on the ground, I want to meet them. And we can have that debate,” the president said, an apparent response to Carson’s claim, while also taking a dig at Donald Trump in the process. “What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region who are getting killed and to protect our allies and people like France. I’m too busy for that.”

I would anticipate that this is not the only operation ISIL has in the pipeline. … it’s not going to content itself with violence inside of the Syrian and Iraqi borders.

Obama went on to hammer other Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz, who have called for barring Muslim refugees from Syria from entering the United States, but still allowing displaced Christians to seek refuge. “That’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are,” Obama said. “We don’t have a religious test for our compassion.”
At the same time, Obama said, addressing other world leaders, “slamming the door” in the faces of refugees fleeing conflict in Syria “would be a betrayal of our values.”
“Our nations can welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety and ensure our own safety. We can and must do both,” the president said. However, he’s facing resistance from Republicans. As of Monday, governors in a number of states (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan and Texas) had closed their borders to Syrians seeking asylum.
With his comment last week that ISIL has been “contained” in the region, Obama noted on Monday that the group controls less territory than at this point last year. “And the more we shrink that territory, the less they can pretend that they are a functioning state and the more it becomes apparent that they are a network of killers that are brutalizing local populations,” he said. “We play into the ISIL narrative when we use routine military tactics that are designed to fight a state that is attacking another state. That’s not what’s going on here. These are killers with fantasies of glory who are very savvy when it comes to social media and are able to infiltrate the minds not just of Iraqis and Syrians but disaffected individuals around the world.”
The strategy against ISIL needs to be one “that can be sustained,” Obama said. Even if the U.S. were to send 50,000 troops to Syria, problems could crop up elsewhere, he remarked, in attempting to poke holes into the boots-on-the-ground argument. He also declared, “We have the right strategy and we’re gonna see it through.”
Reclaiming territory from ISIL will require an end to the Syrian civil war and an Iraqi effort to bridge differences between Sunnis and Shiites, Obama noted, in once again explaining that the fight would be a long one. In recent months, ISIL has struck civilian targets in Beirut, in Ankara, “and routinely in Iraq,” he said, and Paris is not alone in having been recently attacked by ISIL and ISIL-motivated terrorists.
Concurrently, French President François Hollande called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, telling a special session of Parliament in Versailles he would meet with Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin to join forces.
Striking a more forceful tone, Hollande argued that the “need to destroy Daesh” (an acronym that the group hates) concerns the international community as a whole, telling members that a strong coalition was needed to take out the group and that it was “not beyond reach.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in a press conference in Washington on Monday, called the attacks “a crime against civilization,” pledging that Justice Department attorneys are “working aggressively” in concert with the FBI, the French government and other international law enforcement agencies to collect and share intelligence and “to ensure that those responsible for this carnage are brought to justice.”
Earlier on Monday, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, warned that ISIL likely has more operations “in the pipeline.”
“It’s not a surprise this attack was carried out, from the standpoint of we did have strategic warning,” Brennan said at a Center for Strategic & International Studies forum in Washington. “We knew that these plans or plotting by ISIL was underway, looking at Europe in particular as a venue for carrying out these attacks.”
Friday’s attacks were not likely a “one-off event,” Brennan added.
“This is something that was deliberately and carefully planned over the course I think of several months,” he said. “I would anticipate that this is not the only operation ISIL has in the pipeline. … it’s not going to content itself with violence inside of the Syrian and Iraqi borders.”
The blunt comments from Brennan come as the Islamic State in a new video on Monday threatened all countries taking part in airstrikes against the terrorist group, specifically identifying Washington as a target.
“We say to the states that take part in the crusader campaign that, by God, you will have a day God willing, like France’s and by God, as we struck France in the center of its abode in Paris, then we swear that we will strike America at its center in Washington,” a man in the video said, according to Reuters, which could not verify the video’s authenticity.
Hours earlier, U.S. warplanes bombed 116 oil trucks in eastern Syria, in a new effort to cut off the group’s ability to transport crude oil that it has been producing in the country.