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Obama Defends His Strategy on ISIS Obama Defends His Strategy on ISIS
(about 5 hours later)
ANTALYA, Turkey — President Obama declared on Monday that his strategy for defeating the Islamic State is working despite last week’s horrific attacks in Paris, forcefully rejecting calls for escalating the use of military force in the Middle East or turning away Syrian refugees at home. ANTALYA, Turkey — Time after time, the question was essentially the same: Why isn’t your strategy against the Islamic State working?
At a sometimes tense news conference at the end of an international summit meeting here, Mr. Obama said he would intensify targeted airstrikes and assistance to local ground forces in Syria and Iraq, but it will take time to cripple the terrorist group. He dismissed critics who faulted his approach, accusing them of trying to profit politically from the episode. And time after time, President Obama pushed back, trying to navigate a narrow path between expressing outrage at the “terrible and sickening” attacks in Paris and standing by an approach that he said would eventually succeed if given enough time.
“We have the right strategy and we’re going to see it through,” Mr. Obama told reporters before heading to the Philippines and Malaysia for summit meetings there. He said he planned to intensify his current approach but not fundamentally alter it. “What I do not do is take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough or make me look tough.” In moments of crisis, when the public feels afraid, presidents often find ways of tapping into popular emotion and channeling it — or at least trying to satisfy it with expressions of resolve and determination. But Churchillian statements are not Mr. Obama’s style, and as he faced deep skepticism at the news conference he held here on Monday about the war on the Islamic State, he chose explanation over exhortation.
Mr. Obama grew especially animated in rebuffing suggestions by some Republican presidential candidates, governors and lawmakers that the United States should block entry of Syrian refugees to prevent terrorists from slipping into the country. His plan to cripple the Islamic State through airstrikes and assistance to local forces was making progress, the president asserted, even if the carnage on the streets of the French capital seemed to belie it. And while Mr. Obama vowed “an intensification” of the tactics he had already approved, he vigorously rejected the idea that he should go further, dismissing critics who were playing “political games” or offering shallow solutions.
“The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism; they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife,” Mr. Obama said. He added: “We do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.” “We have the right strategy and we’re going to see it through,” Mr. Obama told reporters as he wrapped up a summit meeting with world leaders before flying to the Philippines. He has consistently said that it would take time, he noted, and he would not change that strategy simply because of domestic pressure. “What I do not do is take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough or make me look tough.”
Without naming him, Mr. Obama singled out a comment by former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, one of the Republicans seeking to succeed him, for suggesting the United States focus special attention on Christian refugees. “That’s shameful,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not American. It’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.” If he did not gratify a public hunger for retribution, or at least the language of it, the president gambled that his position was actually closer to the broader American reluctance to get entangled in another land war in the Middle East. Sending large numbers of American ground troops to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, would repeat what he sees as the error of the Iraq invasion of 2003 without solving the problem at hand.
Mr. Obama sounded weary and defensive as he repeatedly rejected criticism of his yearlong strategy in Syria and Iraq to combat the Islamic State, also called ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. Wrapping up a whirlwind 48 hours of diplomacy in this Turkish resort community on the Mediterranean Sea, the president seemed frustrated by being second-guessed. “That would be a mistake, 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,” Mr. Obama said. Victory over terrorist groups, he said, requires local populations to reject the ideology of extremism “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”
Pressed several times to explain his resistance to a broader war against the Islamic State, Mr. Obama twice chided reporters for asking the same question in slightly different ways. Moreover, he added that sending significant numbers of ground forces into Syria would set an untenable precedent. “Let’s assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria,” he said. “What happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya perhaps? Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else in North Africa or in Southeast Asia?”
Each time, he appeared to take pains to navigate a narrow path — expressing his personal outrage at the “terrible and sickening” Paris attacks by calling the Islamic State “the face of evil,” while at the same time standing firm on a strategy that he acknowledged will take time to produce the results sought by the public. His message drew fire back in Washington, where Republicans and other critics saw it as evidence of an out-of-touch fecklessness. “Unfortunately, the president’s press conference today confirmed that he is unwilling to acknowledge his failed policies or re-evaluate his strategy moving forward,” Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, said.
Mr. Obama’s aides have been making that case on his behalf since the attacks on Friday. But Monday’s exchange with reporters was the first time the president directly confronted the criticism that his policies failed to stop the carnage in the city and it seemed to weigh on him. Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, described the president’s news conference as “excuse-laden and defensive,” proving he had no resolve or strategy to defeat the Islamic State. “Never before have I seen an American president project such weakness on the global stage,” he said.
Republicans quickly pounced on the remarks as defeatist. “With his excuse-laden and defensive press conference, President Obama removed any and all doubt that he lacks the resolve or a strategy to defeat and destroy ISIS,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Never before have I seen an American president project such weakness on the global stage.” To his critics, Mr. Obama has never taken the Islamic State seriously enough, once likening offshoot terrorist groups like it as “a J.V. team” compared with the original varsity Al Qaeda, a term he dropped once Islamic State fighters seized swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Just last week, a day before the attacks that killed at least 129 in Paris, Mr. Obama said “we have contained them,” referring to the Islamic State’s control of territory in Syria and Iraq.
Mr. Obama said the United States did not receive any concrete indications in advance of the Paris attacks that could have provided early warning to prevent them. “There were no specific mentions of this particular attack that would give us a sense of something that we could provide French authorities, for example, or act on ourselves,” he said. At his news conference here, Mr. Obama sounded weary as he repeatedly rejected criticism of his yearlong strategy. Wrapping up 48 hours of diplomacy in this Turkish resort community on the Mediterranean Sea, the president seemed frustrated by second-guessing and twice chided reporters for asking the same question in slightly different ways.
He said there have been concerns about the danger of Islamic State attacks in the West for more than a year. But he added that “some of it is extraordinarily vague and unspecific, and there’s no clear timetable.” He denied underestimating the Islamic State, saying that the group’s attacks have not been particularly sophisticated. “If you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people,” he said. “That’s one of the challenges of terrorism. It’s not their sophistication or the particular weaponry that they possess. But it is the ideology they carry with them and their willingness to die.”
Mr. Obama announced a new agreement between the United States and France to share more intelligence information, saying that new arrangement would “allow our personnel to pass threat information, including on ISIL, to our French partners even more quickly and more often.” And he said that he had not hesitated to use force, citing his approval of the special forces raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden and his first-term decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, since withdrawn. But he said he would not be pressured into “posing” as a tough president to satisfy his critics by doing things that would not make the situation better.
He said the United States was seeking to persuade other allies to engage more deeply in the fight against the Islamic State, and he said the American effort to find more partners on the ground in Syria and Iraq was accelerating.
But he said large numbers of American troops on the ground would repeat what he sees as the mistake of the Iraq invasion of 2003 and would not help solve the terrorism problem around the globe.
“That would be a mistake, 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,” Mr. Obama said. Victory over terrorist groups, he said, requires local populations to push back “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”
Moreover, he added that sending large-scale ground forces into Syria would set an untenable precedent. “Let’s assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria,” he said. “What happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya perhaps? Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else in North Africa or in Southeast Asia?”
Mr. Obama rejected the idea that the administration had underestimated the capabilities of the Islamic State, saying that the group’s attacks have not been particularly sophisticated.
“If you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s one of the challenges of terrorism. It’s not their sophistication or the particular weaponry that they possess. But it is the ideology they carry with them and their willingness to die.”
And he insisted that he has not shown any hesitation to act militarily, citing his approval of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and his first-term decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. But he said he would not be pressured into “posing” as a tough president by doing things that will not make the situation better to satisfy his critics.
“Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said. “Because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough.”“Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said. “Because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough.”
In a subdued tone, he attributed his reluctance to the costs of war. “Maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed,” he said, referring to the military hospital near Washington. “And I see a 25-year-old kid that is paralyzed or has lost his limbs. And some of those are people I’ve ordered into battle.”
Mr. Obama grew especially animated about Republican demands that the United States block entry of Syrian refugees to prevent terrorists from slipping into the country. “We do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism,” he said.
Without naming him, Mr. Obama singled out former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, one of the Republicans seeking to succeed him, for suggesting the United States focus special attention on Christian refugees as opposed to Muslims. “That’s shameful,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not American. It’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
Mr. Obama also announced a new agreement between the United States and France to share more intelligence information, saying that arrangement would “allow our personnel to pass threat information, including on ISIL, to our French partners even more quickly and more often.”
In the end, he said, the strategy will choke off the Islamic State’s financing, cut off its supply lines and reinforcements and make it harder to hold territory. Along with a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war that provided a vacuum for the Islamic State to fill, “that ultimately is going to be what’s going to make a difference,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “and it’s going to take some time.”