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Obama on Islamic State: 'This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war'
While militant group does not pose a threat to the United States now, 'they can evolve,' president says
Dylan Stableford, Yahoo News
By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo News 5 hours ago
President Barack Obama says the threat posed by the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria is "serious," but the administration's strategy to defeat them will not involve U.S. ground troops.
“This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war,” Obama said in a wide-ranging interview with NBC's "Meet The Press" broadcast on Sunday. "The strategy both for Iraq and for Syria is that we will hunt down [IS] members and assets wherever they are. I will reserve the right to always protect the American people and go after folks who are trying to hurt us wherever they are."
But the deployment of U.S. troops, he said, would be a "profound mistake."
“Our goal should not be to think that we can occupy every country where there's a terrorist organization,” Obama continued. “Our goal has to be to partner more effectively with governments that are committed to pushing back against the kind of extremism that [IS] represents.”
Obama said he is planning to outline the U.S. strategy on IS — also known as ISIS and ISIL — in an address to the nation on Wednesday, a day before the 13th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
"This is not going to be an announcement about U.S. ground troops," Obama said. "What I'm going to be asking the American people to understand is, number one, this is a serious threat. Number two, we have the capacity to deal with it.”
On ABC's "This Week," Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz accused Obama of not "taking ISIS seriously," saying the United States should strongly consider military action against the Islamic extremists.
“What we ought to have is a directed, concerted, overwhelming campaign to take them out,” Cruz said. “The focus should be Iraq, but the real focus should be taking out ISIS. Within Syria, it should not be our objective to try and resolve the civil war.”
But Cruz and other lawmakers, including Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, say Obama needs to engage Congress before he does.
"We need to have an endgame," Rogers said on CNN's "State of The Union."
Obama said while they do not pose a threat to the United States now, "they can evolve." And while there is no “immediate intelligence” that indicates an IS attack on the United States, Obama said, the group has clearly "metastasized."
The militant group beheaded a pair of American journalists, broadcasting their executions in barbaric videos uploaded to YouTube. Obama said one of the challenges that the United States and its allies face is the militants' skill at gaining support in the Arab world through social media.
“One of the things we’ve seen about [IS] is they’re really good on social media,” the president said. “They understand how to message to disaffected youth throughout the Arab world and throughout the Sunni world what they’re doing.”
The president said his description of jihadist groups in the region as a "JV team" in January's New Yorker was not a reference to IS specifically.
"I've said regionally there were a whole series of organizations focused primarily locally and not the homeland," Obama said. "Because a lot of us when we think about terrorism, the model is Osama bin Laden and 9/11."
During the wide-ranging interview, Obama addressed other international issues affecting the United States, including the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
“What I've said, and I said this two months ago to our national security team, is we have to make this a national security priority,” he said. “We have to mobilize the international community, get resources in there.
“If we don't make that effort now, and this spreads not just through Africa but other parts of the world, there's the prospect then that the virus mutates,” the president added. “It becomes more easily transmittable. And then it could be a serious danger to the United States.”
Obama also defended his decision to delay any executive action on immigration, saying the border crisis — with thousands of unaccompanied children streaming into the United States from Mexico — changed his strategy.
"The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem," Obama said. "I want to spend some time, even as we're getting all our ducks in a row for the executive action, I also want to make sure that the public understands why we're doing this, why it's the right thing for the American people, why it's the right thing for the American economy."
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