The White House contends Obama isn’t backtracking on his commitment to keep US troops out of Syria because the new military presence is narrow.
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“He [Obama] is not only the president of the United States”. He has authorized fewer than 50 commandos to deploy into northern Syria. Our troops must protect themselves at all costs, but the legal limbo of who they can engage creates more ambiguity than certainty.
Acknowledging the programme’s failures and facing challenges to its influence in Syria as Russian Federation began a bombing campaign against rebels and ISIL targets in late September, the USA has looked to refocus its attention to the country’s east, and support rebel units attacking ISIL’s heartland.
“It’s a fairly major shift to put boots on the ground in Syria”, said Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for the foreign policy program at Brookings Institution, in an interview with The Daily Signal.
Talking about the British government decision to drop plans to carry out strikes against ISIL in Syria, Butler said that the British people are more pragmatic than Americans and geographically they are closer to where all the action is happening hence, they are not happy as a lot of money and wasted effort has been spent to try and conduct these wars.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, said he was troubled with Obama’s “incrementalism” in Syria.
But the Central Intelligence Agency, in collaboration with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, recently broadened the number of groups to which it is clandestinely delivers weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles, one source familiar with the support operation said.
Reuters first reported that the administration was sending forces to Syria to serve as advisers.
Russian Federation has said that President Assad may be ready to deal, and why not?
Last week, Dunford met with his top commanders during a stop in Iraq, and told them to broaden their thinking and map out new ways the U.S.-led coalition can put more pressure on the Islamic State fighters. But each step is on a small scale, so as to reassure Americans that Obama isn’t plunging their country into another large, open-ended conflict. But one official acknowledged it added to a building sense of momentum in Syria.
But in terms of destroying ISIS outright – the supreme US objective – Wood said that 50 Special Operations personnel won’t do much in the short term. “We hope so. But that’s not the reason we’re doing it”.
“We are going to continue to innovate to build up what works”, he told reporters flying with him to Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska, on the first leg of a nine-day trip to the Asia-Pacific region.
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He added that the US will soon beef up its air campaign by sending F-15 fighter planes to a Turkish air base, giving the U.S.an opportunity to accelerate airstrikes. It could also set up momentum for Obama’s visit to Turkey in November, where he will attend the G20 summit along with Putin. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence, I take each and every military escalation seriously, and this announcement deserves careful examination on both policy and legal grounds.
