A defensive President Barack Obama on Monday repeatedly insisted the US has a “comprehensive” strategy to defeat the Islamic State group amid increasingly pointed questions about the leadership of his administration in the wake of Friday’s terrorist attacks across Paris.
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“The concerns about potential ISIL attacks in the West have been there for over a year now and they come through periodically”, Obama told reporters at a Group of 20 summit in Turkey on Monday, using an acronym for Islamic State (IS, also formerly known as ISIS). “But…it is going to take time”. He said most of his critics are simply talking as if theyre tough and offering no real ideas.
Obama, who held an informal coffee-table summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, said there were still differences between the two leaders over the future of President Bashar al-Assad “who we do not believe has a role in Syria’s future because of his brutal rule”.
“If we had 50,000 troops in Syria, and a terrorist attack was generated in Yemen, what would we do then?”
While Mr. Obama did not single out any of his critics by name, some Republican presidential candidates have called for sending USA forces into Syria.
“The strategy that we are putting forward is the strategy that ultimately is going to work”, Obama said.
“We have agreed to take further important steps to cut off the financing that terrorists rely on, to counter the extremist ideology of the terrorist propaganda and to better protect ourselves from the threat of foreign fighters by sharing intelligence and stopping them from traveling”.
Obama described Friday’s killing of more than 120 people in Paris, claimed by the radical Sunni militant group, as an attack on the civilized world and said the United States would work with France to hunt down those responsible.
The president also said the attacks in Paris should not stop US plans to accept refugees from Syria, many of whom are trying to flee the horrors of the Islamic State.
“None of this is a substitute”, Cameron said, “for the next urgent need of all: to find a political solution that brings peace to Syria and enables the millions of refugees to return home”.
In his remarks in Turkey, Obama said Republicans should follow the example of former President George W. Bush in not treating the fight against terrorism as a war on Muslims.
The two-day summit brought Obama and other world leaders just 500 kilometers from Syria where a four-and-a-half-year conflict transformed ISIL into a global security threat and spawned Europe’s largest migration flow since World War II.
He didn’t specify if he’d meet Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin together or separately. The US was expanding its intelligence sharing with the French and helping them identify targets, according to American officials. “What terrorism is about is trying to instill terror and fear into the hearts of people”.
“There are going to be setbacks, including tragic setbacks, like what we saw in Paris, that, obviously, it was an outrageous attack against one of our closest allies, and, as the president said, against all of humanity”, said Rhodes.
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The Islamic State’s increasing focus on wider targets has raised questions about whether Obama underestimated the group. The president called the diplomacy “ambitious” but said the USA remains hopeful that the process will help end the war. Some of the other G20 goals this year included working on efforts to speed up worldwide economic growth, with a specific focus on talking about the way China has played a part due to its own economic slowdown, and the leaders reiterated their goal to raise the G20 GDP by two percent by 2018.
