“Slamming the doors in their faces would be a betrayal of our values”, Obama said. “It reminds us that it will not be enough to take on ISIL in Iraq and Syria alone”.
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“We have the right strategy, and we’re going to see it through”, Obama said. In fact, a growing number of states are refusing to accept the refugees.
Feinstein said she doesn’t believe administration officials’ claim that while ISIS has an ambition to target the US, they don’t have the capability.
He said taking that step “would be a mistake” and would not work unless the USA was committed to being a permanent occupying force in the region. Just last week Donald Trump told a crowd in Iowa that he “would bomb the shit out of ISIS” to a thunderous applause. “It’s in more than a dozen countries now”, Feinstein said.
“The more we shrink that territory, the less they can pretend that they are somehow a functioning state”, he said in the interview.
Obama made clear in a sometimes testy solo news conference in Turkey on Monday that not even the bloody ISIS rampage through Paris, which opened an alarming new chapter in the war on terror, will prompt him to abandon a pillar of his worldview: the insistence that America must avoid intractable Middle East land wars. “The president has no strategy”.
He cited USA efforts to help Kurds retake Sinjar Mountain in Iraq and the recent killing of an ISIS leader in Libya as examples of his strategy working.
“We’re working closely with our French partners as they pursue their investigations and track down suspects”. In my opinion, it was just a continuation of his consistent rhetoric, backpedaling and not truly offering an active strategy to eliminate the threat of ISIS that joins with allies who are seeking United States leadership.
The Vienna talks have seen the world powers find common ground on the need for a ceasefire in Syria, UN-brokered peace talks and a political transition.
“That’s not American”, he said.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, meanwhile, called for the terrorist organization to be “completely destroyed”. “ISIS is the most violent Islamic terrorist group in the world today”.
Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley mentioned that we can not think in traditional terms of warfare, “This is not the conflict where we send in the 3rd division of the Marines…it does not serve our purposes as well as Special Ops, better intelligence and being more proactive”.
Republican critics have offered few concrete alternatives, he said, with the exceptions of sending in ground forces or establishing no-fly zones, moves that open up a “whole set of questions that have to be answered”.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Hours after the attack in Paris, the Charles de Gaulle French Naval fleet was readying to leave, set to to arrive on the Persian Gulf on November 18 to fight ISIS. You can join the discussion on our Ohio Politics Facebook page.
“That allows us to reduce the flow of foreign fighters, which over time will lessen the numbers of terrorists who can potentially carry out bad acts like they did in Paris”. If this means committing ground and air forces to wipe them off the planet, so be it. We will never have peace until we show them we mean business!
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A febrile mood back home in Washington has only been exacerbated this week by a specific Isis threat against the U.S. capital city and an unrelated security scare that shut down much of downtown Washington DC on Monday morning. The leader needs to be taken out, then trickle down the hierarchy.
