“We can not wait for a political transition”. Nor can we allow fear to divide us.
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Since the Paris attacks, Americans now identify terrorism as the most important problem facing the country, Reuters-Ipsos polling shows.
“If Francois Hollande wants to turn up the dial or the volume – however much he wants to do it, either a little bit or a lot – he nearly certainly has to do that with the willing cooperation of the United States”, Shurkin said.
Speaking at a joint news conference with Hollande, Obama cited in particular Europe’s resistance to sharing information on airline passengers.
“The longer ISIL is allowed to grow in Syria, the greater the threat it will pose”, Cameron wrote in a letter to MPs ahead of a speech to parliament, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group. ISIS “cannot be tolerated”. It must be destroyed. “He committed to not bombing them once we’ve provided that”, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on RTL after accompanying Hollande to Moscow.
“You helped us win our independence, we helped the French to break free from fascism”, said Mr Obama, as usual forgetting to emphasize the crucial role played by the USSR in the liberation of the continent. “Assad can not be the future of his people”, Fabius said. It’s the same madness that has slaughtered the innocent from Nigeria to the Sinai, from Lebanon to Iraq.
But while Milbank complained about Obama’s more measured response to the issues, fellow Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” program on MSNBC said that he had a different reaction entirely to Obama’s appearance, calling it “entirely appropriate”.
This was their first meeting after the November 13 Paris attacks that killed 130 people.
“After the recent IS attacks, Paris and Moscow are closer together now in their perceptions of IS as the top long-term priority in Syria, regardless of what happens to Assad”.
Putin also said Russian Federation would keep cooperating with the United States and its partners to fight Islamic State in Syria, but that cooperation will be in jeopardy if there are any repeats of the shooting down of the jet.
“Our positions are the same”, Putin said. “But for now that is not enough to cleanse Syria of rebels and terrorists and to protect Russians from possible terrorist attacks”.
Hollande, who spent just a few hours in Washington as he was making his way across the globe to meet with counterparts, said France now had a “relentless determination to fight terrorism everywhere and anywhere” and would “scale up our strikes” against the Islamic State in Syria and in Iraq.
The French do not possess anything like the military capability of the United States, but since the Paris attacks they have been hitting ISIS as hard as they can in its Syrian stronghold of Raqqa. “That would be extremely damaging”, Hollande said.
“We will not give in”. “This is what we want to do – we want to gather all countries, all those who are willing to find and to implement a political solution in Syria”.
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