The advertised objective of President Barack Obama’s pre-vacation news conference Thursday was to highlight gains in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria with the Pentagon as a backdrop. The Journal reports it was part of a larger settlement between the US and Iranian governments “to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch”.
Advertisement
But the USA will insist on certain “bottom-lines” if it is to increase its cooperation with Russian Federation, which will include Syrian government restraint that has so far been elusive, Obama said. “We didn’t here and we won’t in the future”. “Some of you may recall we announced these payments in January, many months ago”.
“It wasn’t a secret”. Obama said, struggling to disguise his contempt. “If Mr. Trump is suggesting that there is a conspiracy theory that is propagated across the country, including in places like Texas where typically it is not Democrats who are in charge of voting booths, that’s ridiculous”.
Obama was responding to the revelation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that $400 million of the settlement was delivered by plane to Iran in cash.
“Thats why the United States and countries around the world pledged more than Dollars 2 billion in new funds to help Iraqis stabilise and rebuild their communities”, he said. The one piece of news was that the money was paid in cash, he said, and that is because the United States had a strict sanctions regime against Iran at the time that prohibited wire transfers or normal bank relationships. “They will lose them, and we’ll keep hitting them and pushing them back and driving them out until they do”.
Still, the payment has revived allegations from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and other critics of the Iran nuclear deal. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, out Thursday afternoon shortly after Obama spoke, gave Clinton a 9-percentage-point lead, 47 to 38 percent, against Trump.
“ISIL has not had a major successful offensive operation in either Syria or Iraq in a full year”, President Obama said Thursday in comments assessing USA efforts against the extremist group.
“In fact, they are inevitably going to be defeated”, he forecast, predicting that the terrorists…
Italy, just across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya, has said it’s prepared to allow the U.S.to use its bases or airspace to launch strikes against IS in Libya.
Asked if he were anxious about Trump getting classified information, Obama said, “And I’m not going to go into details of the nature of the security briefings that both candidates receive”.
In Syria, where the United States is exploring options to cooperate with Russian Federation militarily to defeat Islamic State, Obama said Russia’s and Syria’s most recent actions have raised doubts about their commitment to a pause in the conflict. “And do everything I can to help them succeed”, he said.
“We have got a number of Americans being held around the world and I meet with their families and it is is heartbreaking”.
Advertisement
The session comes as the US bombs targets in and around the Libyan city of Sirte, in a notable expansion of the U.S.-led coalition’s military mission against IS. Three strikes have been conducted since Monday.
