The “far enemy” was now going after ISIL. Yesterday, French aircraft bombed ISIL’s quasi-capital city of Raqqa in Syria. Soon afterwards, ISIS overran most of western Iraq and renamed itself Islamic State. It will not working. We don’t have until the next election to deal with ISIL. France is now a victim twice of this organization.
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Does anyone think they’re not contemplating a similar attack in NY or Chicago or Los Angeles – or Peoria? That disrupts the region. “There are more of them”. Paul, where dozens of young Somali Muslim men and women-U.S. citizens-have traveled to Syria, Somalia and elsewhere to join Islamic terror groups like Al-Shabaab and ISIS.
We do not know at this stage to which group this particular set of attackers claimed adherence. It had a major attack in Beirut, 40 people killed… they are on the March. “And here’s what they would do, they would back out”.
France’s President Jacques Hollande has declared that the nation is at war after a series of terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday left 132 people dead and hundreds wounded. Nohemi Gonzales was just 20 years old.
Let’s bring in Senator Lindsey Graham.
But you might wonder about Obama moving the goalposts on what our ultimate strategy is.
Non-jihadist Sunni Syrians have already come to resent the USA and its European allies, and with good reason.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum agreed, saying that “under no circumstances” should the United States take Syrian refugees. The organisation originally known as “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” underwent several name changes, to “Islamic State in Iraq” in 2006; then to “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” – ISIS for short – in 2013, and finally to simply “Islamic State” in 2014. White House officials ruled out sending combat ground troops into Syria, and made no indication it was rethinking a no-fly-zones.
Overall the extremists remain in control of about a third of Iraq and Syria.
Mr Erdogan’s enthusiasm for attacking Kurdish insurgents in Turkey and northern Iraq has turned out to be much stronger than his desire to attack IS, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. So, too, was the failure to stabilise Iraq after the invasion in 2003. This time, it must not allow IS to win the propaganda war through complacency and inaction. You will never win the war from the air.
James Stavridis, the retired Navy admiral who served as NATO’s top commander in Europe from 2009 to 2013, said North Atlantic Treaty Organisation should play a military role now.
TAPPER: And Egypt and the Turks… Will the West continue to aim to remove Assad as Syria’s leader and support a new government willing to take on the fight against ISIS themselves? That’s the problem with Obama’s strategy. “ISIL does not represent Islam, it is not representative in any way of the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of Muslims”.
I hope the French will invoke Article V. They should. The world should be at war with ISIL.
But when Obama first told the American public a year ago about his strategy, he said it was to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS.
GRAHAM: Here’s what I would do. But you do have to question priorities that take police officers off the streets – surely they have a greater chance of picking up a plot than a data analyst sitting at a desk in Cheltenham. And Mr. Trump’s position regarding Syria has always been delusional. Both Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Comey and Department of Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson admit there is no way to properly vet all of them. I have a plan. Help us understand how the Islamic State different from al-Qaeda? We must anticipate these threats before they happen. Fight them in their backyard, not our backyard.
In a Cruz administration we would be using overhwleming air power and the Kurds as our boots on the ground.
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Further, the senator said that she’s not a military expert, but she believes far more than 50 Special Forces troops are needed on the ground to defeat the threat. We will see the world’s response in coming days and weeks.
