President Obama acknowledged Sunday that his administration misjudged the danger from the rising Islamic State, while House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said the result is that U.S. officials may have “no choice” but to send troops back to the Middle East.
“Maybe we can get enough of these forces trained and get them on the battlefield, but somebody’s boots have to be there,” Mr. Boehner said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
If Iraqi troops can’t be trained in time to fight the Islamic State militants, he said, “We have no choice. These are barbarians. They intend to kill us, and if we don’t destroy them first, we’re going to pay the price.”
The comments from Mr. Obama in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” came as his most extensive to date on how the Islamic State and other terrorist groups managed to regroup and gain ground while U.S. troops were being pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” Mr. Obama said, according to an excerpt released in advance of the show.
He also blamed a lack of will from Iraqi security forces, saying that U.S. intelligence services failed to recognize that the troops in Baghdad “did not have the incentive or the capacity to hold ground against an aggressive adversary.”
Even so, Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken rejected suggestions that large numbers of U.S. troops may need to return to Iraq, saying the fight against the Islamic State is “totally different” from the war on terror conducted by the Bush administration.
“What we’re doing is totally different than the last decade,” Mr. Blinken said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We’re not sending hundreds of thousands of American troops back into Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else. We’re not going to be spending trillions of American dollars.”
Mr. Blinken, who made the rounds on Sunday news shows to discuss the administration’s attack on terrorist forces in Syria, said local forces will be doing the fighting, not U.S. troops.
“What we’re doing is supporting local forces with some of our unique assets: air power, training and equipment, assisting them, intelligence,” Mr. Blinken said. “They will be doing the fighting on the ground. We can’t want it more than they do.”
“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace pointed out that the administration has already sent at least 1,600 troops back to Iraq, but Mr. Blinken said that’s a far cry from the major military offensive launched by President George W. Bush.
President Obama announced a year ago in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly that U.S. troops had left Iraq “having achieved its mission of dismantling the core of al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11.”
Mr. Blinken said the president wasn’t wrong because, “We’ve said from day one that there would be groups that would emerge in other parts of the world.”
“We’ve been relentless in going after them,” Mr. Blinken said. “What we’re not going to do is fall into the al Qaeda trap of sending hundreds of thousands of Americans back. That’s exactly what they want. They want to bog us down, tie us down, bleed us. We’re going to be smarter.”
Mr. Boehner said he was skeptical that the president’s approach of airstrikes and minimal troop deployments would be enough to defeat the Islamic State, often referred to as ISIS or ISIL.
“If the goal is to destroy ISIS, as the president says it is, I don’t believe the strategy that he outlined will accomplish that,” Mr. Boehner said. “At the end of the day, I think it’s going to take more than airstrikes to drive them out of there.”
Two Senate Democrats, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Sen. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut, called on the president to send a resolution to Congress for debate on the use of force. Mr. Boehner said he would call the Congress back before November if the president were to do so.
“I think the reason we need to have a debate is so we can get a better explanation as to what the endgame is in Syria,” Mr. Murphy said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Really, in the end, … the check on a war without end is a Congress speaking for the American people who can put an end date on an authorization for military force or put a limitation so that you can’t use ground troops,” he said.
Ret. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the former Joint Chiefs chairman, warned against giving the enemy too much information about the U.S. strategy.
“I think when you start putting limitations on your strategy, especially in public, [because] that’s beneficial to your adversary. I think we do that too much in this country,” Gen. Myers said on “State of the Union.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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