The White House defended President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy Monday against a flood of criticism that his prime-time address to the nation was weak, while an analysis said the U.S. needs a complete overhaul of its war on terrorism.
From the president’s “stay the course” message in the face of the latest terrorist attacks to complaints that he veered into a partisan plea for gun control, even to questions about why he chose to stand at a podium in the Oval Office rather than deliver the address from the more presidential pose of sitting behind his desk, critics said Mr. Obama’s speech failed to inspire confidence in his strategy or reassure nervous Americans about the safety of the homeland.
“What I was hoping to hear was the elements of a new strategy that was actually focused on defeating ISIS, and not a list of what had been done, which was incomplete and was a containment strategy,” said House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, using a common acronym for the Islamic State, the Salafist extremist group based in Iraq and Syria that apparently inspired last week’s massacre in San Bernardino, California.
Sen. Roy Blunt, Missouri Republican, urged Mr. Obama Monday “to refocus his efforts on defending the nation rather than doubling down on policies that clearly haven’t worked.”
Even former presidential adviser David Axelrod, who was seen leaving the West Wing on Monday morning, offered little more in the way of praise for Mr. Obama’s speech than to say it was “solid.”
White House aides said the administration is working on a variety of fronts to bolster its counterterrorism campaign against the Islamic State, including intensifying coalition airstrikes on the militant group in Iraq and Syria and encouraging high-tech companies to block the use of “dark apps” that allow extremists to plot attacks online without detection.
White House communications director Jen Psaki said Republican presidential candidates are talking tough but aren’t offering solutions to wage the war against the extremists more effectively.
“Republican candidates saying the president doesn’t have a plan, the president is wrong,” she said on MSNBC. “What we’re not hearing from them is ideas. Do they think terrorists should be able to get guns if they can’t get on a plane? Do they think that we shouldn’t authorize [military force]? Do they think we should put 50,000 boots on the ground? Those are all questions we’d love to hear more from the Republican candidates on.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the criticism was coming “mostly from people who are political opponents of the president” and that the president’s inner circle felt the prime-time address achieved its goals, an assessment he reached “just looking at the news coverage.”
“We feel good about the results. I think the president does, too,” Mr. Earnest said. “The president’s political opponents are not going to be satisfied, and that’s OK.”
But the debate over the administration’s counterterrorism strategy persists with calls for a comprehensive overhaul. A study released Monday said the U.S. should engage in a dramatic revamping of the post-9/11 global war on terrorism, saying major gains during recent years by al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and South Asia indicate the “extremists are no longer on the run and arguably are winning.”
“Al Qaeda, in particular, has expanded its control and influence in the past few years, with affiliates and linked groups present in more than 20 countries,” states the study, authored by a team of nine high-level national security and counterterrorism analysts through the political center-right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
Although the San Bernardino attack is dominating the headlines, the study asserts that the Nov. 13 coordinated terrorist assault by Islamic State followers in Paris provided clear “proof that the West is losing the fight against terrorist organizations” bent on carrying out international operations against Europe and the United States.
The study slams the Obama administration for misjudging the evolving external operations threat posed by local groups that have pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and the Islamic State — also known as ISIS and ISIL — and asserts that “victory requires recognition that the enemy is a global and interconnected system.”
“The current analytical framework the Obama administration and its surrogates have promulgated insists on understanding al Qaeda as a ’core’ disconnected from ’affiliates,’ giving intellectual support to our retreat,” the authors wrote. “Through this framework, the U.S. government has justified ignoring the growing threat from so-called ’local’ insurgencies by defining the ’real’ threat to the U.S. as emanating solely from a terrorist core in South Asia and downplaying the command and control exercised by al Qaeda’s leadership over its branches.”
At the same time, however, the study suggests that the core strategic approach that Mr. Obama and his advisers have promoted in recent years — that of trying to work with and build up the capacity of local partners to fight the Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates on the ground — is not misguided.
“The United States’ first option cannot be large-scale invasions in places where al Qaeda and its affiliates operate,” the document says. “That approach would allow the enemy to impose high costs on the U.S. and its allies in return for only partial successes in individual theaters. The best military course of action to pursue against the extremists is a counterinsurgency. This strategy depends heavily on supporting efforts from our partners and allies, which will in most cases make the deployment of large numbers of American military forces into combat both unnecessary and inadvisable.”
The president held a security meeting Monday at the White House in which terrorism was on the agenda but not the main focus. Mr. Obama met with ambassadors from 20 countries comprising the U.N. Security Council to discuss a wide range of global challenges, including “human rights, infectious diseases and international terrorism,” the White House said.
Also, the administration said it would soon unveil a revised national alert system, the successor to the Bush administration’s color-coded warning system, to reflect a “new phase” of the terrorism threat.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said his department will move to a system that includes an intermediate terrorism threat. The much-maligned color-coded terrorism alert system was phased out in 2011 and replaced by the two-tier National Terror Advisory System, which has never been used.
Mr. Earnest said the revised system will “make it easier to communicate with the public about what threats have been perceived, what steps are being taken to mitigate” terrorist threats.
After the third Oval Office address of Mr. Obama’s presidency, he faced criticism even for his stagecraft decision to stand at a podium in front of the famous Resolute desk, rather than be seated behind it, as he did in his two previous addresses.
Mr. Earnest said George W. Bush also used a podium on occasion in the Oval Office, and he conceded that the decision was based partly on perceptions. He compared it to television correspondents reporting on the White House lawn while standing.
“We’ve reached the same conclusion that many of your colleagues in the television industry have found,” he told reporters. “When they go to the South Lawn, they call it ’stand up’ for a reason.”
Whether standing or sitting, Mr. Obama was facing calls for a new posture on terrorism.
“I’ll be frank: I don’t feel any safer,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, California Republican. “I wanted to hear from the president that there would be a change in policy and change in strategy. I also wanted to see a change in attitude from him.”
• Tom Howell Jr. and Andrea Noble contributed to this report.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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