John McCain rips Obama administration over losses in Middle East

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain ripped into President Obama’s policy for combating the Islamic State, asserting in a hearing Thursday that the extremists’ takeover of the Iraqi city of Ramadi this week “highlights the shortcomings of the administration’s indecisive policy, inadequate commitment and incoherent strategy.”

The Senate hearing, featuring a number of private experts on the reason, was one of the first public sessions on Capitol Hill following a string of embarrassing reverses in the battle against the jihadi Islamic State movement, which seized Ramadi, captured the historic Syria city of Palmyra and appears to have regained the battlefield initiative against the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

“The loss of Ramadi, once the symbol of Iraqis working together with brave young Americans in uniform to defeat al Qaeda, must be recognized as a significant defeat,” Mr. McCain said.

The Arizona Republican’s comments come a day after administration officials announced that they were responding to the Islamic State takeover of Ramadi — the largest city in Iraq’s western Anbar Province — with a plan to send 1,000 antitank missile systems to Iraqi forces scrambling to organize a counterattack on the city.

Speaking on background, a senior State Department official on Wednesday acknowledged that the Islamic State’s advance represented a “very serious situation.”

“Nobody is kidding themselves about what [Islamic State] was able to pull off,” the official said, adding that U.S. advisers are working overtime with Iraqi forces to “consolidate the units that retreated from Ramadi, and we think over the last 96 hours there has been a consolidation which is positive.”

But Mr. McCain said recent events demand a “complete overhaul” of Mr. Obama’s approach.

“The Obama administration seems unwilling or unable to grasp the strategic significance” of the advance by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, he said. “As ISIL terrorists ransacked Ramadi, by the way, the Pentagon’s news page ran a story with the headline, ’strategy to defeat ISIL is working.’”

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, California Republican, said the fall of Palmyra, site of some of the world’s best-preserved Greek and Roman ruins, only underscores the dangers posed by the Islamic State’s recent successes.

“How is it that ISIS is seizing territory on two fronts, ten months after U.S. air strikes began?” Mr. Royce said in a statement Wednesday night. “It’s dreadfully obvious that we aren’t working well enough to defeat ISIS and protect the people of Palmyra and its precious relics of our shared history.”