President Obama’s failure to meet a legal deadline for submitting a plan to destroy the Islamic State raises doubts about his “willingness and ability to do so,” according to House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“The president can — at any time — present the American people with his plan to destroy ISIS,” Ryan’s team wrote in a Thursday release. “But missing this week’s deadline just sheds more doubt on his willingness and ability to do so.”
Obama was supposed to provide Congress with the plan on Monday, under the terms of the legislation funding the military that passed in November. While the White House has said it is already embarking on a mission to destroy the terrorist group, Ryan recalled Obama’s statement that he doesn’t “have a complete strategy” and suggested that’s still the case.
Ryan’s team also pushed back against the idea that Congress is to blame for failing to pass a bill authorizing the use of military force against the Islamic State. “President Obama has repeatedly failed to present a real, comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS — and the current strategy of containment simply isn’t working,” the release said. “The commander-in-chief is uniquely responsible for charting a path to victory, which is necessary for a new AUMF.”
Defense Secretary Ash Carter and outlined the administration’s policy toward the Islamic State in a December congressional hearing, when he described how the military was expanding its list of targets for airstrikes and dispatching special forces operators to assist local forces in attacking Islamic State-held cities and carried out raids on terrorist leadership. “Our strategy is to find, identify, and enable forces that cannot only take territory but hold territory, because we know from the last 14 years that that’s the tricky part,” Carter told the House Armed Services Committee on Dec. 1. “They’re hard to find. They do exist, but they’re hard to find.”
