While other world leaders are calling the attacks in Paris an act of war and, in the case of France, stepping up their strikes on the Islamic State, President Obama said on Monday that the U.S. strategy does not need to change because of the “setback.”
Analysts said this attitude represents an overconfidence in a U.S. strategy that hasn’t changed, even as the Islamic State adjusts its strategy to include recent foreign attacks in Paris, Beirut and on a Russian airliner over Egypt.
By not taking these changes into account, Obama’s speech at the G20 meeting in Turkey came off as “almost tone deaf,” said Justin Johnson, a senior analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
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“Why isn’t Obama at least willing to say ‘let’s look at the strategy again, let’s double check to make sure this strategy is the right one,'” Johnson said. “The fact that he’s not even willing to say that is concerning and could reflect an over confidence or a lack of understanding of just how important the situation is.”
Despite experts, GOP lawmakers, presidential candidates and even members of his own party suggesting or demanding that a revision of U.S. strategy may be in order, Obama doubled down in the speech on his current plan and said the country must stay the course of targeting leadership and infrastructure and working with local ground forces to defeat the Islamic State.
Sending in U.S. ground forces would be a “mistake,” Obama said, seeming to indicate that the U.S. could not sustain a ground force in the multiple hot beds where terrorist activity could brew.
“Let’s assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria, what happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya perhaps? Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else in North Africa or in Southeast Asia?” Obama said. “So a strategy has to be one that can be sustained.”
Obama said his strategy is based on what will keep Americans safe, not on scoring political points or making America look tough, because he’s seen the toll of sending in ground troops first hand when he’s visited wounded warriors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
But the way the Islamic State does battle is changing. The terrorist group launched a sophisticated string of six attacks on Friday across Paris that killed 129 and injured more than 350, some critically. Among the attackers was at least one French national, according to reports. More than 40 people died the day prior during a double suicide attack in Beirut. And earlier in the month, a Russian passenger jet was brought down in Egypt from what intelligence suggests was a bomb planted by the Islamic State.
Johnson said these incidents represent a “significant new phase” in the Islamic State’s capabilities.
“They’re changing what they’re doing, maybe the U.S. and its allies need to at least ask the question of if we need to rethink how we’re fighting back,” he said.
Johnson pointed to President George W. Bush’s radical revision of the U.S. strategy in Iraq when the war was at a low point. Bush took “great political risk” in firing his defense secretary, replacing commanders on the ground and launching the surge that eventually led to success in Iraq, Johnson said.
Michael O’Hanlon, a national security analyst with the Brookings Institution, is among those who said it’s time for the U.S. to step up its campaign against the Islamic State. Still, he said he hadn’t expected to see any change in U.S. force structure decisions in the wake of the Paris attacks.
“I don’t see much movement in U.S. strategy, or much hope in it either,” O’Hanlon said.
