The Obama administration’s Wednesday announcement that it would to tweak its strategy for fighting the Islamic State, instead of radically changing it, amounts to a stay-the-the-course approach that did nothing quell critics, some of whom say Obama is now on a path toward a major foreign policy disaster.
Still smarting from a torrent of criticism after admitting in public there is no “complete strategy” for helping Iraqi forces recruit Sunni fighters, President Obama let top White House and Pentagon officials announce the addition of 450 more U.S. military advisers in Iraq and explain their mission.
Those aides went out of their way to stress that the move is not the radical overhaul that many wanted, and instead called it an “adjustment” or “refinement” to Obama’s plan to help Iraqis take the fight to the Islamic State themselves.
“What we do have is a belief that we should regularly review our approach and make adjustments and refinements based on what we’re seeing on the ground, and that’s what we’ve been doing the last several months, including after ISIL moved into Ramadi,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters on a conference call Wednesday.
The Department of Defense issued a statement saying the decision to send more troops in an advisory role “does not represent a change in mission, but rather adds another location for DoD to conduct similar activities in more areas in Iraq.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest used the word “expand” or “expansion” several times to describe the escalation of the current train, advise and assist Iraq mission.
But for Republicans looking for major changes, a slight expansion of what they see as a failed policy was a terrible response to the news that the Islamic State has taken over the Iraqi city of Ramadi, and several areas in Syria. Many say it’s time to send more special forces to call in airstrikes against key areas controlled by the Islamic State, and said absent more dramatic moves, Obama is on the way to losing the war.
“I think the president set the right goal [to degrade and destroy the Islamic State] but his policies are failing,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told the Washington Examiner. “And it’s not a Pentagon problem, it’s his problem. He’s at a crossroads in his presidency like Bush was with Iraq — either adjust his policies or ISIL gets stronger and one day has the ability to hurt us here at home.”
“So he’s going to have to do what Bush did and that’s change policies because what he’s doing is not working and if he doesn’t make a substantial adjustment then the likelihood of getting hit here at home and ISIL getting stronger over there is almost a certainty,” Graham added.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Wednesday called the administration’s decision to send additional trainers to Iraqi “a step in the right direction, but as the president admitted the other day, he has no strategy to win.”
“It’s clear that our training mission alone has not been enough to slow down the spread of ISIL,” Boehner said. “What’s the overarching strategy that the United States and our allies are going to employ to go out and stop the spread of this horrible disease?”
Boehner was referring to Obama’s statement that there is no “complete strategy” for helping Iraq, a comment some GOP lawmakers used to complain that the broader strategy to fighting the extremist group is incomplete as well.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., went so far as to say Obama was using some of the same tactics that led to the U.S. failure in Vietnam decades earlier.
Obama, whom voters swept into office at least in part because of his promise to pull U.S. troops out of the Middle East and end two wars there, is keenly aware that people are still deeply divided about sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. And he received some criticism from the Left that even the addition of a few hundred more military advisers is going too far.
Ramzy Mardini, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, said sending more U.S. military personnel to Iraq is the wrong approach.
“The White House continues to misdiagnose the problem — treating ISIS as the cause and not the symptom,” he said, arguing that the Iraqi government needs to do far more to reach out to Sunnis and unite the country. “If there is no serious engagement on the political side, you’re unlikely to see much sustained victories on the battlefield.”
The more the U.S. sends personnel to Iraq, “the greater probability that they will end up being attacked by insurgents,” he said.
Nicole Duran contributed to this report.
