The White House on Monday defended President Obama’s Sunday night speech by saying the brief address wasn’t aimed at unveiling new strategies to fight the Islamic State, and instead was meant to explain what he’s been doing to fight the terrorist group.
“[T]he purpose of the speech last night was to speak directly to the American people, not to lay out new policy,” White House Communications Director Jen Psaki told MSNBC on Monday. “He wanted to deliver the speech last night to speak directly about what we’re doing and what we can do moving forward.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest added that Obama knows he won’t placate his harshest critics, but wanted to tell Americans what he’s doing to protect them.
“The president’s political opponents are not going to be satisfied; and that’s OK,” Earnest told reporters on Monday, saying that Republicans hoping to succeed him in the White House have a different agenda when talking about current events. “It’s disappointing sometimes when it takes place in the context of national security issues. But if we spent a lot of time worried or focused on that, we’d be focused on the wrong things.”
Earnest and Psaki reiterated Obama’s call for Congress to block people on the “no-fly” list from buying guns, to reinstate the lapsed ban on assault rifles and to grant new authorization for use of force specifically against the Islamic State.
“Congress can act to prevent terrorists the watch list from having access to guns,” Psaki said. “If you can’t get on a plane, why should you have access to a gun? There’s several steps Congress can take, and that’s something that we’ll continue to push them on in the coming days. Including those running for president.”
Earnest added that he doesn’t understand why any politician would advocate for allowing extremists to exploit the nation’s gun laws to gain access to powerful weapons to kill Americans.
Earnest said the president is not resigned to events such as last week’s massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., becoming some sort of “new norm” in America, but acknowledged from the beginning that the fight against the Islamic State will be long.
“The president’s determined to ensure that that’s not the case,” Earnest said. But “when the president first ordered military action against ISIL … he acknowledged that this would be a process that would take some time, principally because the president was not going to commit U.S. ground troops to a sustained ground combat operation inside of Iraq and in Syria.”
The administration expects to turn over the reins to new leaders with the fight against the Islamic State continuing, Earnest said.
“I would not envision a scenario where the United States has completed the mission of destroying ISIL in the next 13 months,” he said. “But I would expect we will make progress in degrading” it.
