White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday rejected House Speaker John Boehner’s suggestion that President Obama should re-write his plan to fight the Islamic State, and instead blamed Boehner for failing to take up the plan Obama sent Congress in February.
Earlier in the day, Boehner said that in light of the Islamic State’s takeover of the Iraqi city of Ramadi, Obama needs to send up a tougher authorization for use of military force, or AUMF, for fighting the terrorist group. The first one mostly calls for airstrikes, and allows ground forces in very limited circumstances.
But Earnest turned it around on Boehner and blamed the leader for failing to even consider Obama’s plan.
“He’s the speaker of the House complaining about the president not being able to move something through Congress,” Earnest said incredulously on Tuesday.
The Obama administration has said it doesn’t need the AUMF, and Earnest repeated that line today. But he also said it would be disappointing if Congress didn’t take leadership on the issue.
Earnest said Congress has been “AWOL” when it comes to the AUMF. “At some point, somebody in Congress needs to assume responsibility for this and not just complain about it all the time,” Earnest added. “All we’ve seen from Boehner is excuse after excuse for why he hasn’t done his job.”
Boehner has said for months now that it’s the job of the White House to lead on an AUMF. Boehner’s call for a new proposal is the closest he’s come to saying Obama’s plan from February is dead, and is a clear sign that Republicans would vote against Obama’s proposal if it were to come up for a vote.
Even as he blamed Boehner for making excuses, Earnest dodged questions about whether the fall of the Iraq city of Ramadi is a sign that Obama’s Islamic State strategy has failed. Earnest rejected that assertion and said that overall, and pointed out examples of successful battles that he said show Obama’s plan “has been effective in combatting” the Islamic State.
Many conservatives are saying the fall of Ramadi is not a simple “setback,” as the White House has claimed, and is instead a sign that Obama’s strategy is not getting the results it needs to get.
Earnest reiterated that the effort to degrade and destroy the Islamic State would be a long slog with wins and losses, along the way. He urged critics to look at the totality of the struggle before deeming Obama’s plan a failure, and again called it a “setback.”
“Are we going to light our hair on fire every time we have a setback?” he replied to one question.
Obama meets with his national security team daily to evaluate and tweak his Islamic State strategy, Earnest said, to look at what works and where and how progress is and isn’t achieved. He pointed to a meeting of Obama, Vice President Biden and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter planned for later this afternoon as an example.
The barometer for success should be the maintenance of the 60-member coalition fighting the Islamic State and its ability to drive the terrorists out once-imperiled places such as the Syrian town of Kobani and Iraq’s Mt. Sinjar, Earnest said.
The Pentagon recently reported that since coalition forces began bombing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria last summer, 20 percent to 25 percent of territory in which the Islamic State previously operated is no longer a safe haven. That “is measurable progress,” Earnest said.
