WASHINGTON – President Obama will outline to the nation Wednesday his policy to deal with the rising threat of Islamic State terrorists, who have horrified Americans with their video beheadings of two American journalists.
“What I’m going to be asking the American people to understand is, No. 1, this is a serious threat,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “No. 2, we have the capacity to deal with it.”
The interview marked the first for NBC’s Chuck Todd as new host of the storied Sunday talk show. Todd didn’t hold back pressing Obama on a wide range of issues: Why golf after an ISIS beheading? Are you exhausted? And when Obama said politics wasn’t the reason for delaying executive action on immigration until after the November election, Todd retorted: “It looks like election-year politics.”
Obama’s address will come on the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Obama said he’ll be asking Congress for more resources to deal with the threat from this new generation of terrorists.
The statements offer a different tone for the president, who once referred to ISIS and others as the “JV team” in a New Yorker interview, and his administration has since offered mixed messages on whether to contain or destroy the group. Obama back-pedaled on “Meet the Press,” saying he wasn’t referring specifically to ISIS as JV.
“Over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of (ISIS),” he said. “We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We’re going to shrink the territory that they control. And that’s how we’re going to defeat them.”
Obama just returned from a NATO summit in Wales, where the US is building a coalition of nine allies to deal with the Islamic State extremists, also referred to as ISIL or ISIS.
The US has launched more than 130 airstrikes on the jihadists in Iraq but had refrained from putting American combat troops on the ground or bombing Syria, the headquarters of the fast-moving group that has captured swaths of Iraq and Syria to build one Islamic “caliphate.” The US military expanded its airstrikes this weekend to the Haditha dam in western Iraq to prevent the extremists from controlling the water and power supply.
Obama, under criticism from lawmakers who want a stronger response to the terrorists with airstrikes in Syria, reiterated there will be no US boots on the ground to defeat the terrorists.
“This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war,” he said, stressing that the combat troops need to be the Iraqi and Kurdish forces and Syrian rebel troops for gains to be sustainable.
He also called on Sunni states to “step up,” calling out Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.
“They need to be involved,” Obama said. “This is their neighborhood. The dangers that are posed are more directed at them right now than they are us.”
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Sunday he hopes Obama’s address will call for airstrikes in Syria.
“I believe this president has committed presidential malpractice in his foreign policy,” Rubio said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” for his disengagement in the Middle East.
But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) congratulated the president for taking “overdue” steps to deal with ISIS and form a coalition of NATO allies.
“He is now on the offense,” Feinstein said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He has put together the coalition of nine nations. … I think that this is a major change in how ISIS is approached.”
ISIS terrorists have been on the march from Syria to Iraq, taking over communities, capturing military equipment and murdering members of minority groups.
Most Americans were first introduced to ISIS when the terrorists released a video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley last month and threatened the life of fellow journalist Steven Sotloff if the US kept up its airstrikes. The bloodthirsty extremists followed through with the murder of Sotloff last week.
Obama caught heat for not canceling his Martha’s Vineyard vacation in the midst of the horrifying events and hitting the golf course immediately after his statement to the nation about Foley’s murder.
“I should have anticipated the optics,” Obama admitted, noting part of his job is “the theater.”
Meantime, former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Obama should “spend less time on the golf course and more time thinking about ISIS and Ukraine and … immigration.”
Romney said Obama is fumbling on identifying threats and taking the steps to prevent bad things from happening.
“I think the president is really out of touch with reality when it comes to what’s happening in the world,” Romney said on “Fox News Sunday,” saying he’s “not running” for president in 2016.