President Barack Obama plans to begin laying out his strategy for defeating Islamic State militants expanding their grip in Iraq and Syria.
He'll outline his evolving tactics when he meets with congressional leaders from both parties at the White House on Tuesday and then delivers a speech on Wednesday on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Lawmakers said in advance that they would like the president to give specifics.
The president should target command and control centres and oil refineries controlled by insurgents within Syria, suggested Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who sits on both the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees.
Rubio, claiming that Obama has committed “presidential malpractice in his foreign policy,” said he is eager to hear directly what Obama “should have said months, weeks ago.”
“First, clearly explain to the American people what our national security interests are in the region” and spell out the risk that Islamic State militants pose “for us, short-term and long-term, and why they matter,” Rubio told CBS' “Face the Nation.”
“Clearly, he's put together a coalition of the willing - we have heard that before - to tackle this problem,” said House Intelligence Republican Committee Chairman Mike Rogers told CNN. “That's good.”
Speaking Monday on MSNBC, Rogers said, “I think in Congress we need to expose all members to the level of threat that those of us on the national security committees see every day.” He said Washington political leaders should not give the Islamic militants the “time and space” to grow into a more formidable force, which he said happened with the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on the same CNN program that Obama needs to spell out both the diplomatic and military components of his strategy.
“Time's a-wasting, because we have now said that we're going to go on the offensive. And it's time for America to project power and strength,” Feinstein said.
Obama sparked criticism, most of it from Republicans, for his remark last week that “we don't have a strategy yet” for confronting Islamic extremists gaining both land and followers in the Middle East.
His upcoming sessions with lawmakers and the speech to the nation are clearly an attempt to try to show he now has an evolving strategy in place.
“The next phase is now to start going on some offense,” Obama said in an interview with NBC's “Meet the Press.”
“But this is not going to be an announcement about US ground troops,” he added in the session taped Saturday and broadcast Sunday. The operations will be “similar to the kinds of counterterrorism campaigns” the US has waged in the past, Obama said. “In Syria, the boots on the ground have to be Syrian.”
At the recent NATO summit in Wales, the US and nine allies agreed to take on the militants because of the threat they pose to member countries.
In addition to laying claim to territory, the militants have targeted religious and ethnic minority groups and threatened US personnel and interests in the region.
At Obama's direction, the US military has conducted more than 130 airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq in the past month. In retaliation, the group recently beheaded two American journalists it had been holding hostage in Syria, where the organisation also operates.
But the president has repeated his opposition to sending in US ground troops to engage in direct combat with the militants, who have laid claim to large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. Lawmakers have pressed Obama, so far unsuccessfully, to expand the airstrikes further. -
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