House wants answers on Obama's ISIS strategy
By Charles Hoskinson | June 14, 2015 | 12:01 am
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, questions Defense Secretary Ashton Carter as he testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 18,2015. (AP Photo/Molly Riley)
House lawmakers, concerned that President Obama's tweaks to his strategy against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria won't reverse the extremist group's recent gains, are putting pressure on the administration to do more.
The House Armed Services Committee has summoned Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey to a hearing Wednesday to explain not just what they plan to do about the Islamic State, which many experts say has held its own against a nearly year-long effort to defeat it, but also about larger problems in the Middle East, such as the threat posed by Iran and the possibility of a region-wide sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, is among Obama's most vocal critics, saying the president is not taking the Islamic State threat seriously.
"He's kind of like blaming everybody but himself, which is not a way to get the problem solved," Thornberry said.
News last month that the Sunni Muslim extremist group had seized the key Iraqi city of Ramadi and several areas in Syria, as well as having taken complete control of the border between the two countries, has fueled calls for a change in U.S. strategy.
Though the U.S.-led coalition bombing campaign has hurt the Islamic State in significant ways, it has not led to a strategic reversal of the group's position, particularly as it expands into new territories, such as Libya.
But Obama has strongly resisted what many experts and lawmakers say is necessary and some Iraqis openly want the United States to do: send ground combat troops back to Iraq. Instead, the administration has offered a ramped-up training program for Iraqi troops bolstered by the addition of 450 U.S. advisers to the more than 3,000 already in the country, combined with pressuring Baghdad to do more on its own.
The administration also is planning direct supplies of weapons and training to Sunni Arab tribes and Kurdish peshmerga forces, two groups which still view the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad with suspicion.
"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 [the Islamic State] moved into Ramadi," Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, told reporters on a conference call Wednesday.
Republicans in Congress, however, want the return of ground troops on the table. Thornberry noted that the performance of Iraqi troops, which has been heavily criticized by Carter and other U.S. officials, could improve if U.S. trainers were able to continue their work all the way to the battlefield, which they currently are barred from doing by administration policy.
"We have tied our own hands, and that has resulted in us being less effective than we could be," he said.
During his first visit to Washington last week, Salim al-Jabouri, speaker of Iraq's Parliament and the nation's top Sunni Arab political leader, said Iraqis — especially Sunnis — need to see Americans fighting "side-by-side" with them against the Islamic State.
"They need the help of their friends to be victorious over Daesh. And you are the closest friend to us," al-Jabouri said, using the Arabic acronym for the group.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with al-Jabouri on Friday, and the White House later released a statement announcing an additional $9 million in humanitarian assistance for Iraq, bringing the U.S. total in humanitarian assistance to $416 million since 2014.
Concerns over strategy have stalled congressional action on Obama's request for a formal authorization of the military campaign against the Islamic State, with Republicans refusing to move on the issue until the president agrees to take a tougher approach, including consideration of the use of U.S. ground troops in combat.
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