Americans hoping for an it’s-us-or-them declaration about the ISIS terror army from Barack Obama were left unsatisfied on Monday as the U.S. president said he would continue to pursue a weaker strategy that leaves America’s military might on the shelf.
Calling Friday’s terror attacks in Paris a ‘terrible and sickening setback,’ Obama insisted his goal is to ‘reduce the flow of foreign fighters’ streaming into ISIS’s sphere of influence by addressing the root causes of the terror organization’s growth.
‘That’s what we did with al-Qaeda,’ he boasted.
But Obama dismissed the idea of a large-scale military strategy as misguided, saying Republicans who want to draw blood are not seeing the big picture.
We can retake territory, and as long as we leave our troops there we can hold it,’ he told reporters gathered in Turkey, ‘but that does not solve the underlying problem of eliminating the dynamics that are producing these violent extremist groups.’
Obama said he would continue to embrace that root-causes strategy ‘even though it does not offer the satisfaction, I guess, of a neat headline or an immediate resolution.’
Meanwhile, French President François Hollande announced at the same G20 summit that his nation will continue to pound ISIS positions in its home city of Raqqa, Syria.