President Barack Obama took to the world stage Monday to share, among other things, his strategy for dealing with the Islamic State — which is to say, he announced he doesn’t have one. Speaking at the G7 summit in Germany, Obama said:
We do not yet have a complete strategy, because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well, about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place, and so the details of that are not yet worked out.
Many journalists were quick to point out that Obama said pretty much the same exact thing a year ago when the U.S. began its military campaign against the IS. The only difference was that then he blamed Congress:
We don’t have a strategy yet. Folks are getting a little further ahead of where we’re at.… The suggestions seems to have been we’re about to go full-scale on some elaborate strategy for defeating ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] and the suggestion has been we’ll start moving forward imminently and somehow with Congress still out of town, they’ll be left in the dark. That’s not going to happen.
Flashback Aug. 2014: Obama on ISIS: “We don’t have a strategy yet.”https://t.co/EUjVNO9Wkf https://t.co/MfUBsoUxoi
— David Nakamura (@DavidNakamura) June 8, 2015
Of the current strategy snafu, Obama said war plans were still being reviewed, and that he is waiting for a finalized strategy from defense officials. ”When a finalized plan is presented to me by the Pentagon, then I will share it with the American people,” he said.
Obama said the U.S. has “made significant progress in pushing back ISIL from areas in which they had occupied or disrupted local populations.” But Islamic State jihadis have captured key cities in the past month, including Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.
This report, by , was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
