Washington: President Barack Obama will address the country Wednesday to explain to the nation what our game plan is going forward” in the fight against ISIS. President Barack Obama appeared in a TV interview talking about a phased campaign that US will launch to rein in the ISIS.
Obama said the moderator Chuck Todd that the US has a capability to deal with the serious threat posed by the Islamic State and over a course of months, the US will manage to blunt, degrade and defeat the extremists.
Over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL. We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We’re going to shrink the territory that they control. And ultimately we’re going to defeat ’em, said Obama.
While agreeing to the fact that the US can’t defeat ISIS with air strikes alone, Obama said that it was not possible to “deal with this problem by having the United States serially occupy various countries all around the Middle East”.
According to Obama’s remarks, his administration is gearing up to carry out a systematic campaign, the first phase of which involves making ground assessment and targeted airstrikes in Iraq to protect “American personnel, our embassies, our consulates”.
The next phase, said Obama will be “to start going on some offense”, only after an Iraqi government was in place during which the US will train, advise and support the Iraqi military, Kurdish fighters and possibly members of Sunni tribes.
Obama said, we have to get an Iraqi government in place. And I’m optimistic that next week, we should be able to get that done. According to the New York Times, the third and the final phase is apparently the toughest and most politically controversial phase of the operation as it will involve destroying the extremists in their den in Syria. This might take three years according to senior administration officials, reported the New York Times
Bureau Report
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