WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Sunday that it is time for the United States to “start going on some offense” to stop the advances of the Islamic State as he prepared to announce the next phase of the U.S. effort.
“There’s going to be a military element to it,” Obama said in an interview that aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And what I want people to understand, though, is that 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 them.”
Obama is set to meet with congressional leaders of both parties at the White House on Tuesday to discuss his strategy against the group and will deliver a speech to the public Wednesday.
Obama’s remarks on the security situation in the Middle East came as the U.S. military launched airstrikes late Saturday against the Islamic State, also known by the abbreviations ISIL and ISIS.
The group had been threatening to seize control of a second dam that provides electricity and irrigation across Iraq.
In the “Meet the Press” interview with moderator Chuck Todd, which was conducted Saturday at the White House, the president did not specify what stepped-up military efforts he had authorized. He emphasized that it would not include large numbers of U.S. combat troops on the ground.
“This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war,” he said. “What this is, is similar to the kinds of counterterrorism campaigns that we’ve been engaging in consistently over the last five, six, seven years. … We’re not looking at sending in 100,000 American troops.”
The interview marked the start of an effort by the White House to more clearly enunciate the administration’s strategy to deal with the Islamic State. The group has shown sophisticated military capabilities and employed extreme acts of brutality in gaining wide swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq.
Obama was criticized by members of Congress for saying nearly two weeks ago that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for increased action.
“They’re not a JV team,” Obama said of the Islamic State, after Todd reminded the president that he had referred to offshoots of al-Qaeda as akin to junior varsity terrorist groups in an interview with The New Yorker in January.
Obama told Todd he had been referring to other groups and said the Islamic State “has metastasized, has grown. And now we’re going to have to deal.”
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who had criticized Obama’s approach to the Islamic State as too cautious, said, “I want to congratulate the president. He is now on the offense.”
Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, praised Obama’s effort at the NATO summit last week to “put together a coalition” to oppose the militants. At the same time, the president “needs to engage Congress, the American people, on what exactly we’re going to do here.”
