Obama defends strategy on Islamic State

“The strategy that we are putting forward is the strategy that will ultimately work”, he insisted.

“I’m trying to figure out how do we get greater focus on success on the ground instead of these token efforts”, Thornberry said.

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes now claims that Obama meant the Islamic State had been contained “geographically” in Iraq and Syria.

But understand that one of the challenges we have in this situation is that if you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people.

Bay State Democrats slammed President Obama’s botched handling of the ISIS threat following bloody terror attacks in Paris – yet the president refused to send more American manpower to halt the radical group, calling additional boots on the ground a mistake.

“There will be an intensification of the strategy that we’ve put forward”, he said. “The strategy we are pursuing … that’s the strategy we are going to have to pursue”.

Finally, President Obama attempted to justify his position on supporting the bringing of Syrian immigrants into the United States.

“France is at war”, Hollande declared, indicating he would ask parliament to impose a three-month-long state of emergency.

What happens next? Bozell said after Obama complains about the media being too tough, many reporters would “head for the tall grass”.

For now, Obama isn’t shying away from confronting his critics head-on.

Even before the Paris attacks, Obama was under pressure from allies and his own administration to show progress in the campaign against the Islamic State. The group released a new video warning that Western countries launching airstrikes in Syria will suffer the same fate as France.

Now, part of the reason that it is important what we do in Iraq and Syria is that the narrative that ISIL developed of creating this caliphate makes it more attractive to potential recruits. And a containment strategy is not enough.

Obama said the effort will use all elements of power to take out the group: military, diplomatic, law enforcement and economic.

At least one perpetrator in the Paris attacks entered the European continent in a wave of migrants traveling in through Greece, according to French security officials.

Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley mentioned that we can not think in traditional terms of warfare, “This is not the conflict where we send in the 3rd division of the Marines…it does not serve our purposes as well as Special Ops, better intelligence and being more proactive”.

On that score, there is no shortage of input from GOP hawks. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday. “We need to be doing everything we can to protect against more attacks and protect our citizens”.

“Our military strategy is to ramp up air strikes against IS targets, strengthening of the Iraqi and Syrian forces fighting the IS, reducing their financial capabilities, taking out high value targets, and so on”.

True to his isolationist and libertarian leanings, the Kentucky senator said that Obama’s military approach to ISIS, which is mainly airstrikes, is unconstitutional.

“We would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before, which is if you do not have local populations that are committed” to helping combat extremism, Obama said, the terrorists “resurface, unless we are prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries”. In a way that certainly, we haven’t seen in seven years.