Obama is in denial about ISIS say critics

There are 3,550 US military personnel authorized to serve in Iraq and soon 50 USA special operations forces will serve in northeastern Syria working with rebel groups fighting ISIS, according to military officials.

Obama used much of the press conference to strike back at his critics, sounding at times defensive and combative.

The president, who at times sounded combative, has come under intense scrutiny for commenting in an interview broadcast the day of the Paris killings that ISIS has been “contained”.

“Some of them seem to think that if I were just more bellicose in expressing what we are doing that that would make a difference, because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough”, he said. “We can not wait for the next attack on an ally or on American soil”.

He wanted to go down in history as a peacemaker, but he only created a world that 60,000 people now hold hostage. Others want to terminate plans to admit some Syrian refugees into the United States, saying the Islamic State might try to smuggle in terrorists that way.

“If they think their advisers are better than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [of military forces on the ground]”, the president said, “I want to meet them”. Using targeting information provided by the USA military, 10 French military aircraft dropped 20 bombs on an ISIS command center and training camp in Raqqa.

But Obama did announce that the United States would begin a new “streamlined” process of sharing intelligence with France. On Monday, he said the threat of terrorism is hard to approach because the enemy is willing to commit suicide during attacks. “There were no specific mentions of this particular attack that would give us a sense of something that we could provide French authorities, for example, or act on ourselves”, he said.

But the mission reflected only an incremental surge of existing strategy, which has focused on using air power to take out ISIS sites in Iraq and Syria.

Republican critics have offered few concrete alternatives, he said, with the exceptions of sending in ground forces or establishing no-fly zones, moves that open up a “whole set of questions that have to be answered”. GOP presidential hopeful candidate Gov Mike Huckabee says President Obama is in denial about the threat ISIS poses.

He claimed progress was being made in the diplomatic front with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, on securing a long political transition in Syria, but he added: “There are a number of ways that this diplomatic initiative would falter”.

He pointedly denied suggestions from the press that he had underestimated ISIS, and hadn’t done enough to root the group out of Iraq and Syria. “Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values”, the United States leader said.

Praising German chancellor Angela Merkel for showing compassion and leadership on the issue of refugees, Obama urged the world to remember the biggest victims of violence in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad were Muslims. At least one of the attackers in Paris carried a Syrian passport and has been identified as being associated with ISIS.

Republican opposition to accepting more refugees from Syria has become more strident since it emerged that a Syrian passport, bearing the name Ahmed Almuhamed, was found near the remains of a suicide bomber at Paris’ Stade de France on Friday night. As The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial Monday, “Mr. Obama’s every instinct has been to suggest that America will be safer if we stop provoking jihadists and treat them as common criminals”.