| gulfnews.com | - |
Washington:
President Barack Obama said on Friday that he was open to supporting a
sustained effort to drive Sunnis militants out of Iraq if its leaders
form a more inclusive government, even as he vowed that the United
States had no intention of “being the ...
Obama: US won’t be ‘Iraqi air force’
We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq, he says
- By Michael D. Shear And Julie Hirschfeld Davis
- Published: 15:07 August 9, 2014
- Image Credit: AP
- Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take cover during airstrikes targeting Islamic State militants near the Khazer checkpoint outside of the city of Irbil in northern Iraq, Friday, Aug. 8, 2014. The Iraqi Air Force has been carrying out strikes against the militants, and for the first time on Friday, U.S. war planes also directly targeted the group, which controls large areas of Syria and Iraq.
Washington: President Barack Obama said on Friday that he was open to
supporting a sustained effort to drive Sunnis militants out of Iraq if
its leaders form a more inclusive government, even as he vowed that the
United States had no intention of “being the Iraqi air force.”
Obama spoke as he ordered American fighter pilots back into the skies
over Iraq, a decision that he said he reached after concluding that the
United States needed to protect the Kurdish regions in the north and
“bolster” an Iraqi leadership that was panicked in the face of advances
by the militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(Isil).
The president said he was confident that the Iraqi leaders understand
that “the cavalry is not coming to the rescue” with ground forces. But
he insisted that the United States has a “strategic interest in pushing
back” Isil. He suggested a potentially broader mission than the one he
described in Thursday’s White House address: to protect American
personnel and prevent mass killings of religious minorities.
“We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and
Iraq,” the president said in an hour-long interview with Thomas L.
Friedman, a New York Times columnist, as US planes and drones
began dropping bombs in Iraq. “But we can only do that if we know that
we have got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void.”
Lawmakers offered tempered support for the president’s actions in Iraq,
but he also drew criticism from Republicans and Democrats for a mission
that some called too limited and others worried would draw the United
States more deeply back into Iraq.
Obama offered his justifications for his latest use of military force
in Iraq while lamenting the outcome of a similar decision he made to
intervene militarily in Libya in 2011. He defended the desire to help
oust the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, with US air power, but
acknowledged that he had “underestimated” the chaos that would follow
after US forces left.
“So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question
‘Should we intervene militarily?’” Obama said. “Do we have an answer the
day after?”
In the case of the current fighting in Iraq, he suggested that the
outcome would be different from the chaos in Libya because efforts to
form a government that could help rebuild Iraqi society are moving
forward, albeit haltingly.
“They’ve now elected a president. They’ve elected a speaker of the
house,” Obama said. “The final step is to elect a prime minister and to
allow that prime minister to form a government.” He added that Iraqis
are “recognising that they have to make accommodations in order to hold
the country together.”
A day before leaving for a two-week vacation with his family on
Martha’s Vineyard, Obama discussed many of the most vexing problems that
his administration is confronting on the world stage.
The president rejected criticism that the military advances by Isil
could have been prevented if he had been willing months ago to provide
heavy armaments to the Syrian rebels who were fighting against the
extremists and the forces of President Bashar Al Assad in that country.
“It’s always been a fantasy,” he said, “this idea that we could provide
some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially
an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so
forth.”
Some of the criticism of Obama’s Iraq announcement came from his own
party. Democrats and the anti-war groups that make up a crucial part of
their political base said they were concerned about “mission creep,”
cautioning that their opposition to committing ground forces in Iraq was
resolute.
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