President Barack Obama addressed the nation Sunday night and offered no new initiatives for defeating ISIS, despite new polling data showing that Americans are unhappy with his current strategy.
President Obama delivered a rare speech from the Oval Office where he reiterated his strategy for defeating ISIS.
“The strategy that we are using now — air strikes, special forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory, and it won’t require us sending a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil,” Obama said Sunday.
Obama’s speech did not announce any new strategy or tactics or commitments for defeating radical Islam, despite the recent terrorist attack in San Bernardino California that left 14 people dead.
A CNN/ORC poll found that Americans are unhappy with the way that the President is handling war on ISIS. The poll also found that 68 percent of Americans think the U.S. military response hasn’t been aggressive enough. A majority of Americans, 60 percent, think that the America’s fight against ISIS is going poorly.
When the poll broke it down by party affiliation, it found that 52 percent of Democrats think that America’s military response isn’t aggressive enough. Sixty-six percent percent of independents, and 90 percent of Republicans, also think it is not aggressive enough.
Obama reiterated Sunday night that the United States will not get in a ground war in Iraq or Syria, claiming that ISIS wants a ground war in order to recruit new members. “Let me now say a word about what we should not do,” Obama said. “We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want.”
“They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield. ISIL fighters were part of the insurgency that we faced in Iraq. But they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops and draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits.”
However, a recent poll shows that Americans want troops on the ground fighting ISIS. A majority of Americans, 53 percent, think that the U.S. should send ground troops to Iraq or Syria to fight ISIS.
The CNN/ORC poll was conducted by telephone between November 27-December 1. There were 1,020 participants and the margin of error is 3 percentage points.
Source: Breitbart
