US Republicans exploring a White House run next year are pounding away at US President Barack Obama’s strategy for stopping Islamic State militants, but — wary of US citizens’ war fatigue — are so far providing few specifics on what they would do differently.
The renewed threat posed by Islamic militants is emerging as the top foreign policy issue, and Obama’s submission to US Congress on Wednesday of a draft authorization of military force against the group intensified the debate.
With foreign fighters flocking to Syria and Iraq to join the group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the issue has landed in the laps of the dozen or so Republicans who are seriously considering a run for their party’s presidential nomination.
So far they are describing what they see as gaps in Obama’s strategy, which has relied on air strikes, saying he needs to be more aggressive in challenging “radical Islam.”
“With regard to ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham], we have not seen a seriousness of purpose. We have seen instead photo-op foreign policy: a bomb here, a missile there,” Republican US Senator Ted Cruz told the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank.
No one has revealed a strategy.
“What the president needs to come up with is a strategy, militarily, to defeat them, which I think involves, for example a ... ground force made up of Arab armies, combined with US special forces,” US Senator Marco Rubio said.
A Pew Research Center poll last month found that for the first time in five years, defending the US from terrorism was the top issue for US residents, with 76 percent calling it the main policy challenge.
Only Cruz and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have raised the possibility of sending US ground troops to the region. Others speak far more vaguely.
The issue is particularly tricky for former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose brother, former US president George W. Bush, started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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