CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta offered up a critique of President Barack Obama’s Monday comments on the U.S. does not have a “complete strategy” for combatting ISIS.
Appearing with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer Monday afternoon, Acosta called Obama’s remarks “curious,” adding to the host that they are “not coming at a very good time” about ten months after the U.S. started fighting the terror group directly.
WOLF BLITZER: The president’s critics clearly, they are likely to pounce on these comment that there is no complete strategy yet for training Iraqi forces. Why is there no complete strategy? The U.S. has been at war with ISIS for a long time.
JIM ACOSTA: That’s right Wolf, roughly ten months now and, keep in mind, the linchpin of the U.S. strategy for defeating ISIS is to conduct air strikes from the air and to train and arm Iraqi security forces on the ground. So if the cornerstone of this strategy is training Iraqi security forces, it is a curious comment to hear from the president “we don’t yet have a complete strategy,” because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis. As of right now, I suppose they don’t have those commitments and it’s interesting to point out, Wolf, later on in those comments the president said that while they do have the training capacity in Iraq, they don’t the trainees, essentially. I’m paraphrasing there but that’s what he said. So those two comments seem to be in contradiction. They want to ramp up the training over at the Pentagon.
The president says he’s waiting on a plan from the Pentagon to present to the american people to ramp up this training of Iraqis, but yet, at the same time he’s saying almost in the same breath that they don’t have the proper number of trainees. So this is obviously going to feed a lot of the criticism in Washington, and it obviously harkens back to what the president said last summer…when he said “we don’t have a strategy for dealing with isis in Syria.” That set off another round of criticism of the president’s strategy and it comes at a time, just remember last week, CNN/ORC poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans don’t approve of the president’s handling of the battle against ISIS. So all of this is not coming at a very good time for this president.
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