Respected MSNBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel isn’t particularly impressed with President Barack Obama’s plan to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Obama reiterated his four-point plan to defeat ISIS in an Oval Office address Sunday night. After the speech, Engel took on each point in the president’s plan in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, noting that the plan was “really the same strategy that hasn’t been working for the last several years.”
After conceding that Obama has been “quite strong” in pursuing the first point of his strategy, hunting down terrorists, Engel explained how the other three planks of the president’s strategy haven’t been going so well.
On point two, training and equipping Iraqi and Syrian forces on the ground, Engel said that part of the plan has been a “complete debacle.” On point three, closing the Turkish border so ISIS cannot freely travel back and forth, Engel noted the border remains wide open, so that part of the plan is “not working particularly well.” And on the final point, working towards a political solution to the Syrian conflict, Engel expressed skepticism and noted it was “very much a work in progress.”
“The course of treatment that he laid out for this sick patient with cancer with no immediate cure does not seem like it is an incredibly strong prescription,” Engel concluded.
Watch the video for yourself.