White House: No major shift in ISIL strategy for US

by **Ponee** Mon Nov 16, 2015 10:18 am

President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser said on Sunday the U.S. would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with France in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris, but ruled out sending large numbers of combat troops to Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State.

“We do not believe that there is a solution to the challenge in Syria or Iraq that involves significant numbers of U.S. combat troops going in,” Ben Rhodes said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I think what you are going to see is continued intensification of the air campaign,” he added in an interview from Turkey, where the president is attending an economic summit of world leaders, who are now focusing in large part on Friday’s attacks in Paris.

Also appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Rhodes said “all the signs point to” the Islamic State, which has claimed credit for the attacks.

“That’s a determination that the French authorities have made,” he said. “Certainly, our information supports the strong likelihood that ISIL was involved in this.”
“We absolutely agree that this was an act of war by ISIL,” he added. “Anytime you have this type of indiscriminate targeting of innocent civilians, we see that as an act of war by a terrorist group.”

And on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rhodes made clear the administration was planning no major shift in strategy in fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
“Clearly, there’s going to have to be an intensification of our efforts,” he said. “What we’ve been able to do is look at what has worked in the application of the strategy, what hasn’t.”

Also on Fox, Rhodes said, the administration does not intend to halt its plan to take in over the next year up to 10,000 of the millions of Syrians displaced by the civil war there.

“We have very robust vetting procedures for those refugees,” he said.
But Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), appearing on the same Fox show, disputed Rhodes’ assertion.

“What he just said about the robust vetting of refugees is untrue,” King said. “There’s virtually no vetting because there are no databases in Syria. There are no government records. We don’t know who these people are.”

Asked by Fox host Chris Wallace whether the president should then suspend the program, King said, “He should absolutely suspend it unless they can show 100 percent that a person is not involved with ISIS.”

By
THEODORIC MEYER

http://www.politico....isil-strategy/?