YOUR REACTION
Followers on our Facebook page reacted strongly to President Obama’s plan to deal with ISIS. Here’s some of the responses:
Will Drewing: His recommendation is exactly how our war on terror should have been fought from the beginning; with intelligent, airstrikes, and special operations strictly. And maybe humanitarian efforts once the enemies central command was neutralized.
Afghanistan war veteran Jeremy P. Cox endorses President Barack Obama’s call Wednesday for Congress to authorize the use of military force against the terrorist group Islamic State.
But the 26-year-old Xenia man who served as a truck driver in the Ohio Army National Guard also said he doesn’t want a half-hearted response to fighting the terrorists in Iraq and Syria. The “spillover effect” could pose a terrorist risk to the United States, he said.
“If the president is going to commit to U.S. forces in Syria he needs to be completely committed to it and not go with any half-hearted measures,” Cox said. “As far as the air strikes go, I’m of the belief that you don’t win a war without boots on the ground so I would be supportive of that.”
The debate will now fall to Congress after the president addressed the nation in a brief televised speech Wednesday afternoon. Even though the commander-in-chief has already used his authority to launch air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the president said he wanted bipartisan commitment from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The authorization to use military force, as the legislation is formally known, would repeal the 2002 war resolution against Iraq and set a three-year time limit on the use of force against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also called ISIL. It would allow the use of ground troops, but Obama said in a letter to Congress he did not want a large-scale ground force or war, but authority to use elite troops in limited circumstances like rescues and targeting ISIL leaders.
Presidential War Powers
The authorization does not give the president authority to use the military in “enduring offensive ground combat operations” against the Islamic State, but does allow war against “associated persons or forces” of the terrorist group.
“The president believes he has the technical authorization he needs to combat the Islamic State but not the political backing he wants,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said in an email.
In asking Congress for authority to broaden military action and repeal the Iraq war resolution, “President Obama is trying to cement his legacy of having ended President Bush’s Iraq war and de-link the two operations clearly in the minds of the American people,” she said.
Donna Schlagheck, a Wright State University political science professor who has authored a book on terrorism, said the authorization language was vague, but sends a clear signal to partners in the region and the public of the U.S. commitment to the Middle East.
“That will obviously begin the conversation about ground troops,” she added. “That is now unavoidable.”
She added the president pondering lethal aid to Ukraine in its fight against pro-Russian separatists signals a change in direction. “I think we’re actually seeing a more assertive, more aggressive American foreign policy on both of those fronts,” she said.
Terrorists could ‘end up in your backyard’
Harry A. Berry, 73, a Vietnam veteran and a retired Army sergeant first class, backed the president’s call for military authorization.
“If you don’t knock (terrorism) out there, you’re going to end up in your backyard with them,” the Kettering man said. “And I don’t particularly want to fight a war on my own soil.
“If they don’t listen to what the president is proposing, we’re going to be in deep trouble,” he said.
Jerry Leggett, executive director of the Dayton International Peace Museum, said the museum urges the nation’s leaders to explore non-violent alternatives like diplomacy and working with the United Nations to end the bloodshed.
“We’re advocating for the president and the Congress to look at alternatives to using violence because … the outcomes have not been very successful,” he said. “It’s not getting us to a long-term useful outcome.
“Non-violence is a process, just as violence is a process,” he said. “And if we keep (using) violence to address violence, guess what we’re going to keep getting.”
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