NEW YORK – US President Barack Obama’s anti-Islamic State (IS) efforts gained momentum on Tuesday as he told Congressional leaders that he does not need their approval for his planned anti-jihadist operations in Iraq and Syria.
“The president told the [Congressional] Leaders that he has the authority he needs to take action against ISIL in accordance with the mission he will lay out in his address tomorrow night,” the White House said in a statement.
“He reiterated his belief that the nation is stronger and our efforts more effective when the president and Congress work together to combat a national security threat like” IS – the extremist group that is also known as ISIS and ISIL.
The meeting came ahead of Obama’s primetime address to the US public on Wednesday, when he will outline plans for “degrading and ultimately destroying the terrorist group” that imposes centuries-old religious edicts in its self-declared caliphate.
Obama will speak to the nation as John Kerry, his top diplomat, travels to the Middle East for Saudi-hosted talks with Arab leaders on Thursday in a bid to bring Sunni Arab nations more firmly into a coalition that is dominated by Western and Shia forces.
Paul Findley, a 22-year veteran member of the House of Representatives and co-author of the War Powers Resolution, which limited a US president’s power to wage armed conflicts overseas, warned that Obama’s sidestepping of Congress is unlawful.
“Congress must decide whether to bomb Iraq or Syria, or both. The president has no authority to bomb either,” he told Rudaw on Tuesday. “He violates the Constitution with every bomb he sends to Iraq. Ordering acts of war is too serious a decision to leave to one man.”
US fighters and drones pounded IS targets on Monday and Tuesday, destroying more than a dozen vehicles, helping Iraqi forces and Sunni militiamen hold the Haditha Dam and bringing the number of US airstrikes to 153 since August, the Pentagon said in a statement.
Despite war weariness across the US and Obama’s reluctance for new military ventures, recent opinion polls by CNN and Washington Post-ABC News indicate a hardening in American attitudes against IS and support for airstrikes and even US ground troops.
Anti-IS efforts have gained traction since the release of videos showing a British-sounding IS militiaman beheading the American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley as well as gruesome executions of captured Kurdish troops.
US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Iraq’s new government, which includes Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, was a “milestone” in the fight-back against IS, which is estimated to control an area the size of Jordan with as many as eight million inhabitants.
“We certainly pushed any outside country … to support the Iraqi forces themselves and the Kurdish forces as the answer, security-wise, to the ISIL problem; it’s not militias; it’s not extra-governmental organizations,” she told reporters on Tuesday.
Attacking IS in Syria remains awkward for the White House, stoking concerns that it would bolster Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is accused of atrocities against civilians during a three-and-a-half year uprising against his rule.
The International Crisis Group warned of an increasingly-complex war in Syria, where al-Assad’s sectarian regime and IS have emerged as more powerful than Free Syrian Army and more moderate opposition forces, which are struggling in the north-west city of Aleppo.
“At stake in Aleppo is not regime victory but opposition defeat,” said the group’s analyst Noah Bonsey. “If that occurs, the war would continue, pitting regime and allied forces lacking capacity to reconquer north and east Syria against an emboldened IS strengthened by recruits from rebel remnants”.
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