Obama Promises Sustained Effort to Rout ISIS Militants

Saul Loeb/Pool via The New York Times

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In his address to the nation, President Obama outlined a multi-phase plan for combating ISIS, saying the United States would lead a “broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat.” He said he was authorizing U.S. air strikes in Syria for the first time, and that the U.S. effort in Iraq would expand. The president repeatedly stressed the move would not be like the long ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. While the U.S. will send 475 service members to Iraq, they will “not have a combat mission,” but rather, provide intelligence, training, and equipment. “We will not be dragged into another ground war,” said Obama. “We cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves.” Already, France has agreed to support airstrikes and Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide a base for training.

The president compared the proposed campaign against ISIS to the counterterrorism strategies used in Yemen and Somalia, saying the U.S. will rely on “our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground.” He said that thus far the U.S. has “conducted more than 150 airstrikes in Iraq.” The U.S. will continue to work with the newly formed Iraqi government, so that “we’re hitting [ISIS] targets as Iraqi forces go on offense.”

Obama noted how broad a threat ISIS posed with its international recruitment. “Our intelligence community believes that thousands of foreigners—including Europeans and some Americans—have joined them in Iraq and Syria,” he said. While the president focused on a strategy for combating ISIS in Iraq, he made it clear that the U.S. “will not hesitate” to go into Syria if need be. “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” he said. A year ago, the president declined to use air strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; his decision to take such action against ISIS amounts to a change in strategy spurred by the extremist group's growing threat.

Although Obama said he has the “authority to address the threat” posed by ISIS, he said he “welcomes congressional support to show the world that Americans are united in confronting this danger.” Obama has asked Congress to allocate $5 billion for counterrorism funding, which has yet to be approved.

N.Y. TIMES
He warned that “eradicating a cancer” like ISIS was a long-term challenge that would put some American troops at risk.

Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners. Earlier on Wednesday, he called King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to enlist his support for the plan to step up training of the Syrian rebels.

Mr. Obama is acting as polls show rapidly shifting public opinion, with a large majority of Americans now favoring military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, even as they express deep misgivings about the president’s leadership,

Mr. Obama is also facing difficult crosscurrents on Capitol Hill, where Republican lawmakers, initially reluctant to demand congressional authorization of military action, have begun agitating for a vote, even as some Democrats warn of a stampede to war.

On Wednesday, Senate Democratic leaders prepared legislation on the narrow issue of authorizing the American military to train the Syrian rebels. House Republicans appeared ready to follow their lead.

The surge of activity means Congress is likely to weigh in on the military action before the midterm elections in eight weeks.

While Mr. Obama said that Mr. Assad had lost his legitimacy to govern Syria, he did not call again for his ouster. Instead, he spoke of strengthening the moderate rebels to give them a seat at the table in a political settlement with the Assad government.

Administration officials indicated that airstrikes in Syria could still be weeks away, while American surveillance planes continue to gather intelligence on the location of ISIS targets.

They also tried to manage expectations about whether the United States could truly destroy ISIS.

“What we can do is systematically roll back the organization, shrink the territory where they’re operating, decimate its ranks, cut off its sources of support in terms of funding and equipment, and have the threat methodically and relentlessly reduced,” a senior official said in a briefing for reporters, speaking on the condition of anonymity under White House ground rules.

  

 

HOW DOES ONE SQUARE A CIRCLE? THE GAZA - ISRAELI HORROR

Illustrative photo of a nun walking by price tag graffiti at a church near Beit Shemesh in August. (photo credit: Flash90)

Read more: 'Price tag’ attacks draw calls for stronger response | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/price-tag-attacks-draw-calls-for-stronger-response/#ixzz3Ap0zcZMp

NEW REPUBLIC, Yishai Schwartz

Children are dying in Gaza. In the coming days, more will die. And though many die as shields cruelly used by cynical Hamas terrorists, they are being killed by bombs from Israeli planes and shells from Israeli tanks. And so even as we acknowledge that Hamas’ hands are stained with the blood of its own people, for Israel, too, there must be a moral accounting.

I do not mean simply a refrain we have heard frequently in recent weeks: “No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens.” This sentence is probably true. But it is also irrelevant. The question is not what some other country would do, but what Israel ought to do. And that question is not as easily answered. In fact, it presents us with one of the great moral paradoxes and tragedies of our time: A war which must be fought—and which seems impossible to fight morally.

Traditionally, moral thinking about war is divided into two broad questions. First, we ask whether the decision to go to war was a moral one. In doing so, we ask: Are the reasons for the war morally compelling? Were less-destructive alternatives considered and pursued?
For Israel, the first question seems easier to answer. Few would deny that, in principle, Israel’s war with Hamas is both just and necessary. Israel acts on the most clear justification possible: self-defense after days of restraint, warnings, and pleas—as rockets continued to land on its cities and later, as militants sprang from tunnels to kill its citizens. Ceasefires have been offered, but Hamas has rejected them. And whatever criticisms one may have of Israel’s failures to midwife an effective and peaceful alternative to Hamas (and I have many), these do not undermine the fundamental justice of this self-defense.

But there is also a second, larger question: How should wars be fought? And here, Israel runs into a problem. Because in the conduct of war, we insist not only that combatants be the sole targets of military action or that steps be taken to reduce civilian deaths. But we also insist on proportionality; that the military value of a target must outweigh the anticipated harm to civilians.

And on this key issue, Israel may seem to fail the test. True, Israel only targets combatants and takes unprecedented efforts at avoiding civilians (making personalized phone calls to civilians before striking areas near them), but can we confidently say that the anticipated harm to innocents is justified by Israel’s expected military gains? The degrading of Hamas’ rocket capabilities, and most of all the destruction of its terrifying network of offensive tunnels (fortified by the limited cement that Israel permitted into Gaza for humanitarian purposes) are valuable military goals. But as the Palestinian death count rises above 500—many of these civilian—I find myself bewildered: Are these tunnels really worth the lives of all those children?
And the truly horrifying thing is that it is pretty clear that Israel couldn’t do much better. With Hamas headquarters, weapons caches, and infiltration tunnels buried below hospitals, mosques and homes, there may simply be no way for Israel to actually pass the test of proportionality. The killing of any individual Hamas operative, the destruction of any particular piece of terrorist infrastructure, can seem pale and insignificant beside the quantity of innocent death.

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We are thus left with a paradox: Morality demands that Israel fight this war, but allows no way to fight it morally. In this conflict, reason itself seems to fail.

There is, however, a way out of this paradox. And we find it at the moment we realize that Hamas’ actions have made this war about more than Israel or Palestine; it's a war about future of morality in armed conflicts. For if Israel declines to fight, we live in a world where terror groups use their own civilians, and twist morality itself, to bind the hands of those who try to fight morally. In this world, cruelty is an advantage, and the moral are powerless in the face of aggression and indiscriminate attack. And make no mistake: The eyes of the world are on Hamas, and terrorist groups worldwide will—as they have for generations—learn from the tactics of Gazan terrorists and the world’s reaction. So if Israel allows Hamas’ human shields to defeat it now, we will all reap the results in the years to come.

But there is an alternative. We can say that there is a principle worth fighting and dying for: Civilians cannot be used to make just wars impossible and morality will not be used as a tool to disarm. And once we have that principle, the proportionality calculation changes. The deaths of innocents are not simply outweighed by Israelis’ right to live without daily rockets and terrorists tunneling into a kibbutz playground; but by the defense of a world in which terrorists cannot use morality to achieve victory over those who try to fight morally. It is the protection of that world, one in which moral soldiers still have a fighting chance, that justifies Israel’s operations against Hamas today. And it is that greater cause that decisively outweighs the terrible toll in innocent life.

MUSLIMS IN AMERICA: CONFLICTED LOYALTIES

Anzor Tsarnaev, the father of the two men suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing, lives and has commercial space in this building in Makhachkala, the capital of the Russian republic of Dagestan.

Credit: Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

NY TIMES    SCOTT SHANE

Three years ago, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was assigned by his high school English teacher to write an essay on something he felt passionate about, he chose the troubled land of his ancestors: Chechnya.  He wrote to Brian Glyn Williams, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. “He wanted to know more about his Chechen roots,” recalled Mr. Williams, a specialist in the history of Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim republic in southern Russia’s Caucasus Mountains. “He wanted to know more about Russia’s genocidal war on the Chechen people.”

Mr. Tsarnaev was born in Dagestan and had never lived in neighboring Chechnya, relatives said, but it fascinated him. The professor sent him material covering Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Chechens to Central Asia, in which an estimated 30 percent of them died, and the two brutal wars that Russia waged against Chechen separatists in the 1990s, which killed about 200,000 of the population of one million.

As law enforcement and counterterrorism officials try to understand why Mr. Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother, Tamerlan, 26, would attack the Boston Marathon, they will have to consider a cryptic mix of national identity, ideology, religion and personality.   

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 Their relatives have expressed anguished bafflement, and it is conceivable that the motive for the attack will remain as inscrutable as those of some mass shootings in recent years.

Still, as investigators try to understand the brothers’ thinking, search for ties to militant groups and draw lessons for preventing attacks, they will be thinking of some notable cases in which longtime American residents with no history of violence turned to terrorism: the plot to blow up the New York subway in 2009, the Fort Hood shootings the same year and the failed Times Square bombing of 2010, among others.

“I think there’s often a sense of divided loyalties in these cases where Americans turn to violent jihad — are you American first or are you Muslim first? And also of proving yourself as a man of action,” said Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington.

 

Mr. Fishman cautioned that it was too early to draw any firm conclusions about the Tsarnaev brothers, but said there were intriguing echoes of other cases in which young men caught between life in America and loyalty to fellow Muslims in a distant homeland turned to violence, partly as a way of settling the puzzle of their identity.

 

 

 Akbar Ahmed is a visiting professor and was first distinguished chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities and has been called “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC. Regularly interviewed by CNN, NPR, BBC, and Al-Jazeera, he has appeared several times on Oprah, and has also been a guest of The Daily Show and Nickelodeon

 

 

 Akbar Ahmed, the chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, described such men: “They are American, but not quite American.” His new book, “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terrorism Became a War on Tribal Islam,” examines how tribal codes of hospitality, courage and revenge have shaped the reaction to American counterterrorism strikes.

“They don’t really know the old country,” Professor Ahmed said of young immigrants attracted to jihad, “but they don’t fit in to the new country.”

 

Add feelings of guilt that they are enjoying a comfortable life in America while their putative brothers and sisters suffer in a distant land and an element of personal estrangement — say, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s statement in an interview long before the attack that after five years in the United States, “I don’t have a single American friend” — and it is a combustible mix.

“They are furious,” Mr. Ahmed said. “They’re out to cause pain.”

After about a decade in the United States, the Tsarnaev brothers had both enrolled in college — the elder brother at Bunker Hill Community College, though he had dropped out; the younger at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Tamerlan was a Golden Gloves boxer and was married with a child; Dzhokhar had been a popular student at a Cambridge school and earned a scholarship for college.

On the face of it, they were doing reasonably well. But the same might have been said, at least at certain stages in their lives, of those behind other recent attacks.

 

 

 

Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani immigrant who went to college in Connecticut and became a financial analyst

 

 

Faisal Shahzad, who staged the failed Times Square bombing at age 30, had graduated from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, earned an M.B.A. and worked as a financial analyst. He married an American-born woman of Pakistani ancestry, and they had two children. But as he became steadily more focused on radical religion, he traveled to Pakistan and sought training as a terrorist.

      

 

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was born in Virginia and became a psychiatrist.

 

 

Just six months earlier, in November 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, then 39, was accused of opening fire on a crowd of soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Tex., killing 13 people. Born in Virginia to Palestinian parents, he had graduated from medical school and become an Army psychiatrist.

But he began to ponder what he felt was a conflict between his duty as an American soldier and his allegiance to Islam.

Months before the shootings, investigators say, he consulted Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni-American cleric who was later killed in an American drone strike, about whether killing his fellow soldiers to prevent them from fighting Muslims in Afghanistan would be justified.

 

 

Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American who was a coffee vendor in Lower Manhattan.Affable and rooted, he lived for 10 years in the same apartment with his family in Flushing, Queens. His father drove a cab for more than 15 years.

 

 Even Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-American who plotted to attack the New York subway with

backpacks loaded with explosives, spent five years as a popular coffee vendor in Manhattan’s financial district, with a “God Bless America” sign on his cart. He was 24 at the time of his arrest.

 

In the history of Islamic radicalism, there are far more prominent figures who spent time in the United States.

 

      

The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, [above] who would become the most influential philosopher of jihad against the West, visited on an educational exchange program from 1948 to 1950, developing a deep-seated revulsion for what he saw as American materialism and immorality.

      

 

 

In the 1980s, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, [above] who went on to plan the Sept. 11 attacks, spent four years studying in North Carolina, earning an engineering degree. His American sojourn did not stop him from devoting the next two decades to plotting against Western and American targets.

 

If the grim Chechen history that Mr. Williams, the University of Massachusetts professor, shared with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev turns out to be part of the motivation behind the attack, one might have expected the anger to have been directed at Russians, not Americans.

But in the mid-1990s, Mr. Williams said, the Chechen separatist movement split between those who focused locally on the struggle for independence and others who saw their fight as part of a global jihad.

In the propaganda pioneered by Al Qaeda, terrorism is merely self-defense against a perceived American war on Islam.

There has been no more stark statement of this belief than the courtroom declarations of Mr. Shahzad as he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole for the failed bombing in Times Square.

 

Calling himself “a Muslim soldier,” Mr. Shahzad denounced the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. The drones, he said, “kill women, children, they kill everybody.”

“It’s a war, and in war, they kill people,” he added. “They’re killing all Muslims.”