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‘This Is Not the Equivalent of the Iraq War’: Obama Won’t Use Ground Troops to Combat ISIS
TND Guest Contributor: Josh Siegel | 
In a wide-ranging interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” today, President Obama said he will not deploy U.S. ground troops to Iraq or Syria to confront terroristscapturing large swaths of territory in that region.
Obama, in describing his strategy to beat the Islamic State to NBC’s Chuck Todd, said, “This is not the equivalent of the Iraq War.”
The president said he will address the nation on the threat of the Islamic State during a Wednesday speech, one day before the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“What I’m going to be asking the American people to understand is, number one, this is a serious threat,” Obama said about the speech. “Number two, we have the capacity to deal with it.”
As he has in the past, Obama stressed that the United States will work with regional partners like Iraqi and Kurdish forces and Syrian rebel troops to defeat the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL.
“Over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of [ISIS],” Obama said. “We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We’re going to shrink the territory that they control. And that’s how we’re going to defeat them.”
During the interview, Obama also defended his decision to delay executive action on immigration, saying the surge of unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally this year changed the politics of the issue.
“The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem,” Obama said. “I want to spend some time, even as we’re getting all our ducks in a row for the executive action, I also want to make sure that the public understands why we’re doing this, why it’s the right thing for the American people, why it’s the right thing for the American economy.”
Obama denied that the decision to delay action until after the November elections is strictly a political tactic intended to bolster Democratic candidates in contentious battles for U.S. Senate seats.
The president framed his decision as a way to give the American people more time to understand the immigration issue.
“It’s going to be more sustainable and more effective if the public understands what the facts are on immigration, what we’ve done on unaccompanied children, and why it’s [executive action] necessary,” Obama said.
In the interview, Obama also acknowledged that the Ebola outbreak in western Africa is a “national security priority.”
While noting that the virus may not be controllable in Africa for “months” and that Ebola should not reach American soil because it is transferred through bodily fluids and not through the air, Obama said the United States has a responsibility to give the African countries the resources they need to contain the virus.
“If we don’t make that effort now, and this spreads not just through Africa but other parts of the world, there’s the prospect then that the virus mutates,” Obama said. “It becomes more easily transmittable. And then it could be a serious danger to the United States.”
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Josh Siegel is a news reporter for The Daily Signal. Follow him on Twitter: @JoshDailySignal
This article was published at The Daily Signal and is reprinted with permission.
Source: http://thenewsdoctors.com/this-is-not-the-equivalent-of-the-iraq-war-obama-wont-use-ground-troops-to-combat-isis/
