‘Calls for US troops to fight IS misguided’ – Proposed steps could make threat worse: experts
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WASHINGTON, Nov 19, (RTRS): Americans want the Obama administration to get tougher with the Islamic State following the carnage in Paris, but many of the measures now being proposed could actually make the threat worse, counter-terrorism experts said. Republican presidential candidates, lawmakers and others are calling for deploying US ground forces to the Middle East, using air power to create a Syria safe zone to train anti-Islamic State fighters and barring Syrian refugees.
“There is no compelling reason to believe that anything we are doing will be sufficient,” Republican Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared on Tuesday in a speech in which he proposed intervention by a European and Arab ground force backed by 10,000 US military advisers and trainers. US counter-terrorism experts, some of whom have dealt with Islamic radicalism for decades, cautioned that reducing the Islamic State threat will be a long, complicated process — and that more mass casualty attacks in Europe and North America are likely in the meantime.
Moreover, they warned, some steps proposed in the wake of the Paris attacks, like deploying ground troops, risk backfiring by feeding the group’s apocalyptic narrative that it is defending Islam against an assault by the West and its authoritarian Arab allies. “In circumstances like this, a lot of people lose their heads, and call for the most draconian actions,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
“Terrorism is all about over-reaction, provoking an over-reaction.” President Barack Obama’s incremental Islamic State strategy, which relies on airstrikes and modest support to local ground forces in Iraq and Syria, has come under renewed criticism from Republican opponents, among others, after the Paris attacks.
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