Obama calls criticism legitimate

GOP slammed for lack of alternatives on IS

HONOLULU, Dec 21, (Agencies): President Barack Obama says criticism of his strategy to combat the Islamic State group is legitimate and failure to keep the public informed has contributed to fears that not enough is being done.

In a year-end interview with NPR News, Obama says the most damage the group can do to the US is to force Americans to change how they live or what they believe in.

“I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a regular basis I think described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” the president said in the interview released Monday, referring to IS by one of its acronyms.

Obama says that if people don’t know about the thousands of airstrikes that have been launched against IS targets since August 2014, or aren’t aware that towns in Iraq once controlled by the group have been retaken, “then they might feel as if there’s not enough of a response.”

“And so part of our goal here is to make sure that people are informed about all the actions that we’re taking,” he said. To that end, Obama outlined the strategy against IS in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on Dec. 6, days after a radicalized married couple who had pledged allegiance to an IS leader opened fire on the husband’s coworkers in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 and heightening people’s fears about home-grown extremism.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a series of attacks that killed 130 people in Paris about two weeks before the California shooting.

Before leaving Washington for his annual Christmas vacation in Hawaii, Obama tried to soothe the public’s anxieties about similar attacks on the US through a series of public appearances with members of his national security team following separate briefings on the Islamic State and on potential threats to the US homeland.

Credible

After one of those briefings, which took place at the National Counterterrorism Center, Obama said publicly that officials had no specific, credible information suggesting a potential attack against the US. He urged people to be vigilant during the holidays.

In the interview, Obama also urged keeping the situation in perspective, saying that IS “is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”

“But they can hurt us, and they can hurt our people and our families. And so I understand why people are worried,” he said. “The most damage they can do, though, is if they start changing how we live and what our values are, and part of my message over the next 14 months or 13 months that I remain in office is to just make sure that we remember who we are and make sure that our resilience, our values, our unity are maintained.”

Obama chided Republican presidential candidates for criticizing his policy without offering an alternative.

In a Dec 17 interview set to air on NPR public radio at 5 am ET (1000 GMT) on Monday, Obama attributed his low approval ratings for how he has handled terrorism to the saturation of Islamic State attacks in the media after the Nov 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.

Obama noted that the United States has carried out 9,000 strikes against the Islamic State and taken back towns including Sinjar, Iraq from the militant group. “When you ask them, ‘well, what would you do instead?’ they don’t have an answer,” Obama said of Republican candidates he has observed in televised debates.

The interview is one of many recent attempts by the president to ease Americans’ fears following the Paris attacks and the shootings by a radicalized Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California on Dec 2 that killed 14 people.

A national survey by the Pew Research Center found 37 percent of respondents approve of the way Obama is handling terrorism, while 57 percent disapprove, the lowest rating he has received on the issue.

In his year-end news conference before leaving for a two-week vacation in Hawaii, Obama urged Americans to stay vigilant against homegrown threats while not allowing themselves to become terrorized or divided.