Top Republican hopefuls tread carefully on IS policy

WASHINGTON: Republicans exploring a 2016 White House run are pounding away at US president Barack Obama’s strategy for stopping Islamic State (IS) militants but, wary of Americans’ war fatigue, are so far providing few specifics on what they would do differently.

The renewed threat posed by Islamist militants is emerging as the top foreign policy issue for the 2016 race, and Mr Obama’s submission to Congress on Wednesday of a draft authorisation of military force against the extremists intensified the debate.

With foreign fighters flocking to Syria and Iraq to join the IS — also known as ISIS or ISIL — the issue has landed in the laps of the dozen or so Republicans who are seriously considering a run for their party’s presidential nomination.

Many of them are current or former state governors who are just now boning up on foreign policy. So far they are describing what they see as gaps in Mr Obama’s strategy, which has relied heavily on air strikes, saying he needs to be more aggressive in challenging “radical Islam”.

“With regard to ISIS, we have not seen a seriousness of purpose. We have seen instead photo-op foreign policy: a bomb here, a missile there,” Texas Republican Sen Ted Cruz told the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank.

But no one has offered a detailed blueprint on how they would take on the IS, which over the past year has seized a s wathe of Iraq and Syria and overtaken al-Qaeda as a magnet for Islamic extremists.

With Americans long since weary of US involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Republican candidates-in-waiting have to tread carefully.

Ideas include bolstering Iraqi Kurds who have been fighting IS militants, to persuading Arab nations to drop their resistance to putting more troops on the front lines, to sending in more US troops.

“What the president needs to come up with is a strategy, militarily, to defeat them, which I think involves, for example, an antiISIL ground force made up of Arab armies, combined with US Special Forces,” Florida Sen Marco Rubio told Fox News.

He added that air strikes should also be ramped up to provide tactical support.

After a series of videotaped beheadings of US citizens by the IS, Americans’ concern over the threat posed by the group and other militants has risen.

A mid-January poll by the Pew Research Center found that for the first time in five years, defending the US from terrorism was the top issue for Americans, with 76% citing it as the main policy challenge.

This makes it fertile ground for early campaign stump speeches, for both Republicans and Democrats.

Only Mr Cruz and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker have raised the possibility of eventually sending US ground troops to the region, however. Others speak far more vaguely, saying the US needs to be more aggressive.

Television personality and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said Mr Obama’s draft resolution — which bars any large-scale invasion by US ground troops and covers the next three years — is shortsighted for an effort that will require a “sustained military effort”.

“The president’s limitations of a three year commitment and against ‘enduring offensive ground combat operations’ place counterproductive restraints on our national power, and the military’s ability to accomplish the mission,” he said.

The IS issue is particularly tricky for potential Republican candidate Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor whose brother, former president George W Bush, started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Obama’s draft authorisation of military force would repeal and replace the 2002 Iraq war resolution crafted by Mr Bush.

In Detroit last week Jeb Bush criticised Mr Obama’s handling of the threat, calling it a result of a US pullback from the region. But he was careful to say US troops should not be deployed every time there is a global challenge.