Top HASC Republican Rebuffs Obama: Syria ‘Still a Bloody Mess’

The new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday soundly rejected President Barack Obama’s claim in his State of the Union speech that the U.S. is stopping the Islamic State’s advance in Iraq and Syria, and sharply criticized the president’s strategy toward the terrorist group.

His assessment? “Syria is just a horrible mess.”  

“On the Syria side they have grown in territory, so I think factually what the president said is simply not true. The area that they control, what they have influenced, has actually grown, and there is not a lot of prospect, in the near-term, of pushing that back,” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, told defense reporters. But, he continued, “Some problems get to the point that it’s such a mess there that is no solution that says, ‘This is the answer.’ I think Syria is just a horrible mess that prevents us from having a 1-2-3 sort of solution.”

During his Tuesday address, Obama said that his administration’s plan -- including roughly 2,000 air strikes, 4,000 troops and $1.2 billion dollars spent over the last 5 months -- has halted the momentum of the Islamic State.

“In Iraq and Syria, American leadership – including our military power – is stopping ISIL’s advance,” Obama said. “Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group. We’re also supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort, and assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism. This effort will take time. It will require focus. But we will succeed.”

Thornberry, who travelled with lawmakers to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq and Kuwait last month to assess the U.S.-led operation against the Islamic State, agreed with the president that the international coalition has frozen the Islamic State’s advance, but only in Iraq. While noting, “We are not rolling them back,” he said Iraqi and Kurdish forces “have made some progress there.”

But he called into question whether success is possible in Syria, where the Islamic State controls enough territory to have effectively erased the border with Iraq after exploiting the power vacuum of a years-long, bloody civil war between opposition fighters and President Bashar al-Assad’s state forces.

The administration’s strategy against the Islamic State in Syria so far consists largely of a mix of covert and overt missions to train and equip moderate opposition to fight the Islamic State – which Thornberry voted for and supports. But recent comments by U.S. officials indicate the administration has shifted its position on Assad away from defeat in favor of a political resolution between the warring parties.

Thornberry criticized the restrictions Obama has put on the military as largely political, rather than tactical, and said the apparent shift has undermined the mission in Syria. “I really am concerned about the stories I read this week that say, ‘Ok, maybe we’ve changed our mind and Assad can stay after all,’” he said,  “because who is gonna trust us when our positions flip-flop around back and forth, and who is gonna risk their lives to be trained guided and work with us if you can’t be reasonably confident that we’re a reliable entity to work with?”

Thornberry is frustrated with Obama’s all-or-nothing characterization of U.S. military options against the Islamic State. “The president is misleading when he says, ‘It’s sending in a lot of ground troops or doing what I want to do,’” he said.

The option of U.S. forces operating inside Syria to gather intelligence and call in air strikes should be considered, Thornberry said. “My point is we should not tie our hands and pretend that there is a border there when there is not … obviously you got to pay attention to where in Syria, and the risk they would be under and whether they could be protected.”

But Thornberry acknowledged that even the strictures were lifted, “I don’t have a magic answer.” The best that can be hoped for, he said, may be temporarily containing the Islamic State.

“Even if you eliminated all such constraints and were looking only at military effectiveness, this is still a bloody mess without a clear, easy answer,” he said. “So we shouldn’t pretend that we got ‘em on the run, things are going great. One of the lessons of history is that you need to tell people the truth, even when it’s ugly. And this is a pretty ugly truth.”