Feinstein: Obama ‘too cautious’ on ISIL

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee says US President Barack Obama has been “too cautious” in dealing with the ISIL terrorist group.

“I think I’ve learned one thing about this president, and that is he’s very cautious. Maybe in this instance, too cautious,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” when asked whether Obama’s admission that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to confront ISIL projected weakness.

The senior lawmaker said that the Defense and State departments “have been putting plans together” and expressed hope that those plans will “coalesce into a strategy.”

 “So there is good reason for people to come together now and begin to approach this as a very real threat, that it in fact is,” the senator added.

Feinstein, who has been assessing threats to US national security for years, characterized ISIL as “the first group that has the wherewithal in terms of financing, the fighting machine in terms of a structure — heavy equipment, heavy explosives [and] the ability to move quickly.”

“This is a group of people who are extraordinarily dangerous. And they’ll kill with abandon,” he continued.

Meanwhile, two senior Republican senators argued that the Obama administration needed to respond to the threat of ISIL with a robust military action.

In a New York Times op-ed published Friday, Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) dismissed Obama’s limited airstrikes against the terrorist group in Iraq as “tactical and reactive half-measures.”

“Continuing to confront ISIS in Iraq, but not in Syria, would be fighting with one hand tied behind our back,” they wrote, using another acronym for the group. “We need a military plan to defeat ISIS, wherever it is.”

Obama’s statement Thursday that the US lacked a strategy to address the growing threat of ISIL was greeted with intense criticism on Capitol Hill. The US president said he was not planning to significantly expand the military action against ISIL anytime soon.

The terrorist organization commands a vast stretch of territory from central Syria to the environs of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad.

HRJ/HRJ