愛薇塔樂學英文

Obama weighs strategy against Islamic State奧巴馬重戰略打擊伊斯蘭國

KEN DILANIAN AND LARA JAKES, AP
August 14, 2014, 1:56 pm TWN

For months, administration officials have been divided about the threat posed by the Islamic State as it seized parts of Syria and advanced on towns in Iraq. Now, amid new intelligence about its growing strength, a consensus is forming that the group presents an unacceptable terrorism risk to the United States and its allies.

At issue is whether President Barack Obama, elected on a platform of ending the Iraq war, will heed calls for a campaign to contain or destroy the Islamic State, an undertaking that could dominate U.S. foreign policy for the remainder of his term.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the group poses "a threat to the civilized world," while Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein called the Islamic State a "terrorist army" that must be defeated. But Obama has not used similar language. He has authorized a limited campaign of targeted airstrikes designed to protect refugees and American personnel in the Kurdish region -- but not take out the group's leadership or logistical hubs.

A strategy to destroy the Islamic State would not require large numbers of American ground troops, but it would amount to a significant escalation from the recent air operations, analysts say. It might also require military action in western Syria, where the group has its headquarters in the city of Ar-Raqqah.

Proponents of doing so argue that the Islamic State must be stopped because it will destabilize America's allies in the region and eventually export terror to Europe and the U.S. Critics of the idea are urging the president just as strongly not to get sucked into another Middle East war, arguing that years of American micromanagement in that region has ended in tears.

Obama himself has said the U.S. "has a strategic interest in pushing back" the Islamic State, but he has also insisted he will not send American combat troops back to war in Iraq. He has not shied away from using targeted military force in other places, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, when he decided that terrorists there threatened the U.S.

U.S. officials say thousands of Westerners -- and at least dozens of Americans -- have sought to travel to Syria to join the fighting there, and some of them have joined the Islamic State. Attorney General Eric Holder has called the mix of Westerners and Syria-based terror groups "more frightening than anything I think I've seen as attorney general."

When al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula seized parts of southern Yemen in 2011, Obama stepped up drone strikes and used special operations to support Yemeni forces in pushing the militants out.U.S. intelligence believes that some of those Westerners are now fighting in Iraq, said a senior intelligence official who was not authorized to discuss sensitive intelligence by name and requested anonymity.

Smashing the Islamic State, military and intelligence analysts say, would require a sustained campaign of American airstrikes, combined with U.S.-backed a ground force of Sunni tribesmen_the same approach that rooted al-Qaida in Iraq out of the Sunni tribal areas in 2008.

But such a campaign would be "orders of magnitudes more difficult" than Yemen because of how well-armed and well-trained Islamic State fighters are, said Peter Mansoor, a retired army colonel who helped oversee a turnaround in Iraq in 2008.

"We have a mismatch between our goals and our strategy at the present time," said Mansoor, now a professor at Ohio State. "The goal eventually is to eliminate (the Islamic State), but the president has laid out a very restrained military option which can't accomplish that goal."

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a security forum in Aspen, Colorado, last month that the military is "preparing a strategy that has a series of options to present to our elected leaders on how we can initially contain, eventually disrupt, and finally defeat (the Islamic State group) over time."

Obama's Republican critics fear that the president will shy away from such a strategy because it repudiates what they say was his misguided decision to disengage from Iraq. Two years ago, the president resisted the calls of his advisers to aggressively arm moderate rebels in Syria.

"You can almost hear the angst in the voices of our military commanders connected to what they know is a fundamental mismatch" between the threat and the strategy, said Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo, a former Army officer and member of the House Intelligence Committee. "President Obama absolutely is refusing to acknowledge the threat to America and respond in a way that is appropriate."

Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, rejected that view. "We absolutely believe that (the Islamic State) poses a threat to U.S. persons and personnel," he said Wednesday. "We're focused on dealing with that threat right now in Iraq so that the terrorists cannot advance on Irbil," the Iraqi Kurdish capital.

In January, when the militants overran the western Iraqi city of Fallujah. U.S. officials weighed whether to intervene. But one senior U.S. official familiar with the conversations said there were concerns that what was playing out was an internal dispute -- a revolution by Sunni tribes against the Shiite-led government and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. At a result, the U.S. limited its response to providing the Iraqi army with Hellfire missiles and began tracking the militants with surveillance drones.Administration officials say the White House has been deeply divided at least since the start of 2014 over how much the Islamic State threatens Americans.

Since then, the number of Islamic State militants swelled from a few thousand militants to an estimated 15,000 die-hard members, according to two senior intelligence officials.

Many of the extremists are battle-hardened former members of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard who are intimately familiar with Iraq's dusty terrain and tribal connections, say the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information by name.

The Islamic State, which has been disavowed by al-Qaida in a dispute over strategy, wants to strike a terrorist blow at the U.S. to assert its primacy in the jihadist movement, said Derek Harvey, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who advises U.S. Central Command.

"They have been planning do to this for some time," he said. "We just don't know when."

奧巴馬重戰略打擊伊斯蘭國

KEN DILANIAN和LARA JAKES，美聯社
2014年8月14日，下午1時56 TWN

幾個月來，政府官員一直分歧伊斯蘭國家提出，因為它抓住敘利亞部分地區和先進的伊拉克城鎮的威脅。現在，由於擔心其實力不斷壯大的新的情報，一個共識正在形成，該集團提出了一個無法接受的恐怖主義風險，美國和它的盟友。

目前的問題是美國總統奧巴馬，當選結束了伊拉克戰爭的一個平台，是否會聽從呼籲一場運動，以控制或消滅伊斯蘭國家，這可能主導美國外交政策為他的剩餘任期的承諾。

國防部長哈格爾表示，該集團提出了“文明世界的威脅”，而民主黨參議院情報委員會委員長范士丹呼籲伊斯蘭國“恐怖分子軍”必須被打敗。但奧巴馬並沒有使用類似的語言。他已授權旨在保護難民和美國人員在庫爾德地區有針對性的空襲有限的運動 - 但不取出集團的領導和後勤中心。

一項戰略，以摧毀伊斯蘭國將不需要大量的美國地面部隊，但就相當於從最近的空中操作的顯著升級，分析師說。它也可能需要在敘利亞西部，倘本集團的總部設在該市的Ar-拉卡的軍事行動。

這樣做的支持者認為，伊斯蘭國家必須停止，因為這將動搖美國的盟友在該地區，並最終輸出恐怖活動，以歐洲和想法的美國批評人士敦促總統一樣堅決不捲入另一個中東戰爭，認為年美國微操在該地區的眼淚已經結束。

奧巴馬本人曾表示，美國“有推背的戰略利益”的伊斯蘭國家，但他還堅持說，他不會派美國作戰部隊回到伊拉克戰爭。他沒有迴避使用有針對性的軍事力量在其他地方，如巴基斯坦，也門和索馬里，當他決定，恐怖分子有威脅美國