Obama Defends ISIS War Plans, Says More US Troops A ‘Mistake’

President Barack Obama said he will not send additional U.S. ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in a broad defense of his strategy against the terrorist group responsible for Friday’s attacks across Paris.

“It is not just my view, but the view of my closest military and civilian advisers, that (sending more U.S. troops) would be a mistake,” Obama said during a press appearance Monday following a Group of 20 leaders’ summit in Turkey.

The summit was intended to address the global economy and cyber threats, but quickly switched to global terrorism after ISIS-aligned militants killed nearly 130 people across six locations in Paris in the worst violence France has seen since World War II.

Obama’s critics have claimed his reluctance to deploy U.S. ground forces in far greater numbers than the current 3,500 in Iraq have permitted ISIS to extend its violent reach to countries like Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and France. Several Republican presidential candidates have lined up behind calls for a no-fly zone in Syria to protect civilians, a move which would call for thousands of additional ground troops, and which White House officials and senior military commanders do not support.

“My only interest is to end suffering and to keep the American people safe. And if there’s a good idea out there, then we’re going to do it,” he said. “But what we do not do, what I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough, or make me look tough. And maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.], and I see a 25-year-old kid who’s paralyzed or has lost his limbs, and some of those are people I’ve ordered into battle. And so I can’t afford to play some of the political games that others may.”

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That would be a mistake, Obama said, “not because our military could not march into Mosul, or Raqqa, or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL.” An operation on that scale, he said, would ultimately fail because it would not reflect any of the lessons learned from the Iraq invasion of 2003, which deposed a leader and left no “local populations that are committed to inclusive governance and who are pushing back against ideological extremes.”

Problems like the rise of ISIS would only resurface he said, “unless we are prepared to have a permanent occupation” in the countries that are breeding grounds for terrorists.

“Let’s assume we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria,” he said. “What happens when there is a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya, perhaps. Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else in North Africa or Southeast Asia. So a strategy has to be one that can be sustained.”

The U.S. strategy in Syria, Obama said, “focuses on going after targets, limiting wherever possible the capabilities of ISIL on the ground, systematically going after their leadership, their infrastructure, strengthening Syrian forces and Iraqi forces that are prepared to fight them, cutting off their borders, and squeezing the space in which they can operate until ultimately we’re able to defeat them—that’s the strategy that we’re going to have to pursue.”

The Friday night U.S. military airstrike in Libya—which killed the ISIS chief there, known as Abu Nabil—is proof the U.S. is intent on keeping up its strategy of a limited troop engagement backed by a heavy contingent of air sorties and surveillance flights, the president said.

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“This is not conventional warfare,” he said. “Given the fact that there are enormous sacrifices involved in any military action, it’s best that we don’t shoot first and aim later...We play into the ISIL narrative when we act as if they're a state and we use routine military tactics that are designed to fight a state."

He also expressed some optimism with the “modest progress” made in the Antalya talks on the future of Syria, “which is critical,” he said, “because a political solution is the only way to end the war in Syria and unite the Syrian people and the world against ISIL,” a path he said has been forged as a result of American leadership. But he repeated his position that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must leave power before the “root cause of this crisis” is addressed.

“If we want this progress to be sustained, more nations need to step up with the resources that this fight demands. Of course, the attacks in Paris remind us that it will not be enough to be enough to defeat ISIL in Syria and Iraq alone.”