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Top 3 questions Obama needs to answer in his speech on Islamic State

As President Obama prepares to make his case about the necessity of confronting the Islamic State, there are key questions he must answer for the American people and for Pentagon officials who must carry out the strategy. Here are the Top 3:

2. Who’s going to help with this job?

  • By Anna Mulrine Staff writer

America’s ability to put together a coalition to help take on IS will be key to making the operations more palatable to the American public, and to Mr. Obama himself, who has vowed to never again go it alone when it comes to confronting a threat that is equally palpable to our close allies.

The question is Obama’s capacity for “leading from behind,” as with US engagements in Libya, or whether the US will once again nominate itself for the chief role in military operations.

Eight nations have stepped up so far to provide aid and arms to Kurdish peshmerga forces fighting IS in Iraq, including Albania, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany, and the UK.

But how willing these nations will be to enter into operations in Syria, given their own political constraints on the home front, remains to be seen – along with whether neighbors such as Turkey and Jordan will step up, too.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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