WASHINGTON (AP) – Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Tuesday defended President Barack Obama’s strategy to defeat Islamic State militants amid blistering criticism from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain.
McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election and has been a harsh critic of the administration’s foreign policy, said there is no compelling reason to think that anything the U.S. is doing will be enough to achieve the president’s goal of degrading and ultimately destroying IS.
“Our means and our current level of effort are not aligned with our ends,” the Arizona Republican told Carter at a Capitol Hill hearing. “That suggests we are not winning, and when you are not winning in war, you are losing.”
McCain said Islamic State continues to gain territory in Iraq and Syria, while expanding its influence across the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. He said there is no responsible ground force in either Iraq or Syria that can seize territory from IS, and slim prospects as well from the U.S.-led coalition’s current training efforts of local ground forces.
Iraq is going through its worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Islamic State group controls large swaths of the country’s north and west after capturing Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul and the majority of the western Anbar province last year.