'We're Not Going to Eradicate or Annihilate ISIL' says Gen. Allen, Obama's Envoy

Barbara Boland | February 25, 2015
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“We’re not going to eradicate or annihilate ISIL,” said Gen. John Allen today at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. Gen. Allen is Obama’s special envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) asked Allen at today’s hearing to describe “what defeat looks like.”

Here’s his unbelievable response:

“It is that this organization [ISIS] has been rendered ineffective in its capability of being an existential threat against Iraq,” said Allen. “We’re not going to eradicate or annihilate ISIL.”

“Most of these organizations that we’ve dealt with before there will be some residue of that organization for a long period of time to come,” Allen said. “But we don’t want it to have operational capabilities that create the opportunity for it to threaten the existence of Iraq or other states in the region.”

Allen: “We want to diminish its capacity to generate funding which limits dramatically its operational decision-making and capabilities to affect discretion with respect to its recruiting and its battlefield capabilities.”

“We want to compete with it and ultimately overcome or defeat its message in the information sphere where it has achieved significant capability and recruiting prowess,” he concluded.

In the clip it is clear that Allen’s remarks were not off-the-cuff, but prepared and his words are very measured, a sign that he rehearsed them earlier. It follows that the incredibly weak namby-pamby language he used are the words the Obama administration chose for him.

Besides Allen’s pointed statement that we will not be eradicating or annihilating ISIL (leave that kind of language to Jordan’s King Abdullah,) he also says the U.S. wants to “diminish” its funding and “compete” with its message. Compete with ISIS??!

Usually the Obama administration uses the carefully-parsed phrase “degrade and ultimately destroy” to describe what the U.S. wants to do to ISIS, but a few beheading videos later and we’re “diminishing,” “competing with” and most definitely not “eradicating or annihilating” them. One shudders to think what threat-level the administration’s language will reach next week.

 

 

 

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