Key House Dem: Obama’s ISIS Plan Raises ‘Alarm Bells’

White House Terms War an 'Overall' Success

Over the weekend, Iraq lost a city of half a million people to ISIS. The city was the capital of Iraq’s largest province, and Iraq’s military abandoned a large amount of armored vehicles to the ISIS forces.

So it might come as a little bit of a surprise that the White House today, when pressed on the strategy of the ISIS war and how things are going, talked about “tweaks” and insisted that the war is “overall” a success.

The number of people who see it that way is dwindling all the time, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D – CA), a ranking House Democrat, today said the administration’s war rhetoric should be raising “alarm bells.

“I don’t think we’re losing the war, but I don’t think we’re making tremendous progress either,” Schiff said, adding he wasn’t comfortable with the Pentagon using number of airstrikes as a metric for success in the failing mission.

Ever hawkish Sens. Lindsey Graham (R – SC) and John McCain (R – AZ) aren’t happy either, and they see the solution to the war’s woes as a full-scale ground invasion, insisting the current situation is the lack of a strategy.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.