HONOLULU—President Barack Obama says criticism of his strategy to combat the Islamic State (ISIS) is legitimate and failure to keep the public informed has contributed to fears that not enough is being done.
In a year-end interview with NPR News, Obama says the most damage the group can do to the U.S. is to force Americans to change how they live or what they believe in.
“I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a regular basis I think described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” the president said in the interview released Monday, referring to ISIS by one of its acronyms.
Obama says that if people don’t know about the thousands of airstrikes that have been launched against ISIS targets since August 2014, or aren’t aware that towns in Iraq once controlled by the group have been retaken, “then they might feel as if there’s not enough of a response.”
“And so part of our goal here is to make sure that people are informed about all the actions that we’re taking,” he said.
To that end, Obama outlined the strategy against ISIS in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on Dec. 6, days after a radicalized married couple who had pledged allegiance to an ISIS leader opened fire on the husband’s co-workers in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14 and heightening people’s fears about home-grown extremism.
ISIS claimed responsibility for a series of attacks that killed 130 people in Paris about two weeks before the California shooting.
