Though he voted in favor of President Barack Obama's request to arm the Free Syrian Army to help fight the Islamic State (ISIS) on the ground, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said he doesn't believe the president has a clear strategy for defeating the terrorist group.
Johnson, appearing Sunday on
"Meet the Press," said that during the Iraq War, it took 100,000 Iraq security forces and 160,000 American troops to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq, the group now going by the name Islamic State.
"Now we've got 31,000 members of the Islamic State, and we don't have a strategy to defeat them," Johnson said.
Obama has been carrying out airstrikes against the group over Iraq in cooperation with the new Iraqi government and Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the north. But ISIS has its base of operation in Syria, where it is part of a complicated three-way civil war against both the Free Syrian Army and the government of President Bashar Assad.
Obama has vowed not to send American ground troops into the battle.
Johnson said he is going to the United Nations to explain to Arab nations that the United States is behind them, but that they have to take part in a coalition Obama is trying to build. The White House has been silent on which Arab countries will participate, though it says many have pledged to do so.
"We've been at war with this Islamic terror since 1993," Johnson told "Meet the Press." "We have to recognize it. We can't bury our heads in the sand on this."
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