http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=8465F2E8-B166-496A-8C8B-066697092B84 Adam Kinzinger: Obama ‘toeing the water’
By: Kendall Breitman
August 8, 2014 07:51 AM EDT
Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Friday that the airstrikes President Barack Obama plans to launch in Iraq will just be a “toe in the water.”
“This is not going to be enough to crush ISIS,” Kinzinger said on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.” “The president’s a very cautious person to a fault and I think he’s just kind of toeing the water here a little bit.”
Kinzinger, who served in the Air Force, has been a vocal critic of Obama’s military tactics in the past. This time around, the Illinois Republican turned his focus to “targeted airstrikes” authorized by the president on Thursday night to help fight back against Sunni extremists, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who have taken over much of Iraq and have left some 40,000 Iraqi Yazidis trapped on a mountaintop without food or water.
Kinzinger said Friday that the situation will “continue to spiral out of control the longer [Obama] takes to make the decision that ISIS is a very bad group and has to be destroyed.”
“They’re not going to stop, their blood lust is not going to be satisfied, the only thing that can happen is that the West, the United States, has to provide air power to Iraqi troops,” Kinzinger said.
Instead, he said that the president has been “war weary.”
“You could never imagine the president coming on national television and saying he’s going to crush ISIS because he just doesn’t really frankly have the courage to do that, but this may be the beginning of a small move,” Kinzinger said.
He added, “It’s time for the president to stand up and say, ‘America, I know you’re tired but it is in our national interest because in 10 years, history is going to judge us very, very harshly.’”
