The United States does not “yet have a complete strategy” for standing up an Iraqi force to take on Isis militants, President Barack Obama said on Monday, a year after the capture by Isis of the northern city of Mosul and amid new warnings by the Iraqi prime minister that the militant group continued to profit from oil sales.
In a wide-ranging news conference at the end of the G7 summit in the Wetterstein Mountains in Germany, Obama issued a stern warning against Russia, accepted praise for the work of US prosecutors at confronting corruption in world soccer, gave the US supreme court advice on how to rule in an upcoming healthcare case and defended his immigration policies.
The president’s confident prescriptions seemed to run out, however, when he turned to the question of whether additional US troops would be required to recover the security situation in Iraq, which has seen a series of gains in recent weeks by extremist groups. Just before Obama’s appearance at the Schloss Elmau resort, he held a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who urged world leaders to crack down on oil smuggling by Isis.
While claiming that coalition forces had “made significant progress in pushing back” Isis in Iraq, Obama admitted that the group had moved quickly to claim insufficiently defended territory, such as the provincial capital of Ramadi, where militants last month chased away an Iraqi force that vastly outnumbered them.
Obama said that better training of Iraq troops was needed but that the Pentagon had not yet submitted “a finalized plan” on how to do so.
“We don’t yet have a complete strategy because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well, about how recruitment takes place, how training takes place,” Obama said, “The details of that are not yet worked out.
“We’ve got more training capacity than we’ve got recruits … It’s not happening as fast as it needs to.”
The comments echoed the president’s assessment nine months ago, when he was asked at a White House news conference about how to defeat Isis militants in Syria.
“We don’t have a strategy yet,” Obama said then.
On Monday, Obama acknowledged that Isis had shown itself to be a capable foe. “They’re nimble, and they’re aggressive and they’re opportunistic,” he said. The comments came two weeks after defense secretary Ash Carter criticized Iraq forces, saying that the takeover of Ramadi was evidence that national forces did not have the “will to fight”.
Obama claimed better results in the effort to punish Russia with international sanctions for its incursion in Ukraine. “Russia is in deep recession” as a result of coordinated sanctions on its economy, Obama said. “The G7 is making it clear that if necessary, we stand ready to impose additional significant sanctions against Russia.”
The US president also said that European leaders had praised the US prosecutions of 14 Fifa officials and marketing executives announced in a bombshell appearance two weeks ago by US attorney general Loretta Lynch.
“With respect to Fifa, I cannot comment on a pending case by our attorney general. I will say that in conversations I’ve had here, in Europe, people think it is very important for Fifa to be able to operate with integrity, and transparency, and accountability,” Obama said. “The United States, by the way, since we keep on getting better and better at each World Cup, we want to make sure that a sport that’s gaining popularity is conducted in an upright manner.”
US law enforcement officials were quoted last week as saying that the FBI is investigating the process by which Fifa, world soccer’s governing body, awarded the 2018 World Cup tournament to Russia and 2022 Cup to Qatar.
Turning to the domestic sphere, Obama said he was “frustrated” by a district court ruling, now under appeal, that delayed millions of undocumented migrants from applying for legal status, as promised by executive actions two years ago. Obama said he was “absolutely convinced” the move was “well within my legal authority”, but said that “until we get clarity there, I don’t want to bring people in, have them apply, jump through hoops”.
The president saved his sharpest words for the judiciary, however, for the highest court in the land, which he appeared to criticize for taking up a case that challenges his signature healthcare law. The supreme court is scheduled to rule in June on whether people who sign up for health insurance through federal exchanges qualify for government subsidies, which millions currently receive.
Obama warned “a contorted reading of the statute” could mean that “millions of people who are obtaining insurance currently with subsidies, suddenly aren’t getting those subsidies, many of them can’t afford it”.
“This should be an easy case,” Obama said. “Frankly it probably shouldn’t have been taken up. And since we’re going to get a ruling pretty quick, I think it’s important for us to go ahead and assume that the supreme court’s going to do what most legal scholars who’ve looked at this would expect them to do.”
A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Monday found that the public opposes any supreme court action to change the healthcare law by a margin of 55-38.
“The thing’s working,” Obama said. “Part of what’s bizarre about this whole conversation is, we haven’t had a lot of conversation about the horrors of ‘Obamacare’, because none of them have come to pass.
“You have 16 million people who’ve gotten health insurance.”
