Congress is mulling how to proceed after President Barack Obama asked for congressional authority to train and equip moderate Syrian rebel forces in Saudi Arabia–with a $500 million price tag–to address the threat coming from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The Obama administration had already requested the $500 million as part of its fiscal year 2015 Overseas Contingency Operations budget. But with Congress unprepared to pass all its 12 spending bills before the Oct. 1 start of the fiscal year, lawmakers will instead pass a continuing resolution to extend FY ’14 spending levels through Dec. 11. Because there is no congressional authority for training foreign fighters in a third-party foreign country in the FY ’14 bill, the CR would not allow this new mission either.
Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said during a speech Thursday morning at the American Enterprise Institute that the president believes he has authority to continue air strikes in Iraq and begin them in Syria but needs specific congressional approval of his train-and-equip plan.
“We were going to pass a continuing resolution today to fund the government for the rest of the year, and [Obama] called the chairman of the appropriations committee Tuesday afternoon as he was getting ready to submit the bill we were going to vote on today and asked him if he would put in there authority to go into Saudi Arabia because they’ve offered to give us bases, or places, that we could use for training Free Syrians to go back and then fight,” McKeon said. “So that kind of was a last-minute request and has caused us to not vote today.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) agreed that Obama’s proposal to deal with ISIS “requires immediate congressional action to grant the administration authority to equip and train Syrian rebels under Title X to fight ISIS.” Reid, speaking to reporters Thursday, expressed support for Obama’s plan and said he expects both the Title X authority and the CR to pass easily with bipartisan support, either in a single vote or separately. As of Thursday afternoon, it was unclear whether House leadership would pursue one or two votes, but Reid said he would go along with whatever Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) chose.
In the same press briefing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the Senate majority whip and the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman, said that the Obama administration had not made any additional specific funding requests beyond the $500 million to support the Title X authority.
“I just think it’s too soon to be speculating on the cost of this other than the Title X aspect of it,” he said of the cost of going after ISIS.
During McKeon’s speech, he outlined his own proposal for tackling the ISIS threat, which included the elements of Obama’s plan but also called for special operations forces to go into Sunni-held areas of Iraq to reconnect to the population and help turn them against ISIS, a Sunni extremist group.
“Any U.S.-led coalition must engage with the Sunnis and make them understand that this is not a sectarian fight against them,” McKeon said. “We have to get into those Sunni villages with Special Operations Forces to rebuild relationships. Because if the moderate Sunnis slip through our fingers, they’re gone–and with them, our chances for success. We have to reconnect the intelligence links and security forces’ capabilities that were lost when we left Iraq. Iraqi Shia, Sunni, and Kurds all will be needed to maintain post-war security and stability. That process has to start now.”
He also proposed going beyond the president’s notion of leading a coalition of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and other local Muslim countries, and suggested that heavy U.S. military support would be needed to ensure the success of coalition partners’ troops on the ground.
“We’re not talking about sending in divisions [of American troops] that are going to do another Iraqi Freedom,” McKeon said. “What we’re talking about is using the local forces that are Iraqis, Syrians, helping them rise to the capabilities that they have. But there are shortcomings that they have that we can fill–we can do the logistics, we can do the communications, we can provide the air support, and there’s nobody that can plan and carry out missions like we can.”
He acknowledged his plan was more hawkish than the president’s but told reporters afterward that “I would err on the side of more rather than less because [a smaller initial response] generally means longer, more expensive in terms of blood and treasure. So I’d rather go full force and hit them as hard as we could as fast as we could.”