This weekend in India, President Barack Obama was asked by Associated Press correspondent Julie Pace, if he would he still hold it up as the model for how the U.S. should fight terrorism, despite the resurgence of al Qaeda, as evidenced by the Paris attack, and the recent political upheaval in Yemen.
According to Obama, it is our only alternative.
Obama said, “I guess the point really is — Yemen has never been a perfect democracy or an island of stability. What I’ve said is is that our effort to go after terrorists networks inside of Yemen without an occupying U.S. Army, but rather by partnering and intelligence sharing with that local government is the approach we are going need to take, and that continues to be the case. The alternative would be for us to play whack-a-mole every time there is a terrorist actor inside of any given country. To deploy U.S. troops and that is not a sustainable strategy.”
He continued, “So we will continue to try and define and fine tune this model, but it is the model we are going to have to work with, because the alternative would be massive US deployments in perpetuity which would create its own blow back and cause more problem then it would potentially solve.”
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