Fox News contributor Liz Cheney said Sunday it should come as no surprise that President Obama had gone against earlier pledges by sending American troops to Syria, saying "it's no longer news" when he contradicts himself.
The announcement came Friday that the U.S. would deploy special operations forces to Syria to help in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group, after Obama had promised repeatedly that he would never put boots on the ground in the war-torn nation.
Cheney, who recently co-wrote the book Exceptional: Why The World Needs a Powerful America alongside her father Dick Cheney, blasted Obama's counterterrorism policy as ineffective and likely to be condemned by history on Fox News Sunday.
"It's no longer news that the president has done something that directly contradicts statements he made previously," Cheney said. "It happens on such a regular basis. The bottom line here is we've got a militant Islamic terrorist organization that has established a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. It is a clear and direct threat to the United States of America. They have to defeated, and they've got to be defeated by force."
We have a president, Cheney said, that seems to either not know or not care that taking back the territory from IS has to be done through fighting.
"He has no plan in place to defeat them," Cheney said. "We've got these incremental deployments of forces that include rules of engagement, for example, for our pilots that really preclude them from doing the job that he says that they're out there to do. So, at the end of the day, the notion that we're in Vienna negotiating with the Russians and the Iranians, somehow brought in as positive partners in the president's view in this effort, is all folly.
"The president is going to have to answer to history. I'm sure he's now looking towards his legacy in this last part of his administration, and the question for him is going to be why did you stand by while this threat to America, this grave threat, grew and gathered strength across the Middle East?"