President Barack Obama's recent statement that "we don't have a strategy yet" to deal with the Islamic State (ISIS) has Americans worried.
In a new
Rasmussen poll, 73 percent of those surveyed say they are concerned that the United States does not have a strategy, and 47 percent said they were "very concerned" about Obama's policy for handling the brutal Islamic State, which has committed several atrocities, war crimes, and executions, including the beheading of two American journalists.
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The poll also found that the number of Americans who believe that the United States should send ground troops back into Iraq to deal with the deadly threat of ISIS has increased steadily, from 12 percent in December to 30 percent in the recent poll, and opposition to sending troops back into Iraq has dropped from 71 percent in December to just 41 percent today.
Overall, 42 percent say the Obama administration has done a poor job of dealing with the Islamic State situation. When broken down by party affiliation, 82 percent of Republicans consider the Islamic State a serious threat to the United States, while only 52 percent of Democrats feel the same way, and 44 percent of Republicans favor sending troops back into Iraq, but only 21 percent of Democrats agree.
Obama came under heavy fire from adherents of both parties over his statement, and an administration spokesman scrambled to explain that he meant a specific strategy for dealing with the Islamic State in Syria, but the damage had been done.
Bloomberg News reported that Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said on "Face The Nation, "We have to defeat ISIS. Not contain, not stop. Defeat."
Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee, told the
Washington Post, "[Obama's] foreign policy is in absolute freefall. This 'don't do stupid stuff' policy isn't working."
Even on the Democratic side, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, slammed Obama on "Meet The Press," saying, "I've learned one thing about this president and that is he’s very cautious, maybe in this instance too cautious.
"This is a group of people who are extraordinarily dangerous and they’ll kill with abandon," she said. "I believe their goal is Baghdad. I think it’s very, very serious. And we have to have a strategy to deal with it," the
New York Post reports her saying on the show.
While Obama's overall approval hovers at around 42 percent, Rasmussen noted, "Belief that the United States is winning the War on Terror has plummeted to its lowest level in over 10 years of regular tracking."
The poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted between Aug. 30-31.
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