Win Without War Statement on President Obama's Speech

Last Updated on September 10, 2014.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 10, 2014

Contact:
Stephen Miles, Advocacy Director

(504) 289-3594stephen@winwithoutwar.org
Washington, DC- The Win Without War coalition released the following statement by Advocacy Director, Stephen Miles, in response to President Obama’s speech on September 10, 2014.
“We are deeply troubled by President Obama’s announcement tonight of an expanding military intervention into Iraq and Syria. While we, like all Americans, share in the outrage over the violence of ISIS militants, an open-ended escalation of US military force is not the answer.  The US should not be rushing back to another endless war in the Middle East.
As the President himself has said many times, there are no military solutions to the challenges we face in the Middle East, yet our response remains first and foremost a military one. The instability we see today in the Middle East was, in many ways, sparked by President George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, and we must be skeptical of the belief that more American bombs will bring peace to a region embroiled in a massive, sectarian war.
In the coming days, Congress should ask President Obama the hard questions they failed to ask his predecessor. What will we do when these additional airstrikes fail to defeat ISIS? How many more announcements of troop deployments to the region will we see? And in the famous words of Gen. David Petraeus, tell me how this ends?”

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Win Without War is a coalition of national organizations with diverse constituencies originally founded in opposition to the Iraq War. The coalition remains active in opposition to the continued U.S. war in Afghanistan, the dangerous rush to war with Iran, and the underlying national security strategy on which these conflicts are based.  We seek a fundamentally new approach to meet the national security challenges of the United States that is consistent with our nation’s highest values.

For more information visit www.winwithoutwar.org

 

September 10, 2014