Obama to send advisors to Iraq, open to military action

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama pledged to take "precise" military action if needed to check marauding Sunni radicals in Iraq and offered up to 300 US advisors to train Iraqi forces facing a crisis splintering the country along sectarian lines.

But Obama, who based an entire political career on ending US involvement in Iraq, insisted the United States was not slipping back into the morass -- and warned Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Iran that promoting sectarianism would spell disaster.