President of the United States, Barrack Obama appeared on 60 minutes Sunday to sit down to softball questions with Steve Kroft. President Obama acknowledged that the U.S., not Mr. Obama, underestimated the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also called ISIL) and overestimated the ability of the Iraqi military to fend off the militant group once we left Iraq without support.
When the president was asked about comments made by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has said the U.S. not only underestimated ISIS, it also overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi military to fight the extremist group, the president responded with “That’s true, that’s absolutely true.”
“Jim Clappper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said, blaming the instability of the Syrian civil war for giving extremists space to thrive on the intelligence community. It has been widely reported the the president received daily briefings that included updates on ISIS for over a year.
“Essentially what happened with ISIL was that you had al Qaeda in Iraq, which was a vicious group, but our Marines were able to quash with the help of Sunni tribes,” he explained. “They went back underground, but over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you had huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos.”
President Obama continued to show his lack of understanding when it comes to Islamic terror groups. While it is clear to most of the world that the battle with the Islamic State is both military and ideological, Mr. Obama continues to espouse an immature attitude on terror.
The group was able to “attract foreign fighters who believed in their jihadist nonsense and traveled everywhere from Europe to the United States to Australia to other parts of the Muslim world, converging on Syria,” the president said. “And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”
He said their recruitment has been aided by a “very savvy” social media campaign. He also blamed remnants of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s military, which were expunged from the Iraqi military after Hussein’s fall, for lending some “traditional military capacity” to the terrorist group.
“That’s why it’s so important for us to recognize part of the solution here is gonna be military,” he said. “We just have to push them back, and shrink their space, and go after their command and control, and their capacity, and their weapons, and their fueling, and cut off their financing, and work to eliminate the flow of foreign fighters.”
It becomes clear that the president of the United States continues to pursue Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton type solutions that appear to be good, but in reality only allow the Islamic State to grow larger.
