Obama: U.S. underestimated rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria
By Steve Kroft | CBS 60 Minutes | Sept. 28, 2014 |

President Obama acknowledged that the U.S. 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 in an interview that [aired] Sunday on 60 Minutes.

The president was asked about comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper [caught lying to Congress], 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.

“That’s true,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s absolutely true.”

“Jim Clappper has acknowledged that I think they [CIA or White House and NSC? – Oui] underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said, blaming the instability of the Syrian civil war for giving extremists space to thrive.

The comments were among the president’s most candid to date about the rapid rise of the terrorist group that has ransacked much of Syria and Iraq in recent months.

“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 (1),” he explained. “They went back underground, but over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war (2), 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.”

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 (3). 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.
Footage courtesy of 60 Minutes  

(1) Awakening Councils – see my recent diary Iraqi Tribal Leaders Pledge March to Baghdad or Not?

(2) During the chaos of the Syrian War … meaning the White House underestimated the strength of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the bad actors that would join the sectarian war. Of course we allowed Libyan jihadists to travel to Syria via Turkey and we even supported the shipment of tons of weapons to Northern Syria with funding ny the Gulf States. Assad was supposed to fall within weeks as this had been U.S. policy under Clinton and Bush. By removing Assad, the US would be helpful to our allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Regime change is in the air, so why not a little push over the brink, we can always blame the Russians and Iranians for our failure.

(3) “very savvy” social media campaign … Yes, I [Obama] was advised that by eliminating some US citizens in Yemen, the bad actor who enticed Muslims around the world to join the jihad against the West, the propaganda would end. See also Nidal Hassan and the monthly Inspire Magazine published ny AQIP.

NYT Interview On Foreign Policy: Hogwash Mr. President! by Oui on August 9, 2014

President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman About Iraq, Putin and Israel …

“The reason,” the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.” That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: “‘We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past. All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again. And we can go about business as usual.'”

U.S. Intelligemce failure on strength ISIL and the weakness Iraq Army

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