ISISObama: U.S. intelligence underestimated ISIS strength, overestimated Iraqi military's resilience

ISIS success due in part to Iraqi failings // Source: waradana.com

President Barack Obama on Sunday said that the U.S. intelligence community had underestimated Islamic State (ISIS) strength and level of activity inside Syria, which has become “ground zero” for jihadist terrorists worldwide, while overestimating the ability of the Iraqi army to fight such militant groups. The president, who was interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes, spoke while additional U.S.-led airstrikes were carried out in Syria and Iraq, and at the same time that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) called for a ground war against ISIS.

Obama cited comments made by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to the Washington Post earlier this month. Obama said U.S. intelligence underestimated what had been taking place in Syria after Islamic militants went underground when U.S. marines defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq with help from Iraqi tribes.

“But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” Obama said. “And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world” (the president was referring to the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006-2007; the Syrian civil war erupted in early 2011).

Clapper was quoted by the Post as saying: “I didn’t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn’t see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

The Guardian reports that Obama’s admission that ISIS succeeded in setting up its bases in Syria and Iraq without being noticed by U.S. intelligence may embolden Republican hawks such Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) who have been complaining for months that the administration was being too passive in its approach to the Syrian civil war.

McCain has been particularly harsh in his criticism of Obama’s policy in the Middle East, ridiculing it for being even worse than Jimmy Carter’s.

In the CBS interview, Obama outlined his military goal against ISIS: “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.”

He added that a political solution was required in both Iraq and Syria for peace in the long term.

The president rejected the arguments by critics who contend that his refusal to intervene more directly in the Syrian civil war, and his decision to withdraw all American troops out of Iraq in 2011, had created conditions which facilitated the rise of the ISIS. Instead, he blamed Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, until recently the prime minister of Iraq. “When we left, we had left them a democracy that was intact; a military that was well-equipped; and the ability then to chart their own course,” Obama said. “And that opportunity was squandered over the course of five years or so because the prime minister, Maliki, was much more interested in consolidating his Shia base.”