Obama: I Underestimated Al Qaeda

toon130809

You don’t say? Really? I thought they were on the run.

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 will air Sunday on 60 Minutes.

The president was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft about comments from 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.

“That’s true,” Mr. Obama said. “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.

The buck doesn’t stop with Clapper though. There were plenty of intel warnings from the US and Iraq of what was happening. At the same time that Obama was dismissing ISIS as a JV team, they had taken Fallujah.

And he knew that because it was the subject of the question.

Obama is still trying to shift the blame onto intelligence failures when it was in fact his policy to assume that Iraq would be fixed through a US withdrawal while ignoring everything that was going on in Iraq.

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,”

Really? Jihadist nonsense.

 

  • Destroyer-Drone

    Carver helped usher a Shiite Islamic Republic. And Obama helped establish a Sunni Islamic State.

    Both have more in common with the respective fruits of their work than one might imagine.

    • objectivefactsmatter

      Carter.

      • Destroyer-Drone

        Was probably too tired to notice the blatant typo when I wrote this.

  • wileyvet

    No, Obama, you failed to grasp what actually drives these people. Islam. Their so called Jihadi nonsense is a requirement incumbent upon ALL Muslims. It is explicit to Islam and has been since old Mo took up residence at Medina in A.D. 622. For decades Middle East “experts” have failed miserably. Hundreds of books and government reports about the “cause” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have got it wrong. Every conceivable reason has been given to explain it, except of course the actual one. Either through ignorance, blindness or an avoidance of offending Muslim sensitivities they have never stated it.

    Post 9/11 every effort has been made to avoid the obvious. It has been a tragic farce of epic proportions as security agencies and world leaders everywhere are blind to what is in plain sight. The myth of Islam as a religion of peace. The proverbial elephant in the room. I am not a conspiracy nut, but what else explains such willful ignorance, outright deception, distorting or ignoring historical truths, burying inconvenient facts all in a concerted effort to shield the public from the truth or to protect Muslims and Islam from criticism. It has been and continues to be a disgraceful travesty of such magnitude that all those guilty of perpetrating this outrage deserve to be “frog marched” to a firing squad.

    • truebearing

      I don’t buy that he underestimated Al Qaeda. He is privy to all kinds of intelligence. He armed Al Qaeda using the CIA. He used our intelligence people to undermine Mubarak to help usher in the wonderful “Arab Spring.” He has given Iran an unobstructed path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons. This crap about underestimating Al Qaeda is just part of his latest smokescreen. Did he underestimate them because they exceeded the gains he thought they’d make with the weapons he funneled to them through the CIA? Did the CIA fail him by delivering too many manpads? It’s just another lie.

      Notice how inept, prone to error, and acceptable as an alibi our apparently dreadful intelligence has become under Obama, but wasn’t under Bush? If Obama hits a bad tee shot, it was the fault of intelligence.

      • wileyvet

        Good points. However I am very skeptical of both the quality of the intelligence of late and its interpretation and application. My concern is his actual view of Islam itself, and why he has done everything to empower it, starting with his apology tour in April 2009. Has he in fact ordered all intelligence to be expunged of Islamic doctrine and insist on sanitizing his briefings of anything remotely critical. Are analysts too afraid to present anything that contradicts Obama’s beliefs or world view. Putting national intelligence aside, simple scans of the internet reveals the ugly face of Islam, yet he stays the course, ignoring it or deflecting criticism of Islam. That pathetic speech at the UN was more malarkey.

        As far as the double standard and hypocrisy in regards to the intelligence you are correct. Bush lied, yada yada. Every intelligence service in the world believed it. Clinton’s intelligence said the same thing. Quote after quote from BJ, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary all said Saddam had WMD and was a danger. Their intelligence was rock solid, yet when GWB used the same he lied. Or as Al Gore said, ” He betrayed this country, he played on our fears”. Funny how that works.

        So now as you point out cleverly, after his bad tee shot, he gets a mulligan.

        • truebearing

          I didn’t disagree with you about the diminishment of our intelligence, but even if it hadn’t been diminished, Obama would have ignored warnings about the rise of ISIS. There is no doubt our intelligence has gone downhill, along with everything else in this country. My point was that even with a diminished intelligence apparatus, Obama knew full well what was going on with ISIS.

  • M2000

    Al-Qaeda is certainly running towards us…and all we do is promote political correctness into not ridiculing them since you know, we should care more about Islam.

  • GSR

    I still say, at least for the short term, the prudent thing to do is stop Islamic immigration for say ten years. That will get their attention and just perhaps the moderates in the Middle East (if there are any!), will sieze control of the governments there and crack down on their more “devout” (read: jihadist) contingent.

    • Pete

      Democrats imported 90,000 Somalis, 100,000 iraqis and 100,000 syrians

      The Catholic & Lutheran VOLSAGS can be thanked as well. Without importing people they do not have a mission. They are just doing their thing and never asked the rest of us what wee thought.

      http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/

  • objectivefactsmatter

    What a team player.

  • Tim Remmy

    It’s easier for Obama and the Democrats to fight an imaginary “war on women” . They can play he-man protector dudley doright and save the damsel in distress.

    Fighting ISIS brings out their inner Alan Alda .

  • reyol

    This is a direct result of Obama ignoring his daily intelligence briefing. It almost doesn’t matter if a President is liberal or conservative; if they sit in the same chair and receive the same information, they should get a similar picture of what going on in the world. But Obama was probably irked by the reality presented in the intel brief and preferred a “narrative brief” coming from his trusted advisers.