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Obama: I Underestimated Al Qaeda
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 28, 2014 @ 1:32 pm In The Point | 13 Comments
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.
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