Obama Lays Blame For Missing Rise Of ISIS On “That Guy”

by William Teach | September 29, 2014 8:37 am

As Glenn Reynolds[1] notes “When things go well, it’s always “I, me, mine” with this guy. When things go badly, it’s always “they” who screwed up.” This dovetails perfectly with my notation of Liberals always blaming[2] Someone Else, That Guy

(The Hill[3]) President Obama largely blamed the United States’ intelligence community in an interview broadcast Sunday for giving an incorrect assessment of the capabilities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said on CBS’s “”60 Minutes.”

Obama said ISIS, also known as ISIL, went “underground” when United States forces fought al Qaeda in Iraq in the last decade.

That, along with Syria’s civil war, allowed ISIS to regroup and recruit fighters from all over the world, including Europe, the United States, Australia and the Muslim world, Obama said in an excerpt from the interview. The full interview with Steve Kroft will air Sunday night.

“And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world,” Obama said of Syria.

See? It’s Someone Else’s fault. It certainly couldn’t have been missed[4] by “one of the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence in the world”.

Perhaps some in the US intelligence community did miss it. The Pentagon certainly didn’t. They’ve been warning[5] about ISIS in the Presidential Daily Briefings for well over a year about the danger. Those are the same PDBs that Obama refuses to be briefed on, he instead simply reads them over (supposedly) by himself. The Daily Beast[6], covering the same friendly 60 Minutes interview as The Hill does, notes

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.

And while James Clapper did tell the Washington Post recently that he somewhat underestimated ISIS, other intelligence officials were giving testimony to Congress in January and February about the threat of ISIS. Clapper himself warned of the terrorist group during those hearings.

Obama was warned time and time again what a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq[7] could lead to, virtually on Day 1.

BTW, whatever happened to that gem Obama liked to throw around[8], “The buck stops with me”?

There’s also this gem, via the Washington Post[9] article on the interview

“What we also have to do is, we have to come up with political solutions in Iraq and Syria in particular, but in the Middle East generally, that arise in an accommodation between Sunni and Shia populations that right now are the biggest cause of conflict, not just in the Middle East, but in the world,” he said.

I truly hope that this is just Politician Speak, rather than something he really believes, because it’s wholly deluded.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove[10]. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach[11].