“I think we have probably underestimated how deep the hole is we dug ourselves in” Iraq, said former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter, who said that the whole region, not just Iraq, is “melting down.”
Leiter said the U.S. underestimated “how weak the government structure in Iraq was, how weak the will to fight has been, and how much it’s going to take to get the Iraqis back up to par.”
Leiter was responding on CNN’s “State of the Union” to whether the Obama administration “has been too slow to confront” the Islamic State “threat in a serious way” after Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s second largest province, fell into their hands last weekend.
“Similarly, I think we’ve underestimated the problems we have in Syria,” Leiter continued. “How weak our situation is there and increasingly I think we have underestimated how alienated many of our Sunni allies feel in the region.”
“So I think on a number of fronts we need to be much more forceful and we need now to be much more aggressive,” he said. “Ramadi is simply the best current illustration of that.”
“Is the strategy in a state of disrepair? How do we fix this?” asked the host.
“I agree with the fundamental premise that we, the United States, cannot fix this in a sustainable way by ourselves. Ultimately, whatever victories we help the Iraqis achieve will have to be sustained by the Iraqis,” said Michele Flournoy, under secretary of defense from 2009 to 2012.
She added that the U.S. has “under-resourced the strategy” and needs to provide more training and advising “down to the battalion level.”
Flournoy said the U.S isn’t doing what’s necessary because there’s “major hesitation” to get “too deeply involved in Iraq again” despite the Islamic State threat in Iraq and Syria.
The whole region, not just Iraq, is “melting down,” said Leiter, citing Islamic State terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Libya that are “really destabilizing the region.”
“This isn’t about Iraq. This isn’t about Syria,” continued Leiter. “This is about a regional conflagration we have to try to put out.”
He added that the threat to the U.S. is real and “we’re well past that point” of treating this as a regional conflict and “we have to be more forceful about it now.”
