President Obama said in a “60 Minutes” interview that will air Sunday evening that the U.S. intelligence community “underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” with respect to the expansion of the ISIS terrorist group.
When host Steve Kroft asked Obama how ISIS gained control of so much territory and whether or not their rapid growth surprised him, the president laid blame on the intelligence community — and essentially excused himself from blame — for not firmly grasping the reach of ISIS in the Middle East.
“I think our head of the intelligence community Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they had underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” explained Obama.
Later, the president also admitted that the government underestimated the ability of the Iraqi army to hold its own in the Middle East.
Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in an interview earlier this month that the intelligence community did not “predict the will to fight” among the Iraqi military.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, Obama dubbed Syria the “ground zero for jihadists around the world” during the civil war in the country.
Additionally, he stressed the need for military support and political solutions in the Middle East in order to defeat ISIS.
“Part of our solution here is going to be military,” said Obama. “We just have to push them back and shrink their support 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.”
“What we also have to do is we have to come up with political solutions, in Iraq and Syria in particular,” he continued, “but in the Middle East generally, that arrives as a combination between Sunni and Shia populations that right now are the biggest cause of conflict not just in the Middle East but in the world.”
Lawmakers — like House Speaker John Boehner most recently — have expressed their skepticism of Obama’s plan to combat ISIS by primarily relying on Iraqi and Syrian forces instead of putting American boots on the ground in the Middle East.
