As the fight against Islamic State extremists in the Middle East accelerates, US officials acknowledge that they both underestimated the strength and fierceness of the enemy and overestimated the ability of Iraqi forces to counter the group also known as IS or ISIS or ISIL.
Those officials include President Obama himself, who says as much in a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast Sunday evening on CBS. Asked if his administration had overestimated the Iraq army’s ability to fight ISIS, Obama answered, “That’s true. That’s absolutely true.”
Similarly, Obama said, the US intelligence community had “underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” that is, the quiet buildup of the group that occurred while the US was busy fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The group essentially “went underground,” Obama said, recruiting fighters from Europe, Australia, the United States, and Muslim countries.
“Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” Obama said. “And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”
Enflamed by its own civil war as President Bashar al-Assad massacred thousands of his own people with little interference from other countries (including the US), Syria in effect became the prime breeding ground for adversaries in what seems to many Americans to be endless war.
US Deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken addressed this concern on Fox News Sunday. “What we’re not going to do is fall into the al Qaeda trap of sending hundreds of thousands of Americans back,” he said. “That’s exactly what they want – they want to bog us down, tie us down, and bleed us.”
House Speaker John Boehner, (R) of Ohio, sees the question of ground troops differently.
“At the end of the day, I think it’s going to take more than airstrikes to drive them out of there,” Boehner said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “At some point, somebody’s boots have to be on the ground.”
If no one else steps up, would you recommend putting American boots on the ground? Boehner was asked.
“We have no choice,” he replied. “These are barbarians. They intend to kill us. And if we don’t destroy them first, we’re gonna pay the price.”
Obama has said again and again that the US will not send ground troops to fight ISIS – aside from the hundreds of trainers, target spotters, and special operations units already there.
