Tossing ‘Intelligence’ Under the Bus

When President Obama attributed the rise in Iraq of the Islamic State, or ISIS, to the failures of the U.S. intelligence community earlier this week, naming and blaming directly National Intelligence Director Gen. James Clapper, he was attempting to deflect criticism of his own incompetence. He was discussing the fact that ISIS, right under his own and the general’s noses, gained control of nearly half of the landmass of Iraq. This is the same Iraq that the United States supposedly liberated from the clutches of a dictator, strengthened as a regional military power and fortified as the Middle East’s newest democracy as a result of our invasion in 2003 and our subsequent 10-year occupation.

Many who supported the war then realize now that we were duped into it by a deceptive and shortsighted Bush administration that was looking to deflect blame for its intelligence failures of 9/11, for which, unlike the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, not a single human being in the federal government has been charged with anything. But that is a topic for another day.

ISIS captured Fallujah and Ramadi, two major cities in Iraq, eight months ago. Surely the president knew about that when it happened. He receives an intelligence briefing every day; more often than not, he prefers a written briefing rather than one where he and his briefers can zero in on problem areas in a face-to-face conversation. Yet since the February takeover of the Iraqi equivalent of Chicago and Los Angeles, the president has told the American people that ISIS is junior varsity and he had no plans to address it, and he seemed not to care about it until ISIS went over his head, so to speak, and beheaded two innocent young Americans and posted grisly videos of their horrific murders on the Internet.

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