Barack Obama admits United States underestimated Islamic State
US president says Syria is ground zero for jihadists around the world; John Boehner says US may have 'no choice' but to send in troops
US President Barack Obama acknowledged that his intelligence agencies underestimated the threat from Islamic State militants and overestimated the ability and will of Iraq's army to fight.
Questioning Obama's strategy to destroy the group, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said the US may have "no choice" but to send in troops if the mix of US-led air strikes and a ground campaign reliant on Iraqi forces, Kurdish fighters and soon-to-be trained Syrian rebels failed to achieve that goal.
Boehner, in an interview broadcast on Sunday, did agree with the White House that Obama had the power to order air strikes in Iraq and Syria, but said he believed Congress should consider a resolution authorising the use of force for this mission.
Obama described the US intelligence assessments in response to a question during a CBS interview aired on Sunday night. He was asked about how Islamic State fighters had come to control so much territory in Syria and Iraq and whether it was a surprise to him.
The president said that during the Iraq war, US military forces with the help of Iraq's Sunni tribes were able to quash al-Qaeda fighters, who went "back underground".
"During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," Obama said.
He noted that his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, had acknowledged that the US "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria".
The Obama administration has cited its intelligence weaknesses before.
At an August news conference, Obama said "there is no doubt" that Islamic State's advance "has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates" suggested it would be.
Obama called Syria ground zero for jihadists around the world, and said military force was necessary to shrink their capacity, cut off financing and eliminate the flow of foreign fighters.
The White House pushed back against Boehner's comments on ABC's about the potential need for American ground troops to confront the militants.
Asked whether he would recommend sending in Americans if no one else was able to step up, Boehner said, "We have no choice. These are barbarians. They intend to kill us. And if we don't destroy them first, we're going to pay the price."
But Obama's deputy national security adviser, Tony Blinken, said the country would not see a repeat of the Iraq war.
"Hundreds of thousands of Americans on the ground in the Middle East getting bogged down, that's exactly what al-Qaeda wants," Blinken said. "That's not what we're going to do."
