|
 Conversely, the United States overestimated the ability of the
Iraqi army to fight the militant groups, Obama said in a "60
Minutes" interview taped on Friday, days after the U.S. president
made his case at the United Nations for action.
Citing earlier comments by James Clapper, director of national
intelligence, Obama acknowledged that U.S. intelligence
underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.
Islamic militants went underground when U.S. Marines quashed al
Qaeda in Iraq with help from Iraq's tribes, he said.
"But 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."
Obama last week expanded U.S.-led airstrikes, which began in Iraq in
August, to Syria and he has been seeking to build a wider coalition
effort to weaken Islamic State. The group has killed thousands and
beheaded at least three Westerners while seizing parts of Syria and
northwestern Iraq.
Clapper told a Washington Post columnist this month that U.S.
intelligence had underestimated Islamic State and overestimated
Iraq's army.
"I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north
coming," Clapper was quoted as saying. "I didn’t see that. It boils
down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable."
Obama outlined the military goal against Islamic State: "We just
have to push them back, and shrink their space, 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."
'GENERATIONAL CHALLENGE'
But Obama said a political solution was necessary in both Iraq and
Syria for peace in the long term.
[to top of second column] |
"I think there's going to be a generational challenge. I don't think
that this is something that's going to happen overnight," Obama
said, citing an environment in which young men "are more concerned
whether they're Shia or Sunni, rather than whether they are getting
a good education" or a good job.
Saying a solution involved "how these countries teach their youth,"
Obama said: "What our military operations can do is to just check
and roll back these (militant) networks as they appear and make sure
that the time and space is provided for a new way of doing things to
begin to take root."
Obama said he recognized the contradiction in opposing the rule of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while battling Islamic State
militants who have been fighting Assad's government.
"For Syria to remain unified, it is not possible that Assad presides
over that entire process," Obama said. "On the other hand, in terms
of immediate threats to the United States, ISIL, Khorasan Group,
those folks could kill Americans."
ISIL is the acronym the U.S. government uses to refer to the Islamic
State.
Asked about how despite assembling a large international coalition
against Islamic State, it appeared the United States was doing most
of the work, Obama replied: "That's always the case.
"America leads," he said. "We have capacity no one else has. Our
military is the best in the history of the world. And when trouble
comes up anywhere in the world, they don't call Beijing. They don't
call Moscow. They call us."
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Peter Cooney; Editing by Stephen
Powell and Eric Walsh)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
