A friend brings to my attention this New York Times piece:
By late last year, classified American intelligence reports painted an increasingly ominous picture of a growing threat from Sunni extremists in Syria, according to senior intelligence and military officials. Just as worrisome, they said, were reports of deteriorating readiness and morale among troops next door in Iraq.
But the reports, they said, generated little attention in a White House consumed with multiple brush fires and reluctant to be drawn back into Iraq. “Some of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just didn’t pay attention to it,” said a senior American intelligence official. “They were preoccupied with other crises,” the official added. “This just wasn’t a big priority.”
He comments:
Look, if you publicly throw the intel community under the bus, they’re going to come back at you. They have better access to the press. They have careerists with longstanding media relationships that they know how to work and how to shape their stories….Plus, you’re giving Republicans wonderful fuel for their absolute strongest subject — bar none — national security: Obama is fighting (insert intelligence community / generals / Secret Service / other military service), more than ISIS.
The idiocy of picking this fight in public is pretty unnerving frankly.
There’s not much point in dwelling on this forever, but Obama’s comment blaming the intel community for misjudging ISIS absolutely blanketed every news outlet in the country last night. It really does make you wonder what’s going on over in the West Wing. Was Obama’s comment on Sunday just a dumb mistake? Does he really have contempt for the intelligence community? Did he somehow think he could get away with blaming them and not getting any blowback? Or what?
