On Saturday from the White House South Lawn, the President blamed "intelligence estimates" for not anticipating the speed with which ISIL would capture large sections of Iraq.  ISIL has been a known quantity for 9 months, since they broke from Al-Qaeda and announced their intentions. (They have been on the internet since earlier this year.). 

They have been actively recruiting on the net and archiving their victories across Iraq.  This played out daily for several weeks in the spring and was televised and covered in the media. Unfortunately, the Obama Regime was just hoping that they wouldn’t attack to the south and hoping that the Iraqis could deal with them (with the 300 hundred advisors, remember that).

The intelligence community pressed the administration before ISIL moved out of Syria and recommended strong military action both before and as ISIL was on the move. They warned of the Iraqi military not being up to par in the spring as well when we saw the Iraqi military flee as ISIL approached Mosul.  

Now ISIL has acquired and captured massive amounts of heavy weapons and an ever increasing and growing army of radicalized fighters.  Obama and his senior advisors in the White House knew very well all along what was going on and chose to ignore the crisis.  His failure to listen to military and intelligence community leaders in 2009-2010, to keep a presence of up to 30,000 U.S. military forces in Iraq to maintain stability, counter the possibility of an reemerging terror threat, and to continue to train Iraq’s army and air force was overcome by Obama’s insistent politically-driven and flawed campaign promise to pull our forces out of Iraq, regardless of the outcome and consequences. 

Further, as this crisis was developing the military and intelligence experts have been urgently calling for the White House to provide weapons and military and intelligence support for the Kurds. Once again, this President has chosen to place blame elsewhere, and once again, continues to ignore, like it has done Israel, one of our other closest allies in the region.

Jim Waurishuk

Colonel, USAF (Ret.)

Tampa, FL