NBC News correspondent Richard Engler said on Meet the Press yesterday that the growth of ISIS was "incredibly predictable" and that military commanders and former national security officials were very upset that President Obama has not come up with a plan to deal with Islamic State in Syrai.

Washington Free Beacon:

NBC’s Richard Engel told Andrea Mitchell on Meet the Press that the growth of ISIL in Iraq and Syria was “incredibly predictable.”

“We reported about it. Reporters risked their lives going into Syria to talk about this buildup of extremists in the country, yet nothing seems to have been done. And now we have a very serious situation,” said Engel.

Engel also reported that military commanders are “apoplectic” over the president’s inaction in Syria: “I speak to military commanders, I speak to former officials, and they are apoplectic. They think that this is a clear and present danger. They think something needs to be done.”

“One official said that this was a Freudian slip,” Engel continued, referring to Obama’s admission last week that he does not have a strategy yet for Syria. “That it shows how the United States does not have a policy to deal with Syria, even when you have ISIS, which has effectively become a terrorist army, roughly 20,000 strong.”

The reverberations from that single utterance continue to roil official Washington. There is tremendous concern that the president is not taking the threat seriously enough, that he is too disengaged to realize the danger.

The White House is still spinning the president's remark as a slip of the tongue - that we're trying to build a coalition to confront IS and the president has a strategy to deal with the overall situation in Syria. If that's true, no one has seen it. And if this state of affairs is deeply concerning to the people who are charged with carrying out whatever policy the president comes up with, it should be deeply concerning to us.