Obama: US 'underestimated' IS threat

The United States not only underestimated the threat posed by "Islamic State" militants, but it also overestimated the ability and desire of the regular Iraqi army to fight, US President Barack Obama said in an interview with the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" on Sunday.

"I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," Obama said, referring to his national intelligence director.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Clapper also mentioned that he overestimated the Iraqi army's will to battle the "Islamic State" (IS) militants.

"I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming," Clapper said. "I didn't see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable."

Reversed assessment

The admission of the intelligence failures marks a reversal for President Obama, who earlier had compared the IS to a junior university basketball team in an interview with The New Yorker magazine.

"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 the chaos," Obama told CBS.

Obama went on to call Syria, “ground zero for jihadists around the world,” and called for military force to degrade their ability to conduct operations, cut off their financing and halt the flow of foreign fighters coming into Syria. The White House emphasized that the war against IS would not necessitate US ground troops being deployed to Syria and Iraq.

"We're not gonna repeat what we did before," US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said Sunday. "Hundreds of thousands of Americans on the ground in the Middle East getting bogged down, that's exactly what al Qaeda wants," he said.

bw/ipj (AP, Reuters, AFP)