Yesterday, we discussed President Obama's buck-passing assertion that 'they' underestimated ISIS. The 'they' that he was referring to is, of course, anyone who isn't Barack Obama. Specifically, the President is claiming that - despite at least a year of briefings to the contrary - the intel community failed to warn him that this whole "ISIS thing" was going to be an issue.
Obviously, that's ridiculous and parts of the intel community have already accused Obama of "bullshitting." Still, it's the administration's official line. So now all of the President's underlings have to get out in front of the cameras and try to sell it.
Enter State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf. She wants you, and Wolf Blitzer, to know that no one could have seen this coming. Heck. Even ISIS was shocked by the rise of ISIS.
“The president said - for a long time we’ve known about the serious threat from ISIL. But everyone - us, the Iraqis, even ISIL itself probably - was surprised by how quickly earlier this summer they were really able to take territory in Iraq.”
Wow. Following Harf's logic, ISIS was just out there, wandering around the desert, wondering if they could do anything, when they suddenly realized that they were really, really, good at slaughtering people and taking territory.
While the President, Vice President, and top Democrats were busy mocking Republican concerns about the power vacuum created by the Iraq pullout, ISIS was taking the time to discover its true potential. Forget all those briefings that warned Obama of their rise, no one could have predicted their successes because ISIS itself didn't think its members "had it in them."
“You know, assessing the will of a force to fight - the capability is one thing you can asses - but the will is a tough thing to assess.”
In essence your State Department is arguing that, even though lots of people predicted the problems ISIS would pose, the President couldn't see it coming because he was under the impression that ISIS was a bunch of lazy navel-gazers who lacked gumption.
Going forward, we need to figure out how to rate the willpower of various terrorist organizations so we'll know how seriously we should take them. ...Maybe we could have a "scale of 1 to 10" or something.
I'm sure the State Department will have a really catchy hashtag to deal with this problem soon.
