dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

>White House micro-managers have put such heavy political restrictions on air strikes to limit possible civilian casualties that up to three quarters of U.S. warplanes return to bases without dropping their bombs.

>The air campaign is handicapped by the most restrictive rules of engagement of any U.S. air operation in history. As a result, ISIS has been hit by only a “drizzle” of U.S. air strikes.

>From the beginning, the Obama administration misunderstood and underestimated the threat posed by al-Qaeda and its ISIS offshoot in Iraq. >Obama allowed short-term political interests to trump long-term national security considerations when he abruptly ended the U.S. troop presence in Iraq in Dec. 2011.

>This deprived the Iraqi government of intelligence, military training, counterterrorism, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets and allowed ISIS (then called Al-Qaeda in Iraq) to grow in a more permissive environment.

>Obama downplayed the threat of ISIS, famously discounting it as a “J.V. team” in a January 2014 interview in the New Yorker.

>This complacent disdain was exposed as wishful thinking when ISIS seized Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, in June 2014.

>The administration’s slow-motion approach to addressing the threat of ISIS has been criticized not only by members of both parties in Congress, but also within the Pentagon.

>A frustrated Pentagon official told a reporter from the Daily Beast last week, “Our hands are tied. You want us to do more, then go talk to those guys across the river,” a reference to the White House, which has micromanaged the anti-ISIS campaign and done a poor job of it.