The White House is facing new questions about underestimating the threat from Islamic State militants in Iraq with the surfacing of a speech in 2011 by John Brennan, then President Obama’s counter-terrorism chief and now CIA director, in which he dismissed the danger of an Islamic caliphate as “absurd.”
“Our strategy is … shaped by a deeper understanding of al Qaeda’s goals, strategy, and tactics,” Mr. Brennan said on June 29, 2011. “I’m not talking about al Qaeda’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate. That vision is absurd, and we are not going to organize our counterterrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen. We are not going to elevate these thugs and their murderous aspirations into something larger than they are.”
Two years later, the Islamic State declared a caliphate in a territory covering northern Syria and northwestern Iraq. And while the militants don’t meet Mr. Brennan’s definition of “global domination,” they are enough of a growing threat to Iraq and the West that Mr. Obama last week ordered air strikes and a humanitarian mission to blunt the terrorist group’s swift progress.
Mr. Brennan’s remarks are similar in their dismissive tone to an interview that Mr. Obama gave in January to the New Yorker magazine. The president described the Islamic State as amateurs.
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Mr. Obama said.
But the president was sounding a different note on Saturday, when he discussed the threat posed by the militants in Iraq.
“We have to make sure that [the Islamic State] is not engaging in the actions that could cripple a country permanently,” Mr. Obama said. “There’s key infrastructure inside of Iraq that we have to be concerned about.”
He also worried aloud that the terrorists “might potentially launch attacks outside the region against Western targets and U.S. targets.”
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