During Monday's edition of the Cable News Network program At This Hour With Berman and Bolduan, anchors John Berman and Kate Bolduan played a clip of Barack Obama admitting that he still has no complete strategy to defeat ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Noting that the president said almost the same thing about the same subject last year, Berman called Obama's comments “surprising,” and Bolduan stated that “he is really opening himself up to criticism, especially ... in light of the continued gains by ISIS.”
During the video segment, Barack Obama said:
One of the areas where we're going to have to improve is the speed at which we're training Iraqi forces.
We don't yet have a complete strategy because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well: about how the improvement takes place, how that training takes place. And so, the details of that are not yet worked out.
Berman then stated: “I want to talk more about this” because “I don’t know what’s more notable -- that the U.S. doesn’t have a strategy, or a complete strategy, to train Iraqi forces to battle ISIS in Iraq or that the president used those words again -- ‘no complete strategy’ -- because this is something he was roundly criticized for” last year.
“We are all these months later, and there’s still no strategy?” he asked.
Guest Fareed Zakaria, the host of CNN's flagship foreign affairs program, had a quick response. “I think that the problem is this: We think of this as a technocratic problem. Why can't we train these troops faster? Why can't we get them more arms? Why can't we, you know, ramp up the readiness?”
Instead, “the problem is political,” Zakaria noted. “The Iraqi army represents a government that is seen as a Shiite government by the Sunnis. Remember, the Sunnis are the guys that ISIS draws its recruits from.”
“So if you don’t change the composition of the army, if you don’t … make concessions to the Sunnis, bring them into the government, then you’re building up what is going to be seen by the Sunnis as a Shiite army,” the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS asserted.
“The fact that you’re training them and equipping them, all great,” Zakaria stated. “But when they go in there, the Sunnis are going to say ‘We prefer ISIS to this,’ and that’s what’s been happening for the last year or two.”
Bolduan joined the discussion by defending Obama:
Right away, I’m sure president Obama even knew himself that if he -- whatever -- what he was trying to say, he did not say it correctly.
By saying ‘We do not have a complete strategy,’ he is really opening himself up to criticism, especially when you see, in light of the continued gains by ISIS, and the president continuing to say that we have temporary setbacks, but we will be ultimately successful. How, if you at this point, this far in, don’t have a complete strategy?”
Zakaria then stated that the U.S. government has to be careful not to criticize the Iraqis too much.
“Remember that Ash Carter, when he was the secretary of defense, when asked why Ramadi fell, he said: 'Well, let's face it. The Iraqi army -- which vastly outnumbered ISIS -- just didn't have the will to fight.'”
Again stressing the political aspect of the situation, Zakaria noted: “You have an army that is not seen as representative of the whole country. The Sunnis don't want to fight with it. Probably, many of them want to fight against it.”
Berman concluded the segment by noting: “The president did say, in fact, there's more capacity to train Iraqi troops right now than are actually being taken advantage of by the Iraqis themselves.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, Obama said that “we don't have a strategy yet” during a news conference in late August.
During the following day's edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe program, co-host Joe Scarborough defended the president's comment as a strategy that “when you were weak, you make your enemies think you were strong. When you were strong, you make your enemies think you were weak.”
Also leaping to Obama's defense was Josh Gerstein of the Politico website, who claimed that “We don’t have a strategy yet” was just an "awkward choice of words" and an "inartful phrase."
Soon after, NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel ripped into the concept that Obama has no strategy to combat ISIS terrorists, calling that notion “quite ridiculous."
Someone apparently forgot to tell Berman and Bolduan that the “no strategy yet” comment was merely an “inartful phrase” and “quite ridiculous.” We can only guess what Obama's defenders would say if a Republican president did the same thing.
