Republican lawmakers on Monday rejected President Obama’s claim in a “60 Minutes” interview that his intelligence advisers “underestimated” the growing terrorism threat in the Middle East.
Sen. John McCain pushed back the hardest against Obama, telling CNN’s “New Day” morning program that Obama was advised to arm Syrian moderates to stop terrorist groups from proliferating in the region.
“We predicted this an watched it,” the Arizona Republican said on the show, adding that leaving some ground troops behind in Iraq would have helped to stabilize the region.
Obama, McCain said, “overruled” his top national security team when they advised him to arm the Syrian rebels.
“If we had armed the Free Syrian Army then, the situation on the ground would be dramatically different now,” McCain said.
On CBS’ “This Morning,” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the former Republican vice presidential nominee, said Obama’s goal was to remove all U.S. forces, even though he was advised to obtain an agreement with Iraq to leave some troops their to maintain stability.
“I think he just wanted to get out of the Middle East and wash his hands of this,” Ryan said, adding, “We didn’t do it, I think, because the president wanted a precipitous withdrawal from the region. And that precipitous withdrawal created a vacuum which in part gave us the situation we have right now.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., appearing on CNN, countered Obama’s claim with his own.
“I happen to know that in Baghdad the request was made from our embassy for strikes early on against [the Islamic State] as they were coming over the border, and this wasn’t unknown by the administration,” Royce said.
Royce, who said both then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus “urged action” in the region at the time, said Obama’s decision not to get involved in the matter “was a political failure.”
On “60 Minutes,” correspondent Steve Kroft asked Obama how the Islamic terrorists “end up where they are in control of so much territory?”
Obama responded, “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”
