Former CIA officer John Maguire revealed this week that the CIA was blindsided by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which now controls so much of Syria and Iraq and has designs on a great deal more territory. Maguire attributed the CIA’s underestimating of ISIL’s threat to The Company’s reduced presence in Iraq: “This is a glaring example of the erosion of our street craft and our tradecraft and our capability to operate in a hard place. The U.S. taxpayer is not getting their money’s worth.” But that isn’t the whole story. Another reason why the CIA was completely surprised by ISIL’s advance was because the Obama Administration has so thoroughly deemphasized the jihad threat, and loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that al Qaeda was the only jihad group – and was, for its part, “on the ropes.” ISIL, an offshoot of al Qaeda in a country where Obama was in a hurry to declare victory and get out was unlikely to be the focus of sustained or serious analysis. The willful ignorance is all-pervasive. It is a fundamental dogma of our age that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Western countries are enthusiastic democratic pluralists who reject and abhor not only jihad terrorism, but the elements of Sharia that are at variance with otherwise universally held principles of human rights. This dogma keeps running up against the buzz-saw of reality, but that never seems to make a difference to authorities.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 18:08:38 +0000