Over the weekend, President Obama once again embraced his inner, bankrupt persona, denying any responsibility for the rise of ISIL.

In his “60 Minutes" interview with Steve "Softball” Kroft, Obama did what he does best: lie unabashedly and throw other people under the bus to deflect from his own failures. “If you’ll recall, Steve, you had an international network in al Qaeda between Afghanistan and Pakistan, headed by Bin Laden. And that structure we have rendered ineffective,” Obama contended.

This is quite simply, a lie. A study released by the Rand Corporation on June 4, 2014 revealed the truth. “Since 2010, there has been a 58 percent increase in the number of jihadist groups, a doubling of jihadist fighters and a tripling of attacks by al Qaeda affiliates,” the study states. “The most significant threat to the United States, the report concludes, comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Director of Intelligence James Clapper was Obama’s first victim. Kroft asked the president how ISIL ended up in control of so much territory, and if he was surprised by that reality. “Well I think, our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Really? Try this from The Long War Journal – published more than a year ago on Aug 27, 2013. “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, one of two al Qaeda affiliates operating in Syria, announced that it would coordinate with other Syrian rebel groups, including the Free Syrian Army, to take revenge for a chemical weapons attack last week in the capital that is said to have killed more than 300 people.”

The pokes a few giant holes in the president’s narrative, doesn’t it? Not only regarding knowledge about the existence of ISIL, but the president’s ongoing fantasy that the Free Syrian Army is the antidote to the head-cutters with whom they occasionally align when it’s politically expedient. And not just ISIL. “Currently, in northern Syria, Free Syrian Army units are fighting alongside the Al Nusrah Front; the ISIL; Ahrar al Sham; the Ahfad al-Rasoul Brigade…and the Islamic Kurdish Front,” the Journal adds.

But let’s dispense with such inconvenient facts and ask a far more germane question: who nominated Clapper for the job? “With four decades of service to America, Jim is one of our nation’s most experienced and most respected intelligence professionals,” Obama said in June 2010, nominating  Clapper for the position. “He possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it’s not what we want to hear.”

Whether Clapper didn’t tell, or Obama didn’t hear, the reaction to president’s assertion was swift. A senior Pentagon official familiar with the metastasis of terror in Iraq and Syria told the Daily Beast he was “flabbergasted,” insisting the president, “doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting.”

Sadly, when it comes to Obama, such deficiencies are never an either/or proposition.

The Beast further notes that “other senior intelligence officials have been warning about ISIS for months.” They include former Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA Director John Brennan and Clapper himself, all of whom warned Obama as far back as eight months ago that ISIL was a serious threat. That’s right around the time Obama himself referred to ISIL as a “javee” team.

Next under the bus, former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “When we left [Iraq], we had left them a democracy that was intact, a military that was well equipped, and the ability then to chart their own course,” Obama contended. “And that opportunity was squandered over the course of five years or so because the prime minister, Maliki, was much more interested in consolidating his Shiite base and very suspicious of the Sunnis and the Kurds, who make up the other two-thirds of the country. So what you did not see was a government that had built a sense of national unity.”

Once again, this is nothing more than pernicious nonsense. While there is some truth to his assertion that Maliki was interested in consolidating Shi'ite power after decades of Sunni domination by Hussein and his Ba'athist Party enablers, much of that animosity was quashed by the surge and the resultant “Sunni awakening.” Now that opportunity has been “squandered.”

Note that Obama wants it both ways. If sectarian divisions were increasing “over the course of five years,” that means the president was well aware of the Iraqi government’s shortcomings in 2009. Nevertheless, two years later he withdrew all American troops from Iraq, against the advice of his military advisors who recommended leaving behind at least 10,000 troops. In October 2011, Max Boot illuminated Obama’s determination to undercut the Status of Forces Agreement, so he could claim he “ended the war in Iraq” in time for the 2012 election. That would be the same 2012 election he told the public al Qaeda has been vanquished and that terror was “on the run.” Boot’s final two paragraphs predicted exactly what is occurring today:

“Iraq will increasingly find itself on its own, even though its air forces still lack the capability to defend its own airspace and its ground forces cannot carry out large-scale combined arms operations. Multiple terrorist groups also remain active, and almost as many civilians died in Iraq last year as in Afghanistan. So the end of the U.S. military mission in Iraq is a tragedy, not a triumph – and a self-inflicted one at that.”

A tragedy self-inflicted by Barack Obama, all the historical revisionism in the world notwithstanding. Even more incredibly, Obama advocated a strategy of containment, not defeat of the jihadist threat, during the interview. He insisted that “the beginning of the solution for the entire Middle East is going to be a transformation in how these countries teach their youth. What our military operations can do is to just check and roll back these networks as they appear and make sure that the time and space is provided for a new way of doing things to begin to take root. But it’s going to take some time.”

So America is going to be involved in “check and roll back” military operations while a “transformation” of Middle East youth takes root? One that hasn’t occurred over the course of centuries? And a transformation to what, exactly? Perhaps someone should alert the president that a transformation is taking place right now, as evidenced by the success of ISIL’s propaganda in drawing disaffected youths from all over the world to fight for jihad. And make no mistake: it is an effort enhanced by a president who remains totally committed to an air assault that will not finish the job, one who waits for Middle East nations to supply the boots on the ground.

That was even too much for Kroft. “What if the Iraqis can’t or won’t fight?‘ Kroft asked. "What’s the end game?” “I’m not going to speculate on failure at the moment,” Obama responded. “We’re just getting started. Let’s see how they do. I think that right now, we’ve got a campaign plan that has a strong chance for success in Iraq. I think Syria is a more challenging situation.”

No plan in the event of failure in Iraq, and Syria remains “a challenge.” PJ Media’s Andrew Klavan says it best. Obama is a “man who doesn’t know what’s important because he doesn’t know what’s true. He lives inside his own insistent fantasy world rather than the real one…It’s unfortunate the rest of us can’t live in that delightful place of the president’s imagination. We are stuck here in the mess he has made of reality, with jihad resurgent and the last, best hope of earth growing weaker by the day.”

Once again: America cannot afford the luxury of such self-inflicted, time-insensitive weakness. Every day ISIL remains a viable force, is another day the siren song of jihad grows louder and louder. Yet even now, Obama’s media cheerleading section attempts to obfuscate reality. “For Obama, a swift leap from no strategy to a full battle plan for Islamic State," blares a Washington Post headline – even as the first paragraph of the story notes that Obama has begun a military campaign "that he acknowledged is likely to far outlive his time in office.” This from the same president who ended, but didn’t win, the war in Iraq on a well-publicized schedule. Whether we can survive two more years of this pie-in-the-sky, “transformational” approach to the exponentially increasing danger of Islamic jihad – courtesy of a president as far removed from reality as his media enablers – is anyone’s guess.

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