ISIS and the Politics of Surprise
10/03/14
Paul R. Pillar
ISIS, Middle East
"The dramatic gains by ISIS earlier this year have been labeled a “surprise” because a swift territorial advance and gruesome videotaped killings grabbed public attention."
The
recent burst of recriminations about what the U.S. intelligence
community did or did not tell the president of the United States in
advance about the rise of the extremist group sometimes called ISIS, and
about associated events in Iraq, is only a variation on some
well-established tendencies in Washington discourse. The tendency that
in recent years has, of course, become especially strongly entrenched is
that of couching any issue in the way that is best designed to bash
one's political opponents. For those determined to bash and frustrate
Barack Obama at every turn, it is a tendency that trumps everything
else. Thus we now have the curious circumstance of some of Mr. Obama's
Republican critics, who in other contexts would be at least as quick as
anyone else to come down on U.S. intelligence agencies (and most other
parts of the federal bureaucracy) like a ton of bricks, saying that the
president got good information but failed to act on it. (Some critics,
however, have tried to lower their cognitive dissonance by saying that
“everyone” could see what was coming with ISIS.)
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/isis-the-politics-surprise-11403
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