The rise of the brutal Islamic State group can partly be blamed on US President Barack Obama’s decision against arming moderate Syrian rebels far earlier, former US secretary of defense Leon Panetta said.
It comes after the US Congress on Thursday passed Obama’s plan to train and arm moderate Syrian rebels to battle the extremists, a key plank of his strategy to smash the terrorists formerly known as the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL).
Panetta told CBS’ television’s 60 Minutes news program in an interview aired on Sunday that he and then-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton had urged Obama in 2012 to arm moderate Syrian rebels against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“I think the president’s concern, and I understand it, was that he had a fear that if we started providing weapons, we wouldn’t know where those weapons would wind up,” Panetta said.
He was US secretary of defense when the US pulled out of Iraq in 2011.
“My view was: You have to begin somewhere,” added Panetta, also a former CIA director.
Asked if not arming them had been a mistake, he replied: “I think that would have helped. And I think in part, we pay the price for not doing that in what we see happening with [ISIL].”
Panetta said that it would take “a long time” to defeat the group.
“And I think the American people need to know it’s going to take a long time,” he said, describing Iraq’s failure to stem the militant tide “a tragic story.”
Panetta said he had not been confident that pulling US forces out of Iraq in 2011 was the right thing to do.
“No, I wasn’t. I really thought that it was important for us to maintain a presence in Iraq,” he said.
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