West Point Report: Obama Watched Islamic State Grow

vis: Investors.com
War On Terror: A new report from the West Point counterterrorism center says the administration ignored warning signs as the Islamic State grew and trained over a four-year period paralleling our withdrawal from Iraq.
As President Obama dithers about whether to strike the Islamic State's sanctuary in Syria, a report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point shows how we got to this point. Obama simply overlooked the "JV" team until it was ready for terrorism's Pro Bowl.
Instead, he was focused on getting us out of Iraq and creating a power vacuum that the terrorist group was all too willing to fill.
"ISIL did not suddenly become effective in early June 2014," the report states. "It has been steadily strengthening and actively shaping the future operating environment for four years."

The Islamic State's rapid expansion into Iraq was "the result of years of patient preparatory operations," wrote the report's author, Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
IS' early steps were not unobserved. We could have stopped IS long before it became the threat it is today.
The report notes how IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, once held by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca in Iraq, "re-booted" the group in 2010 into a "highly motivated cadre of quality light infantry forces" that began with a nationwide campaign of car bombings in Iraq through 2013.
Its "blitzkrieg" into Iraq was due less to the failure of Iraqi forces than to IS' methodical training, preparation and planning — sort of like the Wehrmacht's advance into France in 1940.

What can be drawn from this report is that the Islamic State could have been stopped in its infancy by a president who was busy drawing red lines in Syria using vanishing ink. The "cancer" that the administration now speaks of could have been surgically removed in its early stages as it trained and prepared in Syria.
As Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, noted in a hearing last month, Iraq had been pleading for U.S. drone strikes against IS since August 2013.
Bloomberg News noted in an August 2013 report that Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari had arrived in Washington seeking "U.S. advisers, air surveillance, or even drone strikes" to deal with the growing IS threat.
Zebari returned home empty-handed, ignored by an Obama administration more intent on keeping a campaign promise to withdraw from Iraq than in dealing with the new terror threat. Zebari's requests were apparently lost between all those fundraisers and rounds of golf.