“Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting.” Plus: Boehner Says Yes to Ground Troops.

Well, that didn’t
take long. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) has signaled
that it may be inevitable that American troops will be fighting the
Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.
From an ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos
yesterday:

“If I were the president, [said Boehner,] “I probably
wouldn’t have talked about what I wouldn’t do — and maybe we can
get enough of those forces trained to get them on the battlefield,
but somebody’s boots have to be there.”

“If no one else will step up, would you recommend putting
American boots on the ground?” Stephanopoulos pressed.

“We have no choice,” Boehner warned. “These are barbarians. They
intend to kill us, and if we don’t destroy them first, we’re going
to pay the price.”

More here. 

Needless to say, Boehner is also quite happy not to actually
demand that Congress actually vote on current actions in the
region, saying that he agrees with Obama that previous
authorizations to use military force cover everything OK. Yet he’d
“be happy to” call Congress back into session for a vote if the
president requested it.

While we puzzle over the twin awfulness of Boehner’s position,
let’s not forget the
serious threat inflation at work here. To pretend that ISIS is
an existential threat to the United States, or that it has the
capacity to actually do harm to us in any serious way is simply
wrong. ISIS is a problem for Iraq and Syria and its geographic
neighbors—it isn’t for us.

And that this latest round of action in the Middle East is
starting off under a cloud of stupid. President Obama acknowledged
to 60 Minutes that U.S. intelligience
had both overestimated the resolve and capabilities of Iraqi troops
while underestimating the abilities of ISIS.

Which would be
troubling enough but gets even murkier when you consider Eli Lake’s
must-read story at The Daily Beast. It’s simply not true,
reports Lake:

One former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the
threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was
flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence
he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official
said.

More here.

So we’ve got a president who is either incompetent or lying and
a speaker
whose party is calling out the president for weakness when it
comes to war-making and is willing to put U.S. troops on the ground
as long as they don’t have to, you know, vote on it.

This is not going to turn out well.