On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel painted a dim picture of the U.S. strategy against ISIS, claiming that ISIS was not degraded, not slowing down, and that the U.S. strategy had “enormous contradictions.”
“We’re sixty-five days into this bombing campaign against ISIS,” new host Chuck Todd noted. “Is ISIS being degraded, or are they moving forward?
“They do not seem to be degraded at all…” Engel responded. “It is having an impact in that it has forced ISIS to change their targets somewhat, but it is certainly not slowing down the group.” (RELATED: NBC Journalist: John Kerry ‘Tone-Deaf’ On Kobani)
Engel then listed off what he called “enormous contradictions in the U.S. strategy that are being more apparent every day”:
Let’s start with Iraq. The Iraqi army is in no better shape now, then when it collapsed. The new Iraqi government is not instilling confidence in the people; it is not instilling confidence in the armed forces.
The U.S. spent years and years and billions of dollars to build the Iraqi Army, only to watch it collapse and hand over so many of its weapons. So it is completely unrealistic to think that now with a little bit of outside help and a lot of American goodwill that the army is going to fundamentally change…
On the other side in Syria, there are no allies on the ground. There are some Kurdish militias, but we’re not even fully backing them, we’re not consistently backing them.