Wall Street Journal Editorial –
The CIA chief gives the Senate the bad news that Obama won’t.
CIA Director John Brennan on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on June 16. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
President Obama emerged from a meeting with his national-security team on Tuesday to lecture Republicans for their moral failures. He also found time to mention that his antiterror strategy is “making significant progress” despite the attack in Orlando and that the Islamic State “is under more pressure than ever before.” So it fell to CIA Director John Brennan on Thursday to backfill the bad news that Mr. Obama didn’t mention.
Mr. Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee in his prepared remarks that ISIS remains “a formidable, resilient and largely cohesive enemy.” He invoked the progress Mr. Obama did, which includes liberating ISIS-held terrain, targeting key leaders and a financial sting. Still, he observed that “our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.”
So mull that over. After nearly two years of the U.S.-led campaign, Islamic State poses the same risk to civilians world-wide as it did before. “The group would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly,” Mr. Brennan said.
Mr. Brennan also warned that Islamic State is likely to rely more on guerilla tactics and step up directed strikes like Paris and Brussels to retaliate for whatever gains the coalition has made. ISIS possesses “a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West,” he said, who could infiltrate “refugee flows, smuggling routes and legitimate means of travel.”
Perhaps the scariest part of Mr. Brennan’s testimony is that Islamic State is becoming a more established organization that coordinates with its foreign affiliates, such as the Libyan branch and Sinai franchises. This means that whatever happens on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, ISIS could maintain the strength to continue to inspire the same terror that hit Orlando and San Bernardino. What passes as good news is that “the Afghan-Pakistan branch has struggled to maintain its cohesion, in part because of competition with the Taliban.”
One inference from these comments is that the slow pace of anti-ISIS attrition has allowed the organization to consolidate into a more difficult adversary for the next President to defeat. Mr. Brennan said “there is broad agreement in the international community on the seriousness of the threat,” but there seems to be some disagreement within the Obama Administration, starting with Mr. Obama.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/brennans-isis-warning-1466118933?mod=djemMER
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