ANDREA MITCHELL:
And for more now on the ISIS threat. I'm joined by our chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, who has really been studying ISIS for quite some time in the field. And Richard, what about the President's reluctance to take the fight against ISIS to Syria?
RICHARD ENGEL:
Well, I speak to military commanders. I speak to former officials. And they are apoplectic. They think that this is a clear and present danger. They think something needs to be done. One official said that this was a Freudian slip, that it shows how the United States does not have a policy to deal with Syria.
Even when you have ISIS, which has effectively become a terrorist army, roughly 20,000 strong, about half of them foreign fighters, and incredibly well armed after two major weapons hauls. The first when ISIS took over the city of Mosul and the Iraqi Army, the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army, disgraced itself by not fighting. And the second just last week, when ISIS took over a Syrian air base.
(BEGIN TAPE)
RICHARD ENGEL:
Like it or not, the U.S. may now be forced to take action against ISIS, not only in Iraq, but also, in Syria. This, critics say, could mean helping the Assad regime, which the president said had to go.
RYAN CROCKER:
If we think that we are not in their sights, we are delusional. They have the same agenda that al-Qaeda has.
RICHARD ENGEL:
So what has the U.S. done about it? To a large degree, the administration's policy has been to ignore Syria, ignore it until the horrors there become too barbaric to stomach.
(YELLING) A year ago, that was a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, when Washington blamed the regime for gassing over 1,000 to death, including hundreds of children. The Syrian regime crossed, leapt over, in fact, the President's red line.
PRESIDENT OBAMA:
This menace must be confronted. I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress.
RICHARD ENGEL:
Instead, without Congressional support, the bombings against Assad never came. Neither did large-scale support for the Syrian opposition. In retrospect, the bombings probably would have been too little, too late to have made things better in Syria. ISIS was already on the rise. Weapons given to the opposition would very likely have ended up in the hands of radicals.
Then, after empty threats and empty promises, the administration turned away from Syria again, for another year. (CROWD NOISE) Until ISIS shocked the world by occupying large parts of Iraq and declaring a new state, the Islamic state, the caliphate. The U.S. is now flying surveillance missions over Syria, looking for targets it can attack from the air.
RYAN CROCKER:
This is not mission creep. This is establishing a vital mission for American security. And we need to do it, we need to do it yesterday.
RICHARD ENGEL:
The U.S. risk, falling into what one former official called Bashar al-Assad's trap. Assad's regime helped ISIS grow by attacking other opposition forces and rarely targeting ISIS. Assad waited patiently until ISIS pushed out almost all other more moderate groups, and is now telling the world that he's fighting a just war against terrorism. If the U.S. starts bombing ISIS in Syria, it will be helping the Syrian regime, in effect, pulling weeds out of Assad's garden, which he allowed to grow, but which have now become a global threat.
(END TAPE)
RICHARD ENGEL:
The build-up of ISIS in Iraq and Syria was incredibly predictable, Andrea. We've reported about it. Reporters risk their lives going into Syria to talk about this buildup of-- extremists in the country. Yet, nothing seemed to have been done. And now we have a very serious situation.
ANDREA MITCHELL:
Indeed. Thank you so much, Richard Engel. And for more on the military options for taking on ISIS, I'm joined by Michael Leiter, NBC national security analysts, who served as director of The National Counter-terrorism Center, Michele Flournoy, who served as under secretary of defense for policy in President Obama's first term, and she's now executive director at The Center for New American Security, and General Anthony Zinni, our former commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, and special envoy to the Middle East. His new book is Before the First Shots Are Fired: How America Can Win or Lost Off the Battlefield. Welcome all. Thanks so much. General Zinni, first to you. What we've seen is Dianne Feinstein just saying that the president is perhaps too cautious in this instance. Agreed?
ANTHONY ZINNI:
I agree with Senator Feinstein. This ISIS has committed atrocities, potential genocide. That's unacceptable. And I think that we shouldn't be so cautious. We should blunt them before their recruiting really grows, before they gain more territory.
But I would say one thing that's key to this, a lesson we should have learned in Afghanistan, even back to Vietnam, you can't give sanctuary to a potential enemy. We will have to go to Syria. If we sort of honor that border, unfortunately, they'll be allowed to rebuild, much as AQY al-Qaeda in Iraq morphed into this ISIS.