Former Ambassador to Iraq: Obama Ignored ISIS Because He Wanted out of Iraq

MACCALLUM: "Why do you think the president resisted acting earlier on this whole thing?"

JEFFREY: "I don’t think that’s fully clear. I think that he has seen, as presidents before him, that the Middle East, as I said, is a mess; that there is no way to seemingly from outside fix it for good as we’ve been successful, for example, in Eastern Europe or in parts of East Asia. So, therefore, it’s better to have a hands-off policy. That would work if the nations of the region were able to take care of their security, but they absolutely are not. And if their security’s threatened, ours is because of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, our allies, and the flow of oil. Those are President Obama’s words, not mine, on why the Middle East is so important, and it’s now being threatened."

MACCALLUM: "Do you believe that he turned a blind eye to it because he didn’t want to be there anymore because he had run on pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, which we’ve now completed doing as well, and that if there was something going wrong there, he didn’t really want to know about it? That's what he’s been accused of, being detached."

JEFFREY: "I wouldn’t put it quite that strongly, but I do think he felt that there isn't that much we could do in that if we led from behind, to quote him on Libya, others would step up to the plate and take the lead. But that’s not how that part of the world works. If we are not in the lead, if we’re not showing leadership, if we’re not putting skin in the game, so to speak, we will not get the Arab countries, we'll not get Turkey, we will not get NATO to stand behind us. We’re doing that much better now, but it’s very late."

MACCALLUM: "If we're going to look back at that  moment as a pivotal moment when ISIS could have been contained, could have been stopped, you know, years from now and say, that was a huge mistake. And what does the world look like, you know, down the road because of it, in your opinion?"

JEFFREY: "Well, I do think that we are, first of all, we are containing ISIS. I think it’s going to be very, very difficult to, at this point, destroy ISIS which is our professed goal. But had we been able to act with a very difficult, to be honest, Iraqi government after January, we might have stopped the seizure of Fallujah, and ISIS would have been more contained in Syria rather than sweeping into Iraq as it has. But, you know, that’s reinventing history to one degree. But right now, looking to the future, we have to do a lot more to go after this organization. We cannot contain it, we have to destroy it."