‘Aim Before You Shoot’: Obama Blames Bush for Rise of ISIS
OBAMA: "ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion which is an example of unintended consequences -- which is why we should generally aim before we shoot. We've got a sixty country coalition. We will slowly push back ISIL out of Iraq. I'm confident that will happen.
But what I'm worried about and what we have to stay worried about is even if ISIL is defeated is the underlying problem of disaffected Sunnis around the world but particularly in some of these areas, including Libya, including Yemen, where a young man was growing up and has no education, has no prospects for the future, is looking around. And the one way that he can get validation power respect is if he's a fighter. And this looks like the toughest gang around so let me affiliate with them. And now you're giving me a religious rationale for doing this.
That's a problem we're going to have generally and we can't keep on thinking about counter-terrorism and security as entirely separate from diplomacy, development, education -- all these things that are considered soft but in fact are vital to our national security. And we do not fund those. If you ask the average person, 'How much do we spend on foreign aid?' They will say, ‘25 percent of the federal budget.' Well, it's little over 1 percent. We should be thinking about making investments there that ultimately save us from having to send our young men and women to fight or having folks come here and doing great harm.”