Morell: Obama Didn’t Hit ISIS’s Oil Because He Worried About Environmental Impact

ROSE: “How do we attack that? Rather than retaking territory, attack the funding that they have, attack the ability to sell the oil. We’ve seen attacks on that oil transfer taking place now, after Paris —”
MORELL: “Yeah.”
ROSE: “— that didn’t take place before Paris — which is your original question. What should we been doing now —“
MORELL: “So this is one of the collateral damage questions, right. So prior to Paris there seemed to be a judgment, right, I don’t sit in that room any more, but there seems to be — there seem to have been a judgment that, ‘look, we don’t want to destroy these oil tankers because that’s infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore. And it’s going to create environmental damage.’ And we didn’t go after oil wells, actually heating oil wells at ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure, right?”
ROSE: “So we hit oil on trucks.”
MORELL: “So now we’re hitting oil on trucks, right. And — and maybe you get to the point where you say we have to also hit oil wells. So those are the kind of tough decisions you have to make.”