Hagel Last Week: Assad Is Benefiting from Obama’s ISIS Strategy

ROSE: "Defence Secretary, Chuck Hagel calls this one of the most challenging periods in history for American leadership. In an interview yesterday at the Pentagon we asked the secretary about military action in Iraq and Syria, about ISIS militants. He calls it a long term challenge focused on destroying ISIS, not ousting Syrian President Bashar Assad."

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HAGEL: "Has Assad being --"

ROSE: "Helped?"

HAGEL: "Benefited -- helped by what we are doing -- other countries against ISIL -- he's indirectly benefiting. But here, let's review the landscape here. Why has all of this occurred? This has all occurred because over the last three years Assad, his brutality, his lack of responsible government, his legitimacy in governing, what he's done to his own people has produced this."

ROSE: "But the question is, do we have the will and the capacity to influence the events as we used to?"

HAGEL: "I think our capacity is different because the threats and the challenges are far more diffused and very -- I talked about asymmetric threats. I mean, the sophistication of ISIL, just take that for a moment. We've never seen an organization like ISIL that is so well-organized, so well-trained, so well-funded, so strategic, so brutal, so completely ruthless. We have never seen anything quite like that in one institution. And then they blend in ideology -- which will eventually lose, we get that -- and social media.  The sophistication of their social media program is something that we've never seen before. You blend all of that together, that is an incredibly powerful new threat."