CBS Panel Blasts ‘Disconnect’ on Display in Obama’s SOTU

CROWLEY: “And I think it just came faster and harder than we expected. The government was more fragile than we expected. And now, those counter terror operations against al Qaeda, as a result of the government basically collapsing; appear to be on hold, or close to it. And that’s — that has real consequences for American security.”
SCHIEFFER: “Jeffrey Goldberg, but that’s the way it always seems to be lately. It always happens and then we’re surprised.”
GOLDBERG: “Right. I mean Mosul fell in — in Iraq to ISIS and we were shocked. People said it was coming for a year before that. There’s a — the broader question here is that what we see over and over and over again in the greater Middle East is more and more countries are becoming ungoverned spaces. Yemen has always had an al Qaeda problem, but now the entire country could fall under the control of a group that can use that territory to plot attacks against America. We have that across a broad swath of Iraq and Syria right now. Obviously, Pakistan and Afghanistan all right problematic. And so — Libya, of course, is collapsing on itself. So we have a situation in which the president could be leaving office in January of 2017 with hundreds of thousands of square miles of the greater Middle East under the control of terrorists plotting against the West. A terrible problem to have.”
SCHIEFFER: “Susan, is this an example of what the president’s critics are calling leading from behind?”
PAGE: “Well, it could be. And, you know, the president would very much like to talk about how the economy is getting better and how the Affordable Care Act is working for — for some Americans. But he is forced to deal over and over and over again with these foreign policy crises. And we heard not only criticism from Senator McCain in your interview, but from Senator Feinstein, another Democrat, saying — expressing concern about the fact that intelligence failures here, in Ukraine and elsewhere.”
MILBANK: “And --”
SCHIEFFER: “Do you — go ahead, Dana.”
MILBANK: “And think about the extraordinary disconnect we saw this week. So we get — we began with a State of the Union Address that was about broadband and community colleges. You know, he didn’t mention the word al Qaeda. He certainly didn’t mention Saudi Arabia or Yemen. He gave all of, I think, 65 words to counterterrorism at all. And then you see, it’s been completely overtaken. So I think as the president said Tuesday night, he wants to turn the page. He’s saying the crisis, the shadow of crisis has past. But you can’t just make it so by saying it. And you see them sucked back in by Islamic State and the beheading, sucked back in by the Saudi king’s death and sucked back in by Yemen and now Egypt.”
DICKERSON: “And also in the State of the Union the president talked about his foreign policy as being deliberate, measured, a little bit smarter than maybe his critics had suggested. But what those critics are now saying is this deliberation that the president boasted about in his State of the Union — there is a kind of a asleep-at-the-switch quality. He had mentioned Yemen when he was talking about U.S. operations in Iraq and Syria. He held Yemen up as the model. And so what their critics are now saying is, wait, you’re holding up a country as a model that has now fallen. You just are not aware of what is going on. They also point to other instances where he referred to ISIS, the threat from those kinds of terrorists, as being like the JV team. And that’s where this is particularly damaging because it’s a question of really whether the administration knows what is going on.”