U.S. underestimated ISIS threat and Iraq’s weakness: Obama

• U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview Sunday that he agrees with intelligence leaders who believe the U.S. not only underestimated the threat of terrorists seeking to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham group but also overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi army to fight.

Mr. Obama spoke with the CBS television news magazine 60 Minutes. The network released excerpts ahead of time. In the interview, Mr. Obama was asked how ISIS fighters were able to control so much land in Syria and Iraq. He said that during the war in Iraq, U.S. forces with the help of Iraq’s Sunni tribes were able to quash Al-Qaida fighters, who went “back underground.”

“During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” Mr. Obama said.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Mr. Obama called Syria ground zero for jihadis around the world. He said military force is necessary to shrink their capacity, cut off financing and eliminate the flow of foreign fighters. He has appeared less adamant about the threat in the past. In an interview earlier this year by The New Yorker, the president appeared to minimize ISIS by comparing it to a junior varsity team.

The White House emphasized on several talk shows Sunday the war against ISIS would not involve returning U.S. combat troops to the Middle East. But House Speaker John Boehner said on ABC’s This Week that some ground troops will be needed.

If others don’t step up with ground troops, the U.S. will have “no choice” about sending troops. “They intend to kill us. And if we don’t destroy them first, we’re gonna pay the price,” Mr. Boehner said.