Obama admits U.S. `underestimated` IS threat

U.S. President Barack Obama admitted that his administration failed in early response to the Sunni Muslim extremist group, which is also known as ISIS. Critics including Republican Senator John McCain kept attacking by saying that the U.S. government gave IS chances to mobilize force by failing to support Syrian rebels.

In an interview with "60 Minutes," the CBS News program, on Sunday, Obama said, “(U.S. intelligence) they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria...during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you had huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos."

“(The group) was able to attract foreign fighters who believed in their jihadist nonsense and traveled everywhere from Europe to the United States to Australia to other parts of the Muslim world, converging on Syria," the president said. "And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”

Regarding what was said by the head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, "We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight," Obama said, "That`s true. That`s absolutely true.”

As Obama has admitted to failure in early response to IS, the U.S. political circle is embracing anew fresh debate over the need to deploy ground troops.

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner told an interview with ABS on the day, “If the goal is to destroy ISIS, as the president says it is, I don`t believe the strategy that he outlined will accomplish that. At the end of the day, I think it`s gonna take more than air strikes to drive them outta there...If I were the president, I probably wouldn`t have talked about what I wouldn`t do.”

CNN reported on the day that military experts in Washington, including Mark Hertling, retied Army Lieutenant General, are claiming the need to deploy ground troops.