Opinion Polls Square with Leon Panetta's Revelations

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll shows that 72% of Americans believe US troops will eventually be fighting ISIS on the ground. In expanding airstrikes from Iraq into Syria, President Barack Obama has insisted that the United States will not be involved in another ground war in the Middle East. Obama's plan is to use regional troops, including the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Free Syrian Army rebels. But the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll shows that the public is not buying into Obama's promise. Of those surveyed, only 45% believe using US ground troops is a good idea and 37% oppose the idea. In September, the President told a US military group : "As your commander-in-chief, I will not commit you and the rest of our Armed Forces to fighting another ground war in Iraq. After a decade of massive ground deployments, it is more effective to use our unique capabilities in support of partners on the ground so they can secure their own countries' futures. And that's the only solution that will succeed over the long term." But the new polls shows only 20% believe American ground troops will not be deployed to Iraq again. ~~~~~ In a closely related issue, another survey, the Associated Press-GfK poll, shows that half of Americans think there's a high risk of a terrorist attack on US soil. An additional 32% say the nation is at moderate risk of a terrorist attack and 12% say it faces a low risk of terror attacks. Yet only a third are closely following news of US airstrikes in the Middle East, although most people asked in the Associated Press-GfK poll think the airstrikes are a good idea. Two-thirds of those questioned for the Associated Press-GfK poll say they favor the offensive by the US and allies. And, despite more than a decade of costly war, about one-third favor going beyond that and putting American military boots on the ground in Iraq or Syria, while one-third say they are opposed to the idea, and about one-fourth say they neither favor nor oppose it. Americans are split on how Obama is handling the terrorist threat and specifically the threat posed by ISIS. About half approve and about half disapprove of Obama's actions to confront the threat. Still, those figures are better than Obama's approval ratings for handling top domestic issues. Just 40% approve of his handling of the economy, 41% approve of his work on health care and 34% approve of the way he's handling immigration. These polls were taken before the two following negative reports about the Obama inner circle and the President hit the media. ~~~~~ FIRST, on September 13, the New York Times broke the news that American officials said "the group called Khorasan had emerged in the past year as the cell in Syria that may be the most intent" on striking the United States homeland. But foreign policy analysts and experts say the term "Khorasan group" is nothing more than a name created by the Obama administration. "What is being discussed is not a 'new terrorist group,' but rather a specialized cell that has gradually been established within, or on, the fringes of an already existing al-Qaida franchise, the so-called Nusra Front," said Aron Lund of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In fact, Lund says that the "label has simply been invented for convenience by US intelligence or adopted from informal references within the Nusra Front to these men as being, for example, 'our brothers from Khorasan' [it's the name of a region in NE Iran]." But "Khorasan" has gained popularity with administration officials and President Obama. On September 23, Obama was talking about airstrikes in Syria when he said that the US "also took strikes to disrupt plotting against the United States and our allies by seasoned al-Qaida operatives in Syria who are known as the Khorasan group." The Pentagon also used the term when it announced on the same day that the US had targeted other groups in Syria to disrupt imminent attack plotting by "a network of seasoned al-Qaida veterans - sometimes referred to as the Khorasan group" - that had sought refuge in Syria. But other defense experts have no idea who the new group was. Imran Khan, a journalist for Al Jazeera based in Qatar, said he called contacts in the region to find out who the group was : "To say I drew a blank would be an understatement. Reactions ranged from a hearty laugh to confusion. The name was new," he writes. Khan even called a source who openly supports ISIS and is a veteran of Jihad in Afghanistan who responded, "Khorasan? I don't know that name. I don't know who they are." Khan added : "What it clearly isn't is a name that Jihadists know or use." Intelligence experts were also puzzled about the emergence of the Khorasan group. Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst, told Time magazine : "I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency." Even if the Khorasan group is simply a new name to describe an old threat, Lund says using it "makes no sense either in Arabic or any other language." -- Perhaps the reason the term "Khorasan" was used by President Obama and his advisors was to help establish the scenario that America is in real danger of attack from terrorists, including those we don't even know about yet -- to avoid using Nusrah? to show how hard the White House is working? to convince Congress to agree to greater spending? to excuse Obama's slow uptake in Iraq and Syria by suggesting that he STILL doesn't have all the facts. ~~~~~ SECOND, adding fuel to the fire burning around the President's refusal to accept or act on the real facts in Iraq and Syria, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes in his forthcoming memoir, "Worthy Fights" that President Obama rejected multiple warnings that Iraq might slide back into anarchy and become a terrorist haven without a substantial US troop force in place after 2011. In an excerpt published in Time, Panetta writes that he was among those arguing forcefully for some troops to remain to help protect gains that the US had paid dearly for in eight years of fighting. But he writes that "those on our side viewed the White House as so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests." Many critics of the President's pullout have blamed his decision for the chaos engulfing Iraq today, with ISIS laying siege to that country, as well as Syria. "Worthy Fights" details the failure to get a status-of-forces deal that would have allowed a force to remain, and with immunity from prosecution by Iraqis. "We had leverage," Panetta writes of the negotiations with Iraq's government, led by then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "We could, for instance, have threatened to withdraw reconstruction aid to Iraq...," Panetta writes. But with the December 2011 exit date approaching, Panetta writes that to his own "frustration," the White House didn't seem to have its heart in a troop deal with al-Maliki. The White House "coordinated the negotiations but never really lead them," writes Panetta, adding that "without the Preisdent's active advocacy, al-Maliki was allowed to slip away." The last US troops left Iraq on Dec. 18, 2011. "To this day," Panetta writes, "I believe that a small US troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaida’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country." ~~~~~ Dear readers, these latest polls tell us that average Americans also know what the American Congress and other leaders, as well as the rest of the world, have been trying to convince Barack Obama about for some time -- going after ISIS in its own backyard is the right approach IF a US ground troop follow-up is part of the strategy. Americans also know they are at risk to a terrorist attack in America. And we now have the weighty voice of Leon Panetta saying that Obama has all along been so obsessed with getting out of Iraq that he is responsible for the collapse of Iraq and for the fallout in Syria. ~~~~~ And we have just got the news of another beheading. ISIS has released a video showing the murder of Alan Henning, the British taxi driver kidnapped while helping Syrians displaced by the civil war. Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family. Rest in Peace.