Former CIA Director Woosley Accuses Obama of Acting “Chamberlin-esque” in Face of ISIS Threat


In a recent interview with Al Jazeera America, former CIA Director James Woolsey warns that the United States needs to realize it’s at war with “theocratic, totalitarian, genocidal imperialists” in ISIS and accuses President Obama of behaving “positively Chamberlin-esque,” much like the Europeans did in failing to stand up to Hitler in the years leading up to World War II.

Have to admit I agree and I was thinking the very same thing! ISIS is an extraordinarly dangerous enemy that knows no boundaries and its declared goal is turning the entire world into an Islamic caliphate and barbarically murdering anyone who doesn’t immediately convert to Islam. There can be no appeasing such an enemy and the world must join together to defeat ISIS before it’s too late!!!

Woolsey also accuses Russian President Vladimir Putin of acting much like the Nazis did in the 1930s in its military aggression against Ukraine.  In an except not featured in this clip posted on the Al Jazeera website, Woolsey says, “I think we have to begin to think of Russia  much the way we thought of them during the Cold War. Putin is behaving very much, except for there’s no Holocaust as far as we know, very much the way Hitler did between 1933 and 1939; he’s grabbing Europe a bit at a time and that’s exactly what the Nazis did.”

On the issue of ISIS, Woolsey says,  “This is a group not of just thugs or robbers; these are theocratic, totalitarian genocidal imperialists. They are establishing an empire, a caliphate and anybody who is part of it or lives within its borders and does not convert to their view of religion, they kill and sometimes horribly by burying families alive or by crucifixion and so I think that the first thing we have to do is acknowledge and understand that we’re at war. We’ve been attacked by a totalitarian regime and we have to deal with them accordingly.”

The United States has to take the threat of ISIS “as seriously as we eventually took our major wars,” he says. “So far  I think the President and the U.S. as a whole basically have been behaving somewhat like the Europeans in the 1930s, between 1933 and 1939, just before World War II. We’re being positively Chamerblin-esque in our conduct.” Woolsey was interviewed prior to President Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation on his strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS.

He says among the steps the U.S. needs to take is helping the Kurds with military capability, taking a very tough stance with Qatar to prevent wealthy Qataris from continuing to send weapons and money to ISIS, and figuring out how to pull the Sunni tribes “together into a coherent group the way we did back in ’07, ’08 when we put the surge together. I think we need to all this without putting big American units in but a few CIA people, a few special forces people to help the people who are with us get organized, I think we can do that.”

Asked whether fighting against ISIS would wind up helping brutal Syrian President Bashar al-Assad hold onto power, Woolsey says, “It’s a very big dilemma and you rightly point to it. We had a similar kind of dilemma in the beginning of World War II and we eventually decided to ally with Stalin against Hitler and it’s a good thing that we did because as awful as Stalin was, we were still only able to pull out a victory in World War II because we had worked together with him even for a time. I’m not saying we ought to try to work together with Assad but if we happen to be going against the same people and some of the same groups such as ISIS or others then I think that’s just the way the dice falls in that particular play.”