Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Brookes fears America will suffer from what he perceives as President Barack Obama's lackluster command of policy in the Middle East.
"When you're talking about Iraq or Syria, you're talking about a viper's nest," Brookes said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"This is very, very dangerous. They are dangerous individuals and groups whether you're talking about the government of Bashar Assad or Jabhat al-Nusra, which is an al-Qaida group, or ISIS or any of the other Islamist groups.
"This has gotten really bad and we all may pay a price for the president's lack of attention to what's going on in that part of the world."
Brookes, now a senior fellow of National Security Affairs at The Heritage Foundation, said Americans should be concerned as to whether the Obama administration is up fighting the Islamic State (ISIS).
"We had the president telling us al-Qaida was on the run…. We had the president saying that ISIS a few months ago was a junior varsity. We left Syria as self-relying and secure," he said.
"There's a lot of reasons to be concerned about the lines that they've been feeding us and whether they're up to dealing with this major threat going all the way back to Benghazi and before that."
Brookes believes the commander-in-chief was very uncomfortable last week as he addressed the nation on how the U.S. would take on ISIS.
"The last place the president wanted to be last Wednesday night was standing up there telling America we have a terrorism problem," Brookes said.
"That runs completely counter to the narrative he's tried to spin since he's been in office. He criticized George Bush and the Republicans about Iraq and the last thing he wants to do is put American forces back in there.
"He wanted to be the president that was going to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and of course the way he ended the war in Iraq, right?"
Brookes said that despite the fact the White House is dead set against having American ground troops fight ISIS, the Islamic terror group which beheaded two American journalists, there are Special Operations forces at work.
We do have boots on the ground…. We do have Special Forces types and they're not even admitting that they're there. And that's OK. We all get it, we don't want to talk about it," Brookes said.
"We don't include them as boots on the ground, so that's a convenient fiction that we have. But we do have that and he may have to send more.
"[Obama] may be telling things to Congress that he's not telling the American people for reasons. I hate to say this, but there's some things that should remain secret for the purposes of national security."
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