On the day that ISIS captured Iraq’s tenth-largest city, President Obama said it was a “tactical setback” for the U.S. war and “I don’t think we’re losing.” Obama was speaking to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a wide-ranging interview about the Middle East. (Palmyra, Syria, fell to ISIS the next day.) Obama explained that “Ramadi had been vulnerable for a very long time, primarily because these are not Iraqi security forces that we have trained or reinforced.” As for Republican criticism, Obama said the party still hasn’t learned the lesson of invading Iraq. “If the Iraqis themselves are not willing or capable to arrive at the political accommodations necessary to govern, if they are not willing to fight for the security of their country, we cannot do that for them.”
