LEON JUMPS SHIP – AT 8:52 A.M. ET:  Former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta always struck me as one of the grown-ups in the Obama administration, and frustrated by the chief's indecision and shallowness.  Now Panetta is pretty much jumping ship.  From Fox: 

Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Sunday that he believes the Islamic State terror group was able to flourish in part because the U.S. entered the conflict in Syria too late, saying the Obama administration should have armed the country’s moderate rebels earlier.

Panetta, who served in the Obama administration from July 2011 to February 2013, said in an interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that he was in support of arming the moderate Syrian rebels in 2012, along with several other members of the administration.

“I think that would've helped,” Panetta said. “And I think in part, we pay the price for not doing that in what we see happening with ISIS.”

According to CBS News, Panetta writes in his new book “Worthy Fights” that he, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the director of the CIA and the joint chiefs chairman all urged Obama to arm the rebels at a 2012 meeting.

“The real key was how can we develop a leadership group among the opposition that would be able to take control,” Panetta said. “And my view was to have leverage to do that; we would have to provide the weapons and the training in order for them to really be willing to work with us in that effort.”

However, Obama decided against it.

“I think the president's concern, and I understand it, was that he had a fear that if we started providing weapons, we wouldn't know where those weapons would wind up,” Panetta said. “My view was, ‘You have to begin somewhere.’”

Panetta also discussed the war in Iraq; saying that when the U.S. withdrew from the country in 2011 he was not confident pulling out was the right decision.

“I really thought that it was important for us to maintain a presence in Iraq,” he said. “The decision was that we ought to at least try to maintain 8,000 to 10,000 U.S. troops there, plus keeping some of our intelligence personnel in place, to be able to continue the momentum in the right direction. And frankly, having those troops there I think would've given us greater leverage on (former Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki) to try to force him to do the right thing as well.”

Panetta said he believes the Islamic State is a real threat to America, and will take a “long time” to destroy.

COMMENT:  Some will accuse Panetta of disloyalty, but that is false.  It's always been assumed that this is where he stood.  But his willingness to speak out publicly, and Hillary Clinton's public distancing of herself from Obama's Mideast policy, represents, I think, more than personal political calculation.  There is a certain contempt for Obama and the way he runs things.

Panetta is one of the good Democrats, the dwindling number who know that the post-World War II Democratic Party grew out of the lessons of that war.  The Leon Panettas are no longer welcome in much of the Democratic Party.  Indeed, there is a growing resistance even to Hillary Clinton by those who consider her too "moderate."  And I doubt if Jack Kennedy would even be a Democrat today.

September 22, 2014