The U.S. intelligence community is feeling a bit besieged, what with the president having suggested on "60 Minutes" that it performed less than a crackerjack job in warning the administration about ISIS' calamitous potential. Thus one intelligence official has been dispatched--anonymously--by professional ass-coverers to inform the NYT that "Some of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just didn’t pay attention to it. They were preoccupied with other crises. This just wasn’t a big priority."
That sounds reasonable. Doubtless, warnings there were, which the NYT expansively surveys. Nonetheless, U.S. intelligence is still left with three inconvenient realities, the first and most inconvenient of which is that James Clapper himself admitted earlier this month to WaPo's David Ignatius that he "underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army.... I didn’t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming." As director of national intelligence, Clapper sees whatever bubbles up from all the intel agencies, so one may assume that his underestimation of ISIS was but an underestimation based on others'.
The second problem with the intelligence community's revisionism is one of proportion, or volume; which is to ask, How forceful was it in its warnings? The director of the National Security Agency recently answered, saying that "It"--ISIS's shift from insurgency to conquest--is "an area we talked about, but in hindsight, I wish we had been a little ... stronger about."
Finally (and this loops back to Clapper's additional observation above) the intelligence community's fundamental miscall perhaps came less in underestimating ISIS than in overestimating the Iraqi Army--fundamental, because the latter error, likely shared with the Iraqi Army, contributed to ISIS' Iraq success. As a "senior [U.S.] Army general" told the NYT, "We were surprised by their regional ambitions, the speed of their advance into Mosul and the collapse of the Iraqi security forces." The key word: surprised, as late as June of this year, when the Mosul onslaught occurred.
None if this excuses the administration's radical turnabout in committing the U.S. to a sustained, military campaign in the world's hottest sectarian and civil wars. But all of this does suggest that the administration's turnabout came after the intelligence community woke up.