Chris Wallace grilled President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken over the president's 2013 UN speech, during which he claimed that core al Qaeda had been "dismantled."
"How could the president have been so wrong?" Wallace asked.
"He said all our troops have left Iraq. In fact, he has just sent at least 1,600 troops back into Iraq. He said we've dismantled the core of al Qaeda. The Khorasan, which you've struck in the first day, is an offshoot and follows the direct orders of the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri."
Blinken parroted the administration line, "we decimated the core of al Qaeda," and stressed that the emergence of Khorasan in Syria was evidence enough.
"We said from day one that there would be groups that would emerge in other parts of the world. We've been relentlessly going after them," Blinken said. "What we're not going to do is fall into the al Qaeda trap of sending hundreds of thousands of Americans back.
"That's exactly what they want--they want to bog us down, tie us down, and bleed us. We're going to be smarter this."
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said the fight against ISIL costs the Pentagon up to $10 million per day during a press conference Friday.