Recall President Barack Obama’s claim, on the morning of the Daesh’s terrorist attacks in Paris, that Daesh was contained.
Now he’s saying he was right in that assessment:
[H]e insisted that the reason he said they’re contained, hours before terror teams launched deadly raids across Paris, is because “they control less territory than they did last year.”
That may be marginally true: the Kurds have successfully pushed toward Raqqa in Syria, and they’ve driven Daesh from Sinjar in Iraq.
How important is that bit of geography, though? Daesh has expanded from attacks within and at the periphery of the geography it holds to attacks in two different continents—the airliner bombing in Egypt and those Paris attacks.
Physically contained? Geographically contained, maybe. Maybe. But plainly not physically contained—Egypt and France. And plainly not contained as a practical matter.
It’s hard to believe that neither Obama’s echo chamber nor Obama don’t understand this.