PunditFact has rated the Obama administration’s explanation for what the president meant when he said last week that the Islamic State has been “contained” as “true.”
By “contained,” the White House doesn’t mean ISIS is no longer a threat, as fatal attacks last week in Beirut and Paris would show, the fact-checker explained. Rather, it added, the president and his team use “contained” to mean the insurgent terrorist group controls a smaller portion of the Middle East today than it did a few months ago.
PunditFact, which is a project of the Tampa Bay Times, refers specifically to a Nov. 12 interview between Obama and ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
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“Some of your critics say, even your friendly critics say … that what you have on the ground now is not going to be enough. Every couple of months you’re going to be faced with the same choice of back down or double down,” said the ABC host.
“I think what is true is that this has always been a multiyear project precisely because the governance structures in the Sunni areas of Iraq are weak, and there are none in Syria. And we don’t have ground forces there in sufficient numbers to simply march into Al-Raqqah in Syria and clean the whole place out,” the president responded.
“And as a consequence, we’ve always understood that our goal has to be militarily constraining ISIL’s capabilities, cutting off their supply lines, cutting off their financing at the same time as we’re putting a political track together in Syria and fortifying the best impulses in Baghdad so that we can, not just win militarily, but also win by improving governance,” he added.
ISIS-affiliated terrorists attacked Paris last Friday, the day after Obama’s “contained” remarks, killing 129 and wounding hundreds more. That same week, terrorists with ties to ISIS bombed Beirut, killing 37 and injuring 181. Before that, a Russian jetliner was downed over the Sinai Peninsula, killing more than 220 passengers. Intelligence communities suspect ISIS is responsible for that as well.
Stephanopoulos had a follow-up question for the president: “ISIS is gaining strength, aren’t they?”
“Well, no, I don’t think they’re gaining strength. What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them,” Obama responded.
“They have not gained ground in Iraq. And in Syria they’ll come in, they’ll leave. But you don’t see this systematic march by ISIL across the terrain. What we have not yet been able to do is to completely decapitate their command and control structures. We’ve made some progress in trying to reduce the flow of foreign fighters,” he added.
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes was confronted this weekend with the president’s remarks. He explained in an ABC News interview that, “The president was responding very specifically to the geographic expansion of ISIL in Iraq and Syria.”
“A year ago, we saw them on the march in Iraq and Syria, taking more and more population centers. The fact is that we have been able to stop that geographic advance and take back significant amounts of territory in both northern Iraq and northern Syria,” he added. “At the same time, that does not diminish the fact that there is a threat posed by ISIL, not just in those countries but in their aspirations to project power overseas.”
PunditFact rated these remarks as “true,” explaining that Rhode’s explanation is an accurate reflection of what Obama meant by “contained.”
The fact-checker continued, explaining the full context of Obama’s remarks to Stephanopoulos.
“When Obama said ‘we have contained them,’ it’s within a plainly defined scope: ISIS’s territorial ambitions in Iraq and Syria. This context is bolstered by the fact that Stephanopoulos asks Obama about the ground efforts in those two countries,” the fact-checker explained.
It added, “He wasn’t saying, as critics have shorthanded, that ISIS no longer presents a threat … In fact, in the same interview, Obama acknowledged that ISIS might have surpassed al-Qaeda as the greatest terror threat in the world, adding that they are constantly looking for ‘a crack in the system’ to exploit to carry out attacks.”
But even if the president’s narrow point is considered, not everyone sees it his way, including members of his own party. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Monday that ISIS is anything but “contained.”
“I have never been more concerned,” the senator said in an MSNBC interview. “I read the intelligence faithfully. ISIL is not contained, ISIL is expanding. They just put out a video saying it is their intent to attack this country.”
“There’s only one way we are going to diminish them and that is by taking them out, because they are growing,” she added. “They are in more than a dozen countries now, they are sophisticated, they have apps to communicate on that cannot be pierced even with a court order.”
She stressed in none-too-subtle remarks that the president’s strategy to “contain” and “reduce” ISIS simply isn’t going to get the job done.
“They are on the march. It is important to recognize this and prepare to deal with it with action,” Feinstein said. “And candidly, I don’t think bombing runs alone, we have done about 8,000 now, can really make a difference.”
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An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to PunditFact as PolitiFact. This article also reported incorrectly that PunditFact had awarded Obama a “mostly true” rating, when it had awarded a “true” rating to Ben Rhodes’ explanation of the president’s remarks.
