President Obama acknowledged that he lacks “a little credibility” that his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had to fight America’s enemies. Obama made the remarks in an interview with National Public Radio.
Here’s the question from NPR’s Steve Inskeep: “I have been reading a history of part of the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower was president, he’s meeting his cabinet sometimes in this room where we’re sitting. The Soviet Union has emerged as a major nuclear threat. The country is very worried at this point in the 1950s. But Eisenhower is convinced that they are not that strong, that the United States is stronger, that the U.S. will win if we just avoid a huge war. And he decides to try to reassure the public, gives a series of speeches, saying, keep your chin up, everything’s fine, our strategy is working. It’s a total failure. The public doesn’t believe him. He is accused of a failure of leadership, and his approval rating goes down. Are you going through the same experience now with regard to ISIS?”
Obama answered by making a rare admission of his own shortcomings. “Well, I tell you, first of all, I wasn’t the Supreme Allied Commander helping to defeat Hitler, so he had a little credibility that he was working with,” Obama said. “But ISIL is also not the Soviet Union. And I think that it is very important for us to understand this is a serious challenge. ISIS is a virulent, nasty organization that has gained a foothold in ungoverned spaces effectively in Syria and parts of western Iraq.
“We have to take it seriously. They’ve shown in Paris what they can do in an organized fashion, and in San Bernardino what we’ve seen is their ability to proselytize for their perverted brand of Islam and spur small-scale terrorist attacks. And those are very difficult to detect, so it is going to be important for us to be vigilant. We are pounding ISIL’s core structure in Syria and Iraq. We have put together a coalition that is increasingly effective. We have seen ISIL lose about 40 percent of its populated territory in the region, and both in terms of homeland security and in terms of our efforts over there, I am confident that we are going to prevail.
“But it is also important for us to keep things in perspective, and this is not an organization that can destroy the United States. This is not a huge industrial power that can pose great risks to us institutionally or in a systematic way. But they can hurt us, and they can hurt our people and our families. And so I understand why people are worried.
“The most damage they can do, though, is if they start changing how we live and what our values are, and part of my message over the next 14 months or 13 months that I remain in office is to just make sure that we remember who we are and make sure that our resilience, our values, our unity are maintained. If we do that then ISIL will be defeated.”
