What Barack Obama Said About ISIS Being Contained

Last week, President Barack Obama said the Islamic State is “contained” — a comment that has been scrutinized in the wake of the deadly attacks in Paris that have been attributed to the terrorist group.

But has Obama’s comment been taken out of context?

ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos presented White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes with a list of politicians criticizing Obama for his Nov. 12 remarks. Republican presidential candidate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for example, said Obama sees the world “as a fantasy.”

Rhodes said Obama was talking about a particular aspect of containment that in no way dismissed the possibility of terrorist attacks in the West.

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“It’s a choice of words that isn’t great, but what he is referring to — as opposed to the way people have interpreted it — is correct,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

While ISIS has captured a couple towns in the past few months, it has ultimately lost roughly a quarter of its Iraq and Syria territory overall. A good portion of the losses resulted from United States airstrikes but also from fighting with Iraqi forces and regional groups, Gartenstein-Ross said. This is a far cry from a year ago, when there was serious concern that ISIS would capture Baghdad.

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