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On Thursday, one day before terrorists who appear to have been linked to ISIS launched a series of devastating attacks across Paris, President Obama went on ABC and made a comment that now looks pretty bad:
What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them.
In the wake of Paris, it looked to many like Obama had badly overhyped his administration's efforts against ISIS. At Saturday's Democratic presidential debate, moderator John Dickerson asked Hillary Clinton if the quote meant that the Obama administration's legacy will be "that it underestimated the threat from ISIS."
Obama's comments don't look quite as bad in context. Rather, as PolitiFact points out, Obama was saying that ISIS's territorial expansion in the Middle East has been contained — that, partly as a result of US actions, its march across Syria and Iraq had been halted. That's both a much more modest claim and factually correct.
"The statement is, in the context of the interview ... almost entirely correct," Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,
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