On the recordDecember 9, 2015
I want to talk about the speech the President gave on the Islamic State, or ISIS. He spoke about this to the Nation last Sunday night. I read all the newsclips after having listened to what the President had to say, and I think the universal reaction was that the President did not come up with anything new. Basically, the message was that we are going to stay the course. Of course, this is the same President who called ISIS ``contained.'' I don't know of any other person--any other person with any knowledge of the subject matter--who would share the view the President expressed, that ISIS was somehow contained. Indeed, we have learned that the threat of ISIS is threefold: We have the battle raging in the country, what started out as a civil war in Syria. Now the borders between Iraq and Syria have essentially been erased, and ISIS is controlling large portions of those two countries. It is also about the foreign fighters who come from Europe and other places within the region and even from the United States. There have been examples of people who come from the United States over to the fight in Syria and Iraq in order to help ISIS. Then, as we sadly learned again, just as we learned in Paris recently, we have seen in San Bernardino, CA, the radicalization of people already in our country, using things such as social media and the Internet.…
Source
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