Obama says ISIS can’t destroy America

Obama, speaking to NPR personality Steve Inskeep in the White House, said while he understands Americans' worry about the terrorists, the country should 'keep things in perspective' and realize that IS is not a global power that can decimate the nation - like the threat posed by Russia at the height of the Cold War.

'ISIL is also not the Soviet Union,' Obama said. '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... 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.'

Obama's comments Monday represent a further retreat from his comments almost a year ago in which he downplayed the threat from the IS by comparing it to a junior-varsity athletic team.

In an Jan. 7 interview with The New Yorker, Obama described the IS this way: 'The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.'

At the time, Obama was referring to IS's overtaking of the Iraq city of Fallujah on Jan. 3.

But the remark gained traction in later months, particularly among Republican presidential candidates who said it exemplified the president's distance from reality.

The remark was attacked again recently, after the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, and the Dec. 2 mass shooting murders by a radicalized Muslim couple in San Bernardino, Calif. that killed another 14 Americans.

Obama's critics note that fears of a homeland terrorist attack have risen in the U.S. after those incidents, as measured not least by political polls that ask respondents their top concerns.

In Monday's NPR interview, the president sought to describe the IS movement from a clearer perspective than he did in his 'JV' remark.

'They can hurt us, and they can hurt our people and our families. And so I understand why people are worried,' he said. 

'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,' Obama said.

Asked why a recent Gallup poll shows only 30 percent of Americans support his handling of efforts against Isis, Obama blamed media 'saturation' of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks for inflaming fears in the U.S.

But again, he sought to downplay those fears, saying that the U.S. government has sufficiently made it much more difficult for ISIS and al-Queada-like organizations to carry out single, catastrophic missions like the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

'If you have been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you," he said.

'I understand why people are concerned about it, and this is a serious situation, but what' is important is for people to recognize that the power, the strength of the United States and its allies are not threatened by an organization like this,' he said.

Obama did fault his administration for not more deliberately explaining its efforts against the IS army, creating a vacuum in which Americans were unsure whether their government was doing all it should be to beat the group back.

A total of 9,000 air strikes have been undertaken against the terrorists in Syria and Iraq, and important, strategic towns such as Sinjar and Tikrit have been recaptured from the terror army.

Constantly under fire from Republican presidential candidates for his response to the threat of the IS army, Obama defended his decision against sending conventional ground troops to Iraq and Syria, beyond a few hundred special operations soldiers that have already been deployed.

Likewise, he said simplistic answers like increasing and expanding bombing of the area - GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, for example, has called for 'bombing the hell out of ISIS - aren't the answer because in many cases, the U.S. is already pursuing those strategies.

But Obama also strongly defended his policy of engaging with the IS army 'appropriately and in a way that is consistent with American values.'

'If the suggestion is that we kill tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians and Iraqis, that is not who we are,' he said. 'That would be a strategy that would have enormous backlash against the United States. It would be terrible for our national security.'

Other GOP candidates such as Sen. Lindsey Graham - who withdrew from the Republican race on Monday - have called for specific numbers of U.S. ground forces in the region. While complimenting Graham for his 'honesty,' Obama again reiterated his opposition to such a deployment.

'When you start looking at an Iraq-type deployment of large numbers of troops – 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 troops – we... have essentially said to the Iraqis and the Syrians that we are going to govern for you. And that ends up being of an indefinite period,' he said.

'Part of what we have to do for a sustained defeat of ISIL is to help local forces develop capacity, do it the right way, do it for themselves with our assistance and our help, so that we can actually create a stable government structure in this region. Now that sometimes requires more patience than simply deploying a bunch of Marines.'

(dailymail.co.uk)