Not contained

Forbes looks at the impacts of the Paris attacks, both in Europe and in the United States.
In the short run, President Obama will be pinged with the kind of “mission accomplished” arguments that once dented President Bush. Obama’s comment on ABC News this past Sunday that ISIS is “contained” will be endlessly replayed by talk-radio and cable newscasts and, possibly, by GOP candidates. His comment may have been focused on stopping ISIS’ march in the Kurdish parts of Iraq, but the context will be stripped away—just as Bush learned when his “mission accomplished” moment was shorn of its original meaning to describe the end of the mission of a particular carrier group and falsely represented as a premature signal of the Iraq War’s end.