- Vice President Joe Biden, April 26, 2012
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a (J.V.) team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.
“Let’s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”
- President Barack Obama, January 2014
“From the start, our goal has been first to contain (ISIS), and we have contained them,” Obama told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos in a Thursday afternoon interview that took place before the strike against Emwazi.
- President Obama, November 12, 2015, little more than 24 hours before the attacks in Paris
After more than 150 people were reported dead as a result of a terrorist attack in Paris, France Friday evening, the French president was not nearly as reserved as America's leaders have been in the face of heightened jihadist activity.
French President Francois Hollande promised early Saturday morning that France would respond to terrorist attacks that killed more than 120 people with a "pitiless" war against the group responsible.
"We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless," he said at the Bataclan, the site of one of the attacks, according to the Guardian.
"Because when terrorists are capable of committing such atrocities, they must be certain that they are facing a determined France, a united France, a France that is together and does not let itself be moved, even if today we express infinite sorrow," Hollande added.
It was a little more than two years when France was the United States' only major European ally willing to assist with military action in Syria. In fact, they were even willing to lead militarily. Ultimately the U.S. declined to intervene in the Syrian civil war.
Two years later we can surmise President Hollande's comments as a message to America which essentially says "We got this."
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