Barack Obama holdt den lenge varslede talen om ISIS i natt. Han lovte å utkjempe kampen hvor det måtte være, også Syria. Syriske opprørere vil bli trent i Saudi-Arabia.

Men Obama fastholder at den krigen han utkjemper er ulik den George W. Bush startet i Afghanistan og Irak. Han sammenlignet heller med bombingene i Jemen og Somalia, som har vært mot utvalgte mål, hovedsakelig med droner.

Obama synes ikke å se sin egen rolle og hvor mye verden har forandret seg. New York Times kommenterer:

Standing just outside the Blue Room, steps from where he announced the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Mr. Obama delivered a message that seemed worlds away from his confident assertions that the United States had decimated Al Qaeda. The United States, he said, was locked in a long battle with a successor to Al Qaeda, “unique in their brutality.”

The president’s remarks, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, will thrust the United States into a civil war in Syria that he had long sought to avoid, and will return a significant American military presence to Iraq, not quite three years after the last American troops withdrew.

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Mr. Obama is acting as polls show rapidly shifting public opinion, with a large majority of Americans now favoring military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, even as they express deep misgivings about the president’s leadership,