Last year at a NATO summit, Obama explicitly disavowed the idea of containing ISIS. "You can't contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people, killing that many innocents, enslaving that many women," he said.
Instead he argued, "The goal has to be to dismantle them."
Just before the Paris massacre, Obama shifted back to containment. "From the start, our goal has been first to contain them, and we have contained them," he said.
