Obama downplays Islamic State threat objective now to ‘defeat,’ not ‘destroy’

President Obama and his aides have begun to diminish the threat they see posed by the Islamic State, in sharp contrast to rhetoric last year that depicted the terrorist army as an unprecedented force and a danger to the US.
Obama this month warned against “overinflating their importance.” He said overstating the threat would provide the Islamic State a victory and wrongly suggest that “in some fashion that they are an existential threat to the United States", according to The Washington Times on Monday.
Senior retired military officers disagree, saying the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS, is expanding outside Iraq and Syria basically unchecked by the US.
Repeating Obama’s theme, National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice said that the Islamic State and other terrorists are not existential threats to US. survival.
“Yes, there’s a lot going on,” she said. “Still, while the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature we confronted during World War II or the Cold War.”
Obama told the nation in September, in a major speech to set policy for his new war against the Islamic State, that the objective was to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Sunni Muslim terrorists.