Obama's address at Countering Violent Extremism summit

[SteelCurtain]

To be completely honest (and I should have stated this earlier), it's the only reasonable explanation I have for this behavior, and it makes sense to me. I do not have anything from the administration stating this outright. I did think of one more, though, and that is that if he is about to launch a military effort against ISIS, he might want to establish rhetorical precedence for distancing himself from "fighting Islam" in any sense. Fighting against "radical Islam" is really close to a religious war.

I think his position makes calling a spade a spade more tricky than if you or I did it. He has to weigh the conservative media's response to everything he does. If he had called this thing radical Islam to begin with, the conservative media would have been right on the other side of things, saying he is legitimizing ISIS as representative of Islam, etc. Lesser of two evils, maybe.

"Trying to remain as politically correct as possible and not offend muslims" is a far more plausible motive to me than a concerted attempt at discrediting ISIS through refusing to acknowledge their explicit motives. "Trying to not ruffle feathers" is something that politicians do all the time, and some people call that being sensitive and some call it cowardice.

Just like the nutty conservatives are attaching an agenda to his non-mention of Islam (he's being an apologist for them! he doesn't care about Christians! He's loyal to muslims first!), I equally think we shouldn't attach any tactical prowess or hidden strategy to his statements. It's far more likely and pragmatic that he's simply trying to be politically correct, just at the expense of being clear and directly addressing the underlying philosophy of ISIS in my opinion.

I changed my own mind as I was thinking through this...

But I do think it's a little naive to say there is probably not any tactical prowess behind his statements.