Back into the fray?

On the evening of September 11, 2001, President George W Bush gave a speech in which he treated the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks as a criminal act, meriting "the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice".  By his address the next day, he was saying, "They were acts of war".  And thus began the morasse of the early 21st century in the US, with two brutal wars, a lot of human rights violations, and a lot of money burned.  I qualified it as a lost decade in a past post.

Anyway, I hope that our current President can hold onto his seemingly cool, rational, evolving evaluation of the real threat ISIS poses (for now, a regional insurgency without much reach beyond Iraq and Syria).  I worry that others' language calling the group "an imminent threat to every interest we have" could gradually turn into treating this relatively small, localized threat as a worldwide enemy warranting a return to increased US military involvement in the Middle East.