Susan Rice: It's Not a War Because We Don't Have Combat Boots on the Ground

by Charlie Spiering

Sep 12, 2014 10:38 AM PT

After Secretary of State John Kerry said on CNN that he didn’t view the continuing military strikes against ISIS targets as a war, National Security Advisor Susan Rice was dispatched to play cleanup on the network.

“Is the United States at war right now with ISIS?” asked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during an interview with Rice, adding that it “sounds like a war to me" and asking "Is it fair to call it a war?"

“Well Wolf, I don't know whether you want to call it a war or a sustained counterterrorism campaign,” she said, reminding him that Obama had vowed not to put U.S. combat boots on the ground.

She explained that when Americans thought about war, it was clear that they would think about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We’ll not have American combat forces on the ground fighting as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is what I think the American people think of when they think of a war, so I think this is very different from that.”

Although President Obama used the examples of American’s counterterrorism efforts in Yemen and Somolia, Rice admitted that the fight against ISIS would be a larger endeavor.

“The tempo of our strikes, the intensity in all likelihood will be greater in Iraq and Syria,” she said. “But the fact of the matter is this is different from the previous wars in Iraq and from Afghanistan in that there not be American combat forces on the ground fighting on the ground.”

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