Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon insists that when she said “We now finally are where we need to be” during the debate, she didn’t mean in terms of fighting ISIS.

“That comment is being misconstrued by critics of Hillary Clinton. They’re trying to twist her words. She was in the course of making the comment that we cannot fall into a false choice between confronting ISIS and continuing to abide the Assad regime that’s in place in Syria. There were some suggestions on that stage on Saturday and elsewhere that we need to focus only on one and give up on focusing on the removal of Assad from power, and what we had seen earlier last week was a UN Security Council resolution that laid out a path forward for a political transition in Syria. So her comment applied to the fact that there is now world consensus generating around the idea that we still need to seek political transition from the Assad regime in Syria at the same time that were countering ISIS.”

Here’s Hillary’s comment, in context. She does mention the need to continue opposing Assad’s regime while fighting ISIS, but it’s very hard to contend that her words “we now finally are where we need to be” doesn’t apply to her assessment of the fight against ISIS as well, because that’s exactly what she talks about in the following sentence.

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“When we look at these complex problems, I wish it could be either/or. I wish we could say yes, let’s go destroy ISIS and let’s let Assad continue to destroy Syria, which creates more terrorists, more extremists by the minute. No. We now finally are where we need to be. We have a strategy and a commitment to go after ISIS, which is a danger to us as well as the region. And we finally have a U.N. Security Council Resolution bringing the world together to go after a political transition in Syria. If the United States does not lead, there is not another leader. There is a vacuum. And we have to lead, if we’re going to be successful.”