Obama, the reluctant warrior, back by popular demand

America has made it loud and clear that he should go get the killers who beheaded the two journalists

Charles Laurence

It did not look much like a declaration of war, and maybe it wasn’t really. But it was enough, in the words of the New York Times, to put America back onto "a war footing".

The television screens of America cut from sitcoms, sport and 24-hour cable news froth to a long, windowless corridor in the White House known as the State Floor.

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Charles Laurence is a US correspondent for The Week.co.uk. He is a former New York bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph. He divides his time between Manhattan and Woodstock, upstate New York.