WASHINGTON — In ordering a sustained military campaign against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq, President Obama on Wednesday night effectively set a new course for the remainder of his presidency and may have ensured that he would pass his successor a volatile and incomplete war, much as his predecessor left one for him.
It will be a significantly different kind of war — not like Iraq or Afghanistan, where many tens of thousands of American troops were still deployed when Mr. Obama took the oath nearly six years ago. And even though Mr. Obama compared it to the small-scale, sporadic strikes against isolated terrorists in places like Yemen and Somalia, it will not be exactly like those either.
Instead, the widening battle with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria will be the next chapter in a grueling, generational struggle that has kept the United States at war in one form or another since that day 13 years ago on Thursday when hijacked airplanes shattered America’s sense of its own security. Waged by a president with faded public standing, the new phase will not involve many American troops on the ground, but seems certain to require a far more intense American bombing blitz than in Somalia or Yemen.Continue reading the main story Video
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ISIS’ Goals and Tactics Worldwide
Some background on goals, tactics and the potential long-term threat to the United States from the militant group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.Video Credit By Natalia V. Osipova and Christian Roman on Publish Date September 10, 2014. Image CreditReuters
The battleground for that new phase will now extend beyond the well-known sands of Iraq into the new theater of Syria, a nation racked by more than three years of brutal civil war. After years of trying to avoid entangling the United States in another “dumb war,” as he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr. Obama is now plunging the United States into the middle of one of the world’s bloodiest, most vicious and fratricidal conflicts.
Whether he can wage this war in a more effective way, crushing a jihadist group while minimizing American casualties, could be the central national security test of his final two years in office — and the first one confronting his successor. Mr. Obama acknowledged that “it will take time to eradicate a cancer” like ISIS, but gave no estimates.
“This is going to be more than three years,” said former Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, a Republican who was once the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Confronting ISIS, we may get done with the biggest part of this in three years, but that’s not going to take care of the threat from radical Islam.”
Mr. Obama’s move into Syria reinforces the need for an approach that draws lessons from the mistakes of both President George W. Bush and his own administration, Mr. Hoekstra said. “What we need is a consistent doctrine that Republicans and Democrats from one administration to another can embrace,” he said.
Leading such a campaign will present a challenge to Mr. Obama perhaps unlike that confronted by any of his predecessors. While other commanders in chief enjoyed a surge in public support when they took the nation to war, the nation is not exactly rallying behind Mr. Obama this time around. A fresh battery of polls this week indicated that most Americans do want him to go after ISIS yet disapprove of his leadership. In other words, they support the policy but not the president.
Peter D. Feaver, a former national security aide to Mr. Bush and President Bill Clinton, said the public unease was due, in part, to Mr. Obama’s own shifting descriptions of the threat and his acknowledgment two weeks ago that he had no strategy yet. “Until tonight, the Obama administration has done a textbook job of following the script on how to undermine public confidence,” he said.
But he added that Mr. Obama had a chance to change that and called his nationally televised speech from the White House “a strong step in the right direction” that may have “set the predicate for a rally.”
In the speech, Mr. Obama tried to strike a balance, again presenting himself as the anti-Bush while embracing a military action he had long sought to avoid. He talked almost as much about what he would not do — “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq” — as what he would do to counter ISIS.
But he also advanced an argument that in some ways mirrored Mr. Bush’s much-debated strategy of pre-emption — that is, acting to forestall a potential threat rather than waiting for it to gather. Mr. Obama acknowledged that ISIS did not currently pose a direct threat to the United States, but he contended that “if left unchecked” it could.
That left many divided about his approach. Barry Pavel, a former Obama national security aide now at the Atlantic Council, said the president might be acting too tentatively.Continue reading the main story Video
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The president revealed the plan from the United States and its allies to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.Publish Date September 10, 2014. Image CreditPool photo by Saul Loeb
“I’m not sure half-steps into Syria are ultimately going to achieve the president’s goals,” he said. “It’s a fine strategy for contain and disrupt. It’s not a strategy for defeat by any means. If you want to defeat ISIS, you have to go all-in to Syria, which the president isn’t prepared to do.”
But others warned against that sort of thinking, viewing it as Mr. Bush’s approach all over again. Such advocates expressed concern that Mr. Obama would be too precipitous in hunting down ISIS, when in fact it could be successfully contained by a regional coalition working together without the risks of a deeper military engagement.
“I do hope that he’s going to resist a rush to outcome” said Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, a retired Army officer at the National Security Network, “and that the president will move in a deliberate, methodical fashion with a coalition willing to engage on the ground to resolve the problem over a period of months and years, as opposed to days and weeks.”
In his speech, Mr. Obama tried to equate the emerging strategy to the way he has pursued terrorist cells in Yemen and Somalia. Aides said that by working with local forces on the ground and targeting leaders from the air, the United States had been able to damage extremist groups without occupying territory or engaging in costly nation building, although some former officials like Mr. Pavel noted that terrorist groups remained in both countries.
But what Mr. Obama has in mind for Iraq and Syria goes beyond that approach. By some counts, the United States under Mr. Obama has conducted a dozen or so lethal strikes in Somalia in recent years and about 100 in Yemen. Even at the height of the drone war in Pakistan, Americans conducted fewer than 120 strikes in a single year, 2010, and were down to seven so far this year, according to the Long War Journal.
By contrast, the air campaign against ISIS that Mr. Obama ordered in Iraq has involved 154 strikes in the course of a month — far fewer than necessary in the view of some hawks, but far more than the occasional attacks on satellite terror groups in Africa and Arabia. And that was before Mr. Obama officially expanded the mission to destroying ISIS and effectively erased the border with Syria to send warplanes there as well.
In addition, this war involves a more sprawling and complicated geopolitical landscape than that of Somalia and Yemen, encompassing a broad array of groups, multiple countries, and the broken relationship between the United States and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom Mr. Obama has called on to give up power.
For all that, the campaign Mr. Obama outlined Wednesday night is likely to continue past his departure from office. Much as he was inaugurated with the challenge of finishing Mr. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the next president will be heir to Mr. Obama’s war in Syria and Iraq.
Mr. Obama’s aides said they hoped to use the next two years to reduce the threat of ISIS enough so that the president’s successor would have an easier time — much as Mr. Bush’s aides strived to get Iraq under control with a troop surge and strategy change before turning it over to Mr. Obama.
“We will do as much of that work as we can with the time that is available to the president,” said a senior administration official who briefed reporters under ground rules that did not allow him to be identified.
And then it will be someone else’s turn.
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