CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY SAUL LOEB/POOL/GETTY
With his approval ratings in some recent polls touching new lows, President Obama knows that many Americans don’t have much patience with him. Inaddressing the nation from the White House on Wednesday night, he got right down to it: “My fellow Americans,” he said, “tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.”
The steps that the President announced were largely expected. He said that the United States military would carry out “a systematic campaign of air strikes against these terrorists,” including hitting targets inside Syria. “This is a core principle of my Presidency,” he declared. “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.” Second, Obama announced that he was sending another four hundred and seventy-five U.S. service members to Iraq, where they will “support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence, and equipment.” In addition, he called on Congress to provide additional resources to “train and equip” the Syrian opposition forces who are fighting against Assad and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham. Finally, he said that he would push the international community to step up its counterterrorism and humanitarian-relief efforts.
If this sounded like a significant escalation, the President was at pains to assure his audience that he wasn’t starting another war like the one in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil,” he insisted. “This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partners’ forces on the ground.” As a model, he pointed to American counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia, which have involved the use of drones, aircraft, and special forces. He appealed to a public wary of foreign entanglements—but, seemingly, supportive of striking at ISIS—to support American leadership in the international struggle against terrorism and other perils, adding that “our own safety, our own security, depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for.”
Delivered on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, it was a businesslike address rather than an inspiring one, and precisely what it augurs remains to be seen. Initially, it would appear, the military escalation will be modest. Air strikes inside Iraq will continue—so far, there have been a hundred and fifty, Obama said—but a significant ground offensive will surely have to await the strengthening of the Iraqi and Kurdish forces. If the U.S. strategy in Yemen and Somalia does serve as their model, U.S. attacks inside Syria will be sporadic and aimed at specific targets. Whatever it does, the United States will be keen not to get out ahead of its key regional allies, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. After attending a dinner with other foreign-policy experts and the President, which was held on Monday, Sandy Berger, a former national-security adviser,told the Times, “The big picture is that this is going to be a very long-term proposition, that American leadership is necessary, and that this can’t turn into a U.S. versus Sunni battle.”
Still, the fact remains: President Obama, long a reluctant warrior, has committed the United States to a risky and open-ended military campaign, the ultimate consequences of which are difficult to predict. Confronted with popular outrage at the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and political opponents keen to exploit any hint of weakness or indecision, the realist has relented.
When Assad, the Syrian dictator, ordered his military to drop barrel bombs on civilian areas populated by rebels fighting his regime, killing thousands of innocents and maiming countless more, Obama largely let him get on with it. When Syrian government forces escalated their campaign against the rebels and hit them with chemical weapons, Obama went back on his own words—the “red line” and all that—and reneged on a pledge to punish Assad with military strikes. All along, he was skeptical of providing more weapons to the Syrian opposition, saying, as recently as June, that the idea that they could overthrow the Syrian leader was a “fantasy.”
When the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham took over much of western Iraq, including Fallujah, a town where U.S. Marines fought and died to quell a previous iteration of the Sunni insurgency, the realist in the White House did nothing, dismissing the jihadis as a junior-varsity version of Al Qaeda. WhenISIS marched north and took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, the White House started to take it more seriously. Still, though, it held back from any military action. Only after the black-clad insurgents threatened Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region and the home to a big American consulate, did Obama authorize the use of air strikes to help the Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi Army push them back. Still, though, he refrained from hitting ISIS targets inside Syria.
Even after the beheadings, when it became clear that he would face enormous political pressure to expand U.S. military operations against ISIS, the President tried to stake out his ground carefully. The goal, he said initially, was to “degrade” ISIS, to the point that it no longer represented a threat to American interests. On September 3rd—just last week—he expanded upon this formulation, saying at a press conference, “Our objective is to make sure thatISIL is not an ongoing threat to the region.” Later in the same Q. & A. session, he said that he wanted to see the extremist Islamic organization “degraded to the point where it is no longer the kind of factor that we’ve seen it being over the last several months.”
In all of this, realpolitik and the precautionary principle were both on Obama’s side. But, in his address on Wednesday night, he sent a different message. In pledging to “ultimately destroy” ISIS, he adopted the maximalist language of John McCain and Dick Cheney. Once a President issues pledges of this sort, he has an enormous incentive to try to follow through on them, even if that involves further military escalation. The President, who only last year, at West Point, talked about winding down the “war on terrorism,” has come a long way in a short time.
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