Category: The Dish

The Case For War: Known Unknowns

Frum points to one big question the president didn’t address in last night’s speech:

The question before the nation is, “What is the benefit of this war to America and to Americans?” That was the question the speech left unanswered. And the ominous suspicion left behind is that the question was unanswered because it is unanswerable—at least, not answerable in any terms likely to be acceptable to the people watching the speech and paying the taxes to finance the fight ahead.

But Daniel DePetris can think of a few more:

President Obama announced that the United States will be getting far more involved in Syria’s civil war—accelerating the U.S. train-and-equip program for moderate Syrian rebels who are fighting on two fronts (against ISIL and Bashar al-Assad) and whose capabilities pale in comparison to the Islamic State.  If Congress agrees to the president’s request, $500 million will be available for the Defense Department as seed-money to supplement the smaller training program that the Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly been running for over a year.

Yet the question must be asked: is it too late for U.S. assistance to make a difference?

The Free Syrian Army is perhaps at its most fragile point since Syria’s civil war began, and the moderates have been begging for heavy U.S. military equipment for years now.  Will $500 million be enough money, and if not, is the president willing to double down on his strategy and expend more taxpayer funds to improve its chances of success?

Byron York lists ways things could go wrong:

[W]hat if the Iraqi government turns out to be not as inclusive as the president hopes, at the same time that the U.S. military is deeply involved in the fight against the Islamic State? “One of [the dangers] is that the Iraqi government fails to come together in any meaningful way,” Peter Wehner, a former Bush White House official, said in an email exchange. “It may be that the government comes together but the country does not. That is, the Shia-Sunni split is impossible to repair, at least at this moment. It may be that a new government is formed but the leader himself is weak, or too sectarian, or too incompetent to wage an effective war against ISIS. It may be that the president increases our commitment in Iraq, but (unlike George W. Bush with the surge) not enough. The danger is that having re-engaged in Iraq, we don’t succeed.” The bottom line is that — by the president’s own reasoning — if a genuinely inclusive government fails to materialize, the U.S. mission, no matter how far-reaching, will fail.

Fred Kaplan is relatively supportive of Obama’s approach but shares that concern:

Obama made very clear that this battle requires active participation by the Saudis, Turks, and Europeans. But the roles and missions haven’t yet been outlined; the commitments aren’t quite carved in concrete. The plan has a chance of succeeding in Iraq because the new government, formed by Haider al-Abadi, seems inclusive, embraced by Sunnis and Shiites, for the moment—but it could fall apart with the bombing of a single mosque or a marketplace, and then what? Will it look like the Americans are advising and bombing on behalf of a Shiite regime? Will the other Sunni nations back away, fearing the association?

Tomasky tries to strike an optimistic note:

There are a thousand ways it can go wrong. But what if it goes right? And how about—here’s a crazy thought—we all hope that it does? And not for Obama’s sake: This gambit will certainly—certainly—define his foreign-policy legacy, but it’s not for that reason that we should hope it all works. It’s for the sake of Iraqis and Syrians, and ultimately, for us. Obama didn’t communicate every aspect of this fight effectively in the speech, which was too short and too vague. But the goals are the right ones. It’s a strategy, and he didn’t wear a tan suit.

In Cassidy’s view, the address signified Obama relinquishing his foreign-policy realism:

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. … 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.

John Dickerson wonders what that means in terms of the broader debate over American power and foreign policy:

The president didn’t just start a new military phase of the war on terrorism; he started a new round in the foreign policy conversation. He was brought to office by a war-weary nation. Now the polls suggest the nation is tired of him. For the moment that means the country is looking for a more assertive foreign policy. Whether that is a permanent new condition depends on future violence and success. But at the moment the incentive is for most politicians to make declarations of strength to distinguish themselves from the unpopular incumbent. The presidential candidates in 2016 will be particularly emboldened, since they traditionally run as an antidote to the perceived deficiencies of the current occupant. That’s certainly the way Sen. Barack Obama won office. If his overcorrection was born in his simplistic response to the deficiencies of his predecessor, then judging by the way this current foreign policy debate is going so far, it likely contains the seeds of the next overcorrection.

Michael Scherer thought Obama’s tone of “I can handle this” was well-chosen:

Chances are good the U.S. will win the military fight, and the spooks seem optimistic at the moment about preventing another homeland attack in retribution. But there will also be a cost. Another goal of his second term was to wind down the eternal conflict his predecessor called the “war on terror.” Now that won’t happen anytime soon. The war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, which Obama described as neither Islamic nor a state, will be a long one. As with past painful conflicts, there is no end date, and no clear metric on which to declare victory. He said he will “degrade and ultimately destroy” the threat. But the destroy part could very well come years after he leaves office.

Walter Russell Mead accuses the president of revealing his strategy to the enemy:

As it happens, we agree with the President that American ground troops aren’t the answer to our ISIS problems, and if by some ghastly mischance we ended up in the Oval Office we would be no more eager to send ground forces into this war than he is. But we wouldn’t want our enemies to know that—and we would also be aware that war is, above all other things, unpredictable. You take that first step and you just don’t know what comes next. If things don’t go as planned, the President could find himself in a position where all those “no ground troops” pledges could haunt him; certainly many of his critics will begin to rake him over the coals about the number of advisers and others that he must now inevitably send into harm’s way.

It’s a sign of the President’s tone deafness (and also substance deafness) when it comes to the military that he just doesn’t seem to get this. Telling the enemy that you are going to be out of Afghanistan by date X, or that you won’t put more than Y thousand troops in the country, or that you won’t put any boots on the ground makes life much, much easier for the bad guys. Indeed, in most wars this is exactly the kind of information that the enemy is most eager to get—this is why there are spies.

And to Matt Duss, the speech reflected Obama’s overarching foreign policy principle that “American power is demonstrated not by acting impetuously and demanding that others fall in line, but by working to develop and strengthen international consensus on a range of issues, and then mobilizing that consensus behind cooperative action”:

This is clearly not going to satisfy those in Washington who believe that American leadership is best shown through the application of ordnance and deploying of troops. “By [the] end of [the] speech, POTUS powerfully embraces cause of ‘freedom’ but commits only another 475 troops to the cause,” tweeted the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Robert Satloff. Well, the Bush administration embraced the cause of freedom, and committed over 100,000 troops to the cause. And one of the reasons Obama was up there speaking last night is because we’re still cleaning up the mess. Speaking of Bush, I should mention that one thing that George W. Bush got right about the Middle East is that illegitimate, unaccountable, undemocratic regimes empower extremists.

A Pragmatism Too Far?

It’s extremely hard to reconcile the events of the past month or so with the rationale of the Obama presidency. And that’s what makes this capitulation to hysteria so profoundly depressing. I can see the simple pragmatism behind it: the president under-estimated the strength and tenacity of these maniacs, and feared they could make further gains, plunging the region into a new turmoil. The media and the elites all jumped into full metal panic mode and created a powerful momentum for action. In fact, the elite consensus in favor of attacking ISIS was, until last night, at least, eerily reminiscent of the elite consensus in favor of going to war in Iraq in 2003 – without the year or so of debate. If US-ATTACKS-9/11-ANNIVERSARY-OBAMAyou’re Obama, you do not believe you can really solve this problem, but you need to do something, both to stave off possible disaster, to guard against potential ISIS expansion, and to try and rescue the Iraqi “state” one more time. So you rely on air-power, you corral the Saudis to help train and fund Sunni opposition to ISIS, you funnel some arms to the “moderate” Syrian rebels … and hope for the best.

What this misses in its flexibility is that it comes at the cost of profound incoherence. Presidencies need a grand narrative if they are to succeed. Obama’s was a simple one: to slowly rescue the US from the economic and foreign policy nadir that Bush-Cheney bequeathed us. We would slowly climb back out of the hole of fiscal recklessness and financial corruption into a saner, calmer period of slow but steady growth. We would slowly de-leverage from counter-productive over-reach in the war on Islamist terrorism. We would end two wars. We would begin nation-building at home – in the form of universal health insurance and badly needed infrastructure improvement. Above all, we would not be jerked back and forth by Islamist fanatics abroad, seeking to chart a course of steady strategic retrenchment.

Now, of course, this was never going to be a linear path. I feared back in 2009 that withdrawing from Iraq might look a lot like withdrawal from Vietnam. That it took place without a bloodbath or national humiliation was a triumph of optics and luck and bribery. But I was never under any illusion that the “surge” had succeeded in its own terms. We had no guarantee that Iraq would not return almost instantly to the sectarian distrust, hatred and violence that have been integral to its existence for decades. Kurdistan could work – but the rest remains ungovernable, except by tyranny and terror. And so yet another spasm of Shi’a-Sunni violence seemed inevitable to me. But at least, we would no longer be sitting in the middle.

I don’t buy for a second the lame idea that if the US had kept a residual force there – despite Baghdad’s express wishes – we would have avoided the current turmoil. We couldn’t control or end it with a hundred thousand of the best-trained troops in the world. What chance would 10,000 advisers have to counter the weight of history and the cycle of revenge? So there would come a point at which Iraq would implode again and the US might be tempted to intervene. I naïvely thought no sane American, after the Iraq War, would ever support that. I foolishly believed we would not be able to instantly erase – like an Etch-A-Sketch – all that we so painfully learned in that catastrophe.

What I under-estimated was the media’s ability to generate mass panic and hysteria and the Beltway elite’s instant recourse to the language of war. I believed that Obama was stronger than this, that he could actually resist this kind of emotional spasm and speak to us like grown-ups about what we can and cannot do about a long, religious war in the Middle East, that doesn’t threaten us directly. But he spoke to us like children last night, assuming the mantle of the protective daddy we had sought in Bush and Cheney, evoking the rhetoric he was elected to dispel.

What the president doesn’t seem to understand is that this dramatic U-turn isn’t just foolish on its own national security terms; it is devastating to him politically. He is now playing on Cheney’s turf, not his own. His core supporters, like yours truly, regarded our evolution from that Cheney mindset one of Obama’s key achievements – and he tossed it away last night almost casually. He committed himself and us to a victory we cannot achieve in two countries we cannot control with the aid of allies we cannot trust. And, worse, he has done so by evading the key Constitutional requirement that a declaration of war be made by the Congress. He is actually relying on the post-9/11 authorization of military force against al Qaeda in Afghanistan to wage war in Syria (in violation of international law) and in Iraq.

This is not just a betrayal of a core principle of his presidency – a restoration of normality – it is a rebuke to his own statements. This is what the president said last year:

We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war — through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments — will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.

His speech last night was an argument for doing exactly what he said we should not do a year ago. He has made no attempt to explain why he has completely changed his mind – except to react emotionally to a vile off-shoot of another Sunni insurgency in Iraq. This does not only mean his administration no longer has a coherent narrative, it also means he is utterly hostage to forces abroad he cannot control. His refusal to go to Congress for a prolonged open-ended campaign in Syria is also utterly inconsistent with his decision a year ago to go to Congress before even considering punitive air-strikes in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

If he believed he needed to go to Congress for that limited engagement, how on earth can he argue with a straight face that he does not need to now? It makes no sense – and no one in the administration has been able to make a persuasive case for this walking contradiction.

That seems to me to leave us with a small chance to nip this in the bud. I believe that the administration needs to get direct authorization from the Congress to re-enter the Iraqi theater and enter the Syrian one by October 7 – 60 days since the first air-strike. Again, this is completely consistent with Obama’s previous positions. We have to break the war machine’s ability to do what it will without any constitutional checks upon it. We need to demand a full debate and a serious declaration of war. We are, after all, planning at least a three-year campaign in Syria, without the Syrian government’s approval, and in violation of international law. How can we do that without direct Congressional authority – especially when the administration has declared that ISIS is not a threat to the homeland?

Maybe there are enough Democratic and Republican skeptics in the Senate to force a vote. Even if they lose, such a vote would at least force these cowards to own a war they are acquiescing in, to share the full responsibility and face the voters, and to be subsequently accountable for its failures or modest success. And if an open-ended war against an entity that has not attacked the US or plans to do so is not something that the Congress should approve, then we really are an empire, and not a republic.  We are an empire with an executive branch that controls war and peace, that launches covert and overt wars, that keeps the US on permanent offense across the globe, creating as much terror as it prevents, and entangling us in one more sectarian vortex of fickle friends and mortal foes.

I refuse to cave into depressed acquiescence to this machine, even as it has now captured the one president who promised to restrain it. The only way to do this is to build a strong campaign – not least among Obama supporters – that no war be continued past October 7 without full Congressional debate and formal authorization.

Are we able to prevent the US from entering another nightmarish engagement in a part of the world that rewards no one?

Repeat after me: Yes. We. Can.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama stands at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, September 11, 2014, for a moment of silence marking the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)

Will Marriage Equality Get Its Day In Court?

Lyle Denniston brings us the latest on the question:

Matching the speed of lawyers and lower courts in handling the same-sex marriage controversy, the Supreme Court on Wednesday set the stage for its first look at all of the pending cases, when the Justices assemble on September 29 for a private Conference.

Seven petitions — three from Virginia, and one each from Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin — will be submitted to the Justices at that session.  There is, of course, no certainty that they will act on any or all of them at that point, but the option is there.  With all sides agreeing that the time to rule is now, it would be a surprise if the Court opted to bypass the issue altogether in its new Term.

Michelle Garcia lays out the possible implications:

If the court rules in favor of marriage equality in all of these cases — or allows the current rulings from lower courts to stand — an additional 65 million Americans would live in states with full marriage equality. Currently, roughly 137 million people, or 44 percent of U.S. inhabitants, live in a state with marriage equality.

Congress Isn’t Doing Its Job

enator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Obama is claiming, dubiously, that he has the unilateral authority to fight ISIS. Even if that were true, Drum sees good reason to get Congressional approval:

If Obama is truly serious about not sending combat troops into ISIS-held areas in Iraq, then let’s get a congressional resolution that puts that in writing. Let’s get an authorization for war that spells out a geographical area; puts a limit on US troop deployments; and specifically defines what those troops can do. … It forces the president to explicitly request an escalation and it forces Congress to explicitly authorize his request. At the very least, that prevents a slow, stealthy escalation that flies under the radar of public opinion.

Why Andrew Napolitano wants Congress involved:

[W]ar often has surprise endings and unexpected human, geopolitical, and financial consequences. A debate in Congress will air them. It will assure that the government considers all rational alternatives to war and that the nation is not pushed into a costly and bloody venture with its eyes shut. A congressional debate will compel a written national objective tied to American freedom. A prudent debate will also assure that there will be an end to hostilities determined by congressional consensus and not presidential fiat.

Rand Paul, for one, is speaking up:

“It doesn’t in any way represent what our Constitution dictates nor what our founding fathers intended,” Paul, a likely 2016 presidential contender said on Fox News. “So it is unconstitutional what he’s doing.

“He should have come before a joint session of Congress, laid out his plan—as he did tonight—and then called for an up or down vote on whether or not to authorize to go to war,” Paul added. “I think the President would be more powerful [and] the country would have been more united.”

But Keating won’t be surprised if Obama chooses to go it alone:

It’s certainly valid to argue that just because ISIS have proven themselves to be more Kobe than jayvee, it doesn’t mean that airstrikes in Syria are a prudent policy. And there’s a good debate to be had about the role of Congress in authorizing military action in an age of asymmetrical threats and drone warfare. But let’s not kid ourselves: Shooting first and asking Congress later has become the rule, not the exception.

(Photo: by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Quote For The Day

“The fact is that Waking Up lends a different picture of Harris (at least to me): an intelligent and sensitive person who is willing to undergo the discomfort involved in proposing alternatives to the religions he’s spent years degrading. His new book, whether discussing the poverty of spiritual language, the neurophysiology of consciousness, psychedelic experience, or the quandaries of the self, at the very least acknowledges the potency and importance of the religious impulse—though Harris might name it differently—that fundamental and common instinct to seek not just an answer to life, but a way to live that answer,” – Trevor Quirk, TNR.

Quirk doesn’t care for the new atheists and, until reading this book, was repelled by Sam’s public persona. But I’ve known Sam for a while now and always knew he was different from the others in his camp. His book is a place where the atheist, the spiritual and the religious can meet and argue. Join me in this month’s Book Club discussion of Waking Up. Get it here. We’ll be debating it in October. One reader’s on board:

What a timely choice for the next book! I’ve had a somewhat searching summer and finally gave myself the permission to identify as an atheist. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve taken a stand on the issue of God’s existence, but for all my life I’ve had a mental block against the word atheist. Atheism, on its face, seemed to lack the rich language necessary to sort out a complex world. In its fight against irrationality, it had forgotten how to make us feel (with notable exceptions). This gap felt real to me, but allowing myself the possibility of atheism applying to me opened me up a bunch of writers and thinkers.

Naturally, at one point or the other, I found myself reading Sam Harris. I definitely don’t agree with everything he writes, but it’s undeniable that he writes well and demands from you your attention. Waking Up seems to fit exactly into this gap that I mentioned. I had pre-ordered it when Sam Harris announced the project. Very excited to read the book and see what fellow Dishheads thinks.

Send those thoughts to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com.

The President’s Bullshit Legal Basis For War

Refugees Fleeing ISIS Offensive Pour Into Kurdistan

Eli Lake passes it along:

One Obama administration official said the argument that the new war is legal under the 2001 AUMF stems from the fact that ISIS began as a franchise of al Qaeda. Initially ISIS was known as al Qaeda in Iraq and at one point its leader, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, pledged allegiance to al Qaeda in what’s known as an oath of Bayat.

But that argument would essentially ignore the fact that Baghdadi today has publicly broken with al Qaeda and declared himself the Caliph of the Muslim world.

Elias Groll hears a version of the same argument:

According to the senior administration official, that split does not matter for the purposes of targeting the Islamic State under the AUMF because of its “longstanding relationship with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden” and “its long history of conducting, and continued desire to conduct, attacks against U.S. persons and interests.” In addition, the official said, there is “extensive history of U.S. combat operations against ISIL dating back to the time the group first affiliated with AQ in 2004.” ISIL is an alternate name for the group.

Describing the group as “supported by some individual members and factions” of groups aligned with al Qaeda, the official described the Islamic State as “the true inheritor of Osama bin Laden’s legacy.”

Robert Chesney, who is “cautiously supportive” of the Obama’s ISIS policy, rejects this legal rationale:

Until this evening the big AUMF interpretive boundary seemed to be the notion that it extended only to AQ’s associated forces actually engaged in hostilities against the United States (though the recent al Shabaab strike perhaps shows this line was not so important after all?). Now we are speaking not just of “associated forces,” but also “disassociated forces” that might, from a certain point of view, be seen as “successor forces.” Will we later hear of the AUMF applying to associated forces of this successor force? It is not hard to imagine many of them popping up the Iraqi-Syrian theater.

Benjamin Wittes is also throughly unimpressed by the administration’s logic:

This is not a stable or sustainable reading of the law, absent some dramatic, non-public intelligence about the ISIS-Al Qaeda relationship. Remember that this is a law that barely a year ago, President Obama was lecturing us needed to be narrowed and repealed. “This war like all wars must end,” he piously intoned. Apparently not, however, before we dramatically expand its interpretive scope and deploy it to support a new and open-ended military campaign that, in the president’s own words, “will take time.” All to avoid asking the girl, who might say no, to dance.

Jack Goldsmith joins the chorus:

The largest irony here is that President Obama has long hoped to leave a legacy of repealing the Bush-era authorization and declaring the “war” against al Qaeda over. “I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal” the 2001 law’s mandate” he said in a speech last May at the National Defense University. “I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further,” he added, before insisting that “history” and “democracy” demand that “this war, like all wars, must end.”

President Obama never did engage Congress to refine the 2001 law. The violent reality of the Islamic State has quickly belied the supposed demands of history and democracy. And the President, all by himself, has now dramatically expanded the 2001 mandate.

Ilya Somin counters those who contend that this isn’t a war:

Some defenders of the administration, such as legal scholar Peter Spiro, argue that the campaign against ISIS does not need congressional authorization because it is not a “real war,” primarily because the president assures us it will be limited to air strikes and probably won’t involve a risk of significant US casualties. The president himself said tonight that the campaign against ISIS “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Such arguments are difficult to credit. Air attacks are among the most important instruments of modern warfare, and Air Force and Navy pilots surely qualify as combat troops; and it’s hard to see a meaningful distinction between “fighting on foreign soil” and bombing foreign soil. Repeated air strikes intended to – as the President put it – “degrade, and ultimately destroy” a potent enemy force that controls a great deal of territory, qualify as war by any reasonable definition. Claims that large-scale air attacks don’t count as warfare were specious when the administration trotted them out in defense of its intervention in Libya in 2011; and they have not improved with age. You don’t have to be a constitutional law professor, like the president, to see that.

Steve Vladeck doesn’t want to lose sight of the forest for the trees:

[A]ll of this focus on the legal rationales for military force shouldn’t obfuscate or excuse our continuing lack of understanding of the threshold questions: What, exactly, is the threat that ISIL poses to the United States, and why is that threat sufficient to justify uses of force beyond conventional self-defense? We heard a little bit on this front in the President’s speech last night–but, at least in my view, not nearly enough. And so for all the oxygen that will be consumed in the coming days and weeks over the meaning and scope of the 2001 AUMF, we shouldn’t let that drown out these critical (and necessarily antecedent) questions.

And Yishai Schwartz spells out the trouble with the administration claiming that “it is the ideology that matters, not the organization”:

The problem with the President’s legal theory is not just that it guts congressional war powers, but that it also seriously hampers our ability to achieve any kind of victory. Ideologies are notoriously difficult to stamp out. They evolve and spread and can go underground. States cannot. And while the Islamic State is most definitely a terrorist group, it is also a state. It has territory under its control and centralized bureaucracy—all of which makes it more easily destroyed. As they draft and interpret their resolution, Congress, and the president, ought to remember that.

(Photo: By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Why Are We Going To War?

David Rothkopf suspects that, “what Obama began last night will be left to another president to finish”:

A strategy requires achievable goals and a plan to realize them. A good U.S. national security strategy also should be built around an outcome that enduringly advances national interests. This speech lacked several key components in both respects. It did not specify who was in the coalition that would help achieve our goals or what the division of labor would be among the participants. Most glaringly in this respect, it did not address the issue of who would be providing the critical “boots on the ground” component of the coalition, the ones our air power would support. There is no strategy without them. There is also no good strategy if, by default, they end up being bad guys who pose a different kind of threat – as would be the case if we end up being the air force for the Syrian regime in its battle with IS, or with Iranian troops, or with Iranian-led Iraqi troops (as has already been the case in Mosul and Amerli).

Christopher Dickey predicts ISIS will survive the onslaught:

The group originally known as al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which evolved into ISIS and now Islamic State or the Caliphate, has proved especially resilient. During the American-led surge in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the organization bore huge casualties. But detailed research into documents captured from the group shows it had a well-defined structure that enable it to survive despite enormous losses.

“It could not do much when it was in survival mode, but it did survive,” says Princeton Prof. Jacob Shapiro. “The implication for dealing with the Islamic State is that we should not expect it to be destroyed for a long time. Even if there is a successful coordinated effort against it, the group will likely remain capable of conducting terrorist acts in Iraq and Syria for the foreseeable future.”

Friedersdorf pinpoints the faulty logic in Obama’s speech:

[I]f America didn’t successfully eliminate violent extremists in Afghanistan or Iraq even with tens of thousands of boots on the ground, if extremists in those countries began to gain more power as soon as Americans left, if we didn’t manage to successfully train their armies even during a years long deployment of our best forces, why do we think that a foe Chuck Hagel characterizes as the most formidable we’ve seen in the War on Terror can be beat with airstrikes and a few hundred advisors? Or are they not as formidable as Team Obama has led us to believe? The White House may have an internally consistent logic that they’re not sharing. Evaluating it is difficult so long as they talk to us like we’re stupid.

But what if Obama’s goals are much more modest? Juan Cole asks, “What if he really does mean he has a Yemen-like situation in mind?”

What if Obama wants to prevent the fall of Baghdad, Erbil and even Riyadh? What if he is privately skeptical about Baghdad recovering Mosul any time soon? He has after all used drones in Waziristan in northwest Pakistan not to inflict military defeat but for tactical advantage. Iraq and Syria are the new Waziristan. ….

Don’t listen to his expansive four-stage program or his retooled, stage-managed John Wayne rhetoric. Look at his metaphors. He is telling those who have ears to hear that he is pulling a Yemen in Iraq and Syria. He knows very well what that implies. It is a sort of desultory, staccato containment from the air with a variety of grassroots and governmental forces joining in. Yemen is widely regarded as a failure, but perhaps it is only not a success. And perhaps that is all Obama can realistically hope for.

That is my one sliver of hope: that Obama knows this can only be a permanent mowing of a lawn, that he’s just trying to stop ISIS from further expansion, that what we eventually get will be minimalism. If so, this speaks to a much broader question: is it in any way prudent to declare a lofty, even unachievable, goal, when you have only a modest hope for getting there? It’s the expectations game all over again – and I would have thought this president would have figured out by now the costs of over-promising.

The Case For War: Your Thoughts

image001 (1)

Several readers respond to my initial reaction to Obama’s address. One simply sends the above image. Another writes:

You seem to touch upon but never explicitly articulate the inherent contradiction in the president’s ISIS strategy. On the one hand, the president appears to acknowledge that only Iraq’s Sunnis can defeat ISIS. While commendable, it’s frankly difficult to reach any other conclusion: not only was Iraq’s army absurdly ineffective in fighting ISIS, but 100,000 U.S. ground troops couldn’t defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq. Only the Sunnis could.

The president’s strategy however is tailor made to prevent another Sunni awakening. As demonstrated in Iraq and Syria, ISIS thrives in (and only in) environments where Sunnis perceive themselves to be under attack by hostile outsiders (the Alawites in Syria and Shi’a in Iraq). The president’s strategy is for the U.S. to serve as the air force for the the Kurdish and Shia Iraqi troops in hopes that this will help them retake the Sunni parts of Iraq. It was the Shia Iraqi government’s control over Sunni territory that facilitated ISIS’s reemergence in Iraq in the first place. Being bombed by the most capable military power in the world is also unlikely to persuade the Sunnis that they are not under attack by outside forces.

I fear our reader is correct. There is no real integration of the Sunnis into the Iraqi government – and no real guarantee that they ever will be. If the US is seen as an ally of the Iranians and the Iraqi Shiites, it will help ISIS, not hurt it. Another dissents:

Look, this is not a defense of Obama or of the wisdom of any policy he is pursuing here.  But everybody, including you, has to cut out the non-stop fiction that we are talking about a “war” here, much less a new, defining war decision.

Obama wasn’t asking for a war before and didn’t ask for a war tonight.  No one is asking for a draft, a tax increase, ground troops or anything remotely resembling what – for hundreds of years – would be a “war.”  That whole narrative framing is disingenuous, misleading, and hyperbolic.

Yes, Obama wants to expand air strikes against ISIS … and couple it with (no doubt futile) efforts to “fix” the broken Iraqi government.  Did anyone for a moment doubt that we were going to try expanded airstrikes against ISIS?  And, wake up – did anyone doubt that some military reaction would come when a group like ISIS threatened massive, untapped oil fields?  (Oh, is that rude to say? Please.)

I am not saying that there aren’t all sorts of good, valid questions … but the hysteria and ridiculous demands for some sort of specific strategy, “end-game” and plan to “destroy” ISIS?  C’mon.  Again, I think we can debate the wisdom of the entire U.S. “war on terror.”  But right now what I see are a bunch of journalists and bloggers who so egregiously fucked up the Iraq War under George W. Bush that they are now running around trying to overcompensate for past failures.  And it clouds the debate, not informs it.  Too many hyperventilating about a “war” include not only neocons, but also pundits desperate for some re-do of prior mistakes.

Zing! Look: the United States just announced it would begin airstrikes to back a ground campaign in Syria, a whole new theater of combat. It is only by the dangerous and corrupting process of the open-ended war on Islamist terrorism that we no longer think of that as a “war.” If another power started air-strikes on US soil, somehow, I think we’d think of it as a war. That this is now regarded as routine police work, which needs no Congressional authorization after 60 days, merely reveals the state of affairs we elected Obama to change. Another:

Try as I might, I just can’t see how you still maintain that this fight against the Islamic State is an inter-Islam fight.  I mean, check out this article, which I append only because it’s the most recent one I’ve read on the spread is IS. You’ve been gone, but articles like this have been coming out every day. IS has insinuated itself possibly as far as Egypt and Libya. And, of course, they made a grand attempt to exterminate the non-Islamic Yazidi last month, to say nothing of what they do to your fellow Christians.

These people are pure millenarians, Andrew, and they don’t give the slightest shit about the concept of “over here” and “over there”. I’m all for discussing the intelligence of an intervention, but we can’t have that discussion properly if we assume, from the outset, that they’re containable, or that anything we do would automatically make things worse by the very fact of our having done them.

And as for that singular success you mention, about the chemical weapons removal in Syria, two things: 1. That was a last-ditch success for the Obama administration; it was in no wise a success for anyone living in Syria because… 2. The direct consequence of that forced maneuver was to cripple the chances of the FSA in Syria and to cede the field of battle entirely to the Islamists. You can’t not have noticed this, but I don’t see you saying much about it. That “victory” came at a price that we’re still paying, and will go on paying for some time to come.

Try reading some of the Islamic State’s literature, like their irregular broadsheet Dabiq. It’s as clear as can be. The whole world will be brought face-to-face with Armageddon, not just moderate Muslims or the Shia. My view is: ignore this or laugh it off at your peril.  Welcome back, but don’t stretch the lessons of your break too far: the Islamic State is here, and it is spreading. If you don’t see that as a danger, then I think you need to take another look.

I would ask our reader to think of what our situation would be like if Assad’s WMDs were still at large – and within reach of ISIS. Then I’d favor intervention. But we avoided that true nightmare scenario only to enter into yet another one voluntarily. And the notion that the FSA was poised to win anything in Syria seems to me a fantasy. And another:

I hope you’re right about Obama’s true motives regarding our new intervention in Iraq.  I really wanted him to say that he was doing this reluctantly, that this is an exercise in containment, that this is an Iraqi fight and that our role would be absolutely minimal, that we’re doing this so that the Kurds – who seem to have their act together – don’t get overrun and so the rest of Iraq can get back to fighting amongst themselves rather than dealing with an unwanted invading force, that he was more interested in rebuilding America than waging Iraq War III.  I hope he has good reason to believe that ISIS in Iraq can be broken fairly easily and compelled to retire to Syria and that we won’t follow them there so that they become Assad and Putin’s problem rather than ours.

I suppose, however, that Obama had to act all commander-in-chiefy for a missile-happy American public and assure the people that we remain exceptional and tough.  Therefore, we can’t contain; we can only “destroy.”  With any luck, ISIS might roll back into Syria and a new story will arise to distract us so that Obama can scale this all back.  I hope that’s the game he’s playing with us.

One thing that has been overlooked in all this is the domestic politics in play: we’re two months away from a second-term mid-term election.  Obama’s popularity is as low as it’s ever been, dragged down it seems by the public’s sense that he is not a strong leader in foreign policy.  At the same time, a GOP wave has not yet fully formed; Senate races for Democratic-held seats in Alaska, Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa, and North Carolina remain close.  Should Obama drop some bombs and ISIS ends up in retreat, the public could rally around the commander-in-chief, his poll numbers could rise, and some Republicans may even praise him for his foreign policy.  That might be enough to save the Senate for the Democrats.  It’s a gamble and a despicable way to play politics, but not out of the realm of possibility.

Last night’s speech also probably marks the demise of Rand Paul as a serious presidential contender.  The GOP will never embrace a non-interventionist, and if Paul morphs into an interventionist, his credibility as a man of principle (which is what his candidacy would be built around, and far more so in his case than others) is shot.  Count the votes his dad received in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2012; that’s how many Rand will receive in those states in 2016.  That other Paul – Paul Ryan – is the future of the Republican Party.

We’ll see, won’t we? If this feckless campaign does lead to the unintended consequences I fear, it could be one way for Paul to win the nomination. It’s a long way to 2016. Think of the changes between now and this time last year.