The Dish

How dare we. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf tries to spin how dropping bombs on two countries to destroy an entity that has yet to attack the US doesn’t count as a preemptive war:

Allahpundit watches the clip:

Preventing a dangerous enemy from hitting the U.S. by hitting him first sounds pretty preemptive-y to me. If I understand her correctly, the reason this isn’t preemptive war a la Bush is because it isn’t war, period. A war is something you engage in against a nation-state; we don’t recognize ISIS’s caliphate, ergo, they’re just a bunch of terrorists and preemptive war against terrorists is simply counterterrorism. I think that’s why you’re seeing such a moronic sustained effort today among White House mouthpieces to avoid using terms like “war” and “victory,” with Harf refusing even to accept “war on terrorism” as a label at the beginning of the video [above]. (Obama himself never once described the new “effort” against ISIS as a “war” [Wednesday] night, by the way.) The parallels here to 2003 — preempting a threat to the U.S. by overthrowing a brutal regime in the heart of Iraq — are too obvious and too politically uncomfortable to adopt Bush-era terms like “war” and “preemption” too. And of course, the more you talk about it as a new “war,” the more the public’s left wondering why an Article I declaration of war by Congress is unnecessary.

Asawin Suebsaeng catches John Kerry making the same claim:

“If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with [ISIS], they can do so, but the fact is that it’s a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts,” Kerry said Thursday on CNN. “I don’t think people need to get into war fever on this,” he told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan. … It is true that this latest round of airstrikes and other actions against ISIS is not a war in the classic sense. It isn’t as flashy or big-budgeted as past wars, and significantly fewer boots are on the ground. It is not a war in the sense that war has not been declared, but by that standard, the one that Kerry fought in (that disastrous one that served as the basis of three Oliver Stone movies) wasn’t a war, either.

Froomkin interprets the attitude Obama projected in his Wednesday night address:

This was not going to be a huge deal, he indicated. He called it an “effort,” not a war, and stressed that “this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” There was no talk of shock and awe; what Obama had in mind was a ”counterterrorism campaign” that “will be waged through a steady, relentless effort.” And Obama’s lack of any specificity regarding the scale of the effort, the timing, goals for partner participation, or any kind of metrics for success was either cover for him not really having a viable plan — or a brilliant rhetorical strategy to keep open the option of ratcheting everything back once the hysteria passes. Or both.

Mary Ellen O’Connell underlines that in international law, the kind of preemptive defensive operation the Obama administration envisions is still illegal:

Late last month, Yale law professor Harold Koh, the former legal adviser in Obama’s State Department, asserted that the United States had the right to attack ISIL under international law to “to avert humanitarian disaster and to protect U.S. nationals and vital interests.” But international law is clear: The right to use force in self-defense arises following a significant armed attack against a country when more such attacks are likely. The use of force in self-defense must target the territory of the state responsible for those attacks. The United States has faced only one such situation under current law: It occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, and led to the war against Afghanistan, which gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda forces that orchestrated and carried out the 9/11 attacks. There simply is no right under international law to resort to major military force to avert humanitarian disasters or to protect nationals or “interests.”

Indeed, the administration is trying to claim authority for this operation under the 2001 AUMF that opened the way for the war in Afghanistan. That’s transparently illegal too, but Massimo Calabresi doubts that will make a difference:

If Obama is breaking the law, don’t expect much to come of it in the short term. The consequences of Obama’s legal interpretation, beyond his own discomfort, are not likely very great. The Bush administration showed the bar for legally constraining presidential counterterrorist actions is high, and even when it is surmounted there are little or no penalties. Politically, the president has nothing to fear: no matter how angry they are about the new effort against ISIS, the left wing of Obama’s party isn’t going to impeach him, and the right won’t either, at least not for going after Islamic extremists. In the long term, perhaps Obama’s legal legerdemain will boost those who want to come up with new, clearer legal frameworks for international counterterrorism operations. But for now Obama, like Bush before him, seems determined to act without them.

And that scares the crap out of Jonathan Hafetz:

Going to war against ISIL through the rubric of the AUMF has significant implications. Among them is the deterioration of the levers of democratic accountability for waging armed conflict in an age of global terrorism. It suggests not only the relative ease with which the United States will go to war, but also the way in which new military actions are subsumed under a more generalized war against extremist groups. War is becoming increasingly open-ended, while also more able to avoid democratic checks, as each successive military operation gets subsumed within an existing–and ever growing–conflict. War doesn’t end; it just expands, all without the friction that the separation of powers is designed to provide.

Larison suspects that it’s inevitable:

Escalation was always very likely, because that has been the pattern in U.S. interventions over the last twenty-five years. Obama already demonstrated in Libya that the U.S. would go far beyond the original stated goals of an intervention, and he is now on record saying that his greatest regret about the Libyan war was that the U.S. didn’t follow it up with a post-war military presence. That should be something to bear in mind when you next hear Obama pledge that there won’t be any American ground forces in combat in this new war. That’s why we should have expected this from Obama, but what made escalation even more likely is that our current political culture and foreign policy debate don’t really permit the U.S. to limit itself to small, achievable goals when it uses force overseas. That is especially true once administration officials irresponsibly stoke public fear about a group being an “imminent threat to every interest we have.” Sooner or later, the mismatch between the administration’s alarmist rhetoric and the initial “limited” action was going to be fixed by adopting a more aggressive policy.

Rich Lowry, for one, is ready to send in the infantry:

ISIL has occupied an enormous amount of territory in Iraq and Syria, including major population centers. That is why it declared a caliphate and why it has unprecedented resources. To defeat it, this territory must be taken back and it is unlikely to happen exclusively from the air—especially in the cities. It will take ground forces.

We hope to work with proxy forces, but they are motley groups that will almost certainly need vetting and advising by special operators working closely with them on the ground. But the president ruled out American ground forces. The cynical interpretation is that he is hoping to do enough against ISIL to satisfy domestic political opinion and keep the terror group at bay until he can hand off an incomplete campaign to his successor, who will be left with the difficult choice of whether to truly defeat ISIL.

James Jeffrey agrees that Obama was wrong to rule out boots on the ground:

[S]ometimes local forces are not enough. U.S. troops have capabilities they cannot approach, beginning with the crucial combat multipliers: “speed” and “decisiveness.” The commitment of even a few U.S. troops with actual ground combat missions signals credibility and seriousness. Such a troop presence can integrate rival local forces (as U.S. joint platoons did with the Kurds and Iraqi Army in 2010-2011), prevent friendly atrocities against civilians, and shape the goals of ground combat.

Still, local forces in Iraq and Syria should be the first choice, with commitment of our ground troops only an emergency contingency. Once in combat they introduce entirely new risks beyond those of drones or F-18 strikes, Special Forces trainers, and Navy SEALs. These risks begin with casualties. Ground combat is bloody.  While overall casualty rates are down from Vietnam, thousands have died in each of America’s last two wars, and tens of thousands have suffered serious wounds.

And Dov Zakheim argues that they’re necessary to hold the coalition together:

It is one thing to offer funds or training facilities, which Saudi Arabia is apparently willing to provide. It is quite another to deploy troops. Whether the Saudis, Emiratis, Jordanians, and others will be ready to do so absent American leadership on the ground is at best an open question. It is true that America led a coalition “from behind” in Libya. But that coalition did not commit ground troops; apart from very small numbers of European special forces, it was the Libyan rebels who provided the overwhelming majority of troops conducting operations on the ground against Muammar al-Qaddafi.  Moreover, the aftermath of that conflict hardly was a showpiece for coalition operations: Libya is now virtually a failed state.

Morrissey implies that Americans would come around to embrace another land war in the Middle East if only the president had the courage to give us one:

[I]t’s true that a move to send ground troops to deal with ISIS would create a large amount of political backlash, and would also call into question Obama’s endgame strategy in Afghanistan — even more so that ISIS has. If the American public won’t back a decision to put combat troops back into Iraq, then it would take a President willing to go it alone politically at home to give that order, and clearly that’s not the case with Obama. However, a lack of progress against ISIS will play badly for Obama too, and it will sap the resolve of Americans to see the job through to victory. We may end up looking weaker than we do now, especially if we can’t even get our traditional allies on board for just the 30,000-foot tactical decisions.

Highlighting some of the characteristics of the classic neocon freakout over ISIS, Chait observes that among this crowd, there’s no such thing as too much force:

The nub of neoconservatism is a belief that the only possible strategic failure is the insufficient use of military force. This is more of an atavistic reflex than a cogent form of thought. Cruz assails Obama, “Instead he suggested targeted attacks and focuses frankly on political issues that are peripheral from the central question of how we protect America from those who would take jihad to our nation.” Targeted is bad. Political is bad. Protecting is good. Here is [Jennifer] Rubin’s response:

[Obama] insisted, “This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.” But if the Islamic State, which occupies vast territory and is highly trained and very well organized, than I suppose it won’t work.

That is not even an English sentence. Nonetheless, the underlying impulse is clear enough.

(Photo: A flag of the Islamic State is seen on the other side of a bridge at the frontline of fighting between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Islamist militants in Rashad, on the road between Kirkuk and Tikrit, on September 11, 2014. By JM Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)

Beinart takes the MSM to task for swallowing the government’s line on the ISIS threat:

Many publications have uncritically accepted Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s claim about the number of Americans who have gone to fight with ISIS—a figure that New America Foundation terrorism expert Peter Bergen argues is dramatically exaggerated. Other media commentary simply assumes that if Westerners go to fight with ISIS in Iraq or Syria, they’re destined to attack Europe or the United States. But that’s not true. Bergen notes, for instance, that of the 29 Americans who have gone to fight with the Somali jihadist group al-Shabab, none have tried to commit terrorism against the United States. One reason is that many of them ended up dead.

Press coverage of ISIS often ignores the fact that, in the past, the group has not targeted the American homeland. Jihadist groups, even monstrous ones, don’t inevitably go after the United States. Al-Qaeda began doing so as part of a specific strategy.

Keating stresses that for the most part, “the much-discussed threat of ISIS’s international fighters returning to their home countries to carry out attacks has been theoretical”:

As David Sterman pointed out in an analysis for the New America Foundation this week, “no one returning from or seeking to join a Syrian jihadist group has even been charged with plotting an attack inside the United States.”

Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, the Florida man who returned to the U.S. for a time after training in Syria in 2012 and was under surveillance by the FBI, tried but failed to recruit friends to the cause, and eventually returned to Syria where he carried out a suicide bombing. If anything, greater U.S. involvement in the conflict will make ISIS—a group that until recently was most concerned with local territorial gains—more rather than less likely to target U.S. interests and citizens.

That’s what makes Yglesias uncomfortable with the way Obama talked up the threat on Wednesday night:

Public opinion always matters in politics and therefore in policymaking, but the fact of the matter is that the American people have this a bit mixed up. The beheadings are not the most alarming thing ISIS did this summer (try taking Mosul or genocidal violence against religious minority groups) and the rise of ISIS isn’t even the summer’s most alarming foreign policy crisis (try Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and apparent probing of Estonian and Finnish borders). There is no good reason for the United States to take maximal action against ISIS, not least because none of our potential partners in the region are going to.

Alarmist rhetoric and a policy of wise restraint make odd bedfellows. If the US catches some lucky breaks (or ISIS some bad ones) it may all work out for the best. But Obama’s speeches are writing checks his policy can’t necessarily cash. And eliminating ISIS’ ability to occasional kidnap westerners who travel into the conflict zone is much more difficult than eliminating its ability to capture new Iraqi cities or threaten major oil fields. If another shoe drops in a bad way, there is enormous risk that the president has set the country up for a cycle of unwise escalation.