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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| The dangers of Obama’s incrementalism |
| 2015-11-08 |
| It is difficult to find anyone in the Obama administration who believes that putting up to 50 Special Operations soldiers on the ground in Syria will make much of a difference in the raging civil war there. And yet, the president has authorized this expansion of America’s military intervention for the same reasons that he has approved incremental escalations for the past year and a half. He believes he has to do something . But what he is doing will not work. And in a few months, the United States will face the challenge again — back down or double down. So far, President Obama has responded each time with increased intervention. In a smart piece for Foreign Policy, Micah Zenko provides a timeline of this escalation. He notes that “what began Aug. 8, 2014, with 25 airstrikes in the first week and food and water airdropped to save threatened Yazidis, has morphed and expanded into 600 bombs being dropped per week and more than 100 bundles of ammunition supplied to an unnamed faction of 5,000 Syrian rebels.” And this was before the Special Operations forces were sent to Syria. And yet, the strength of the Islamic State does not appear to be much diminished, even by the administration’s account. This is hardly surprising. The Syrian struggle is complex and ferocious, with many outside powers — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, now Russia — aiding many different groups, with supposed allies often at cross-purposes with each other. It’s difficult to see how a modest U.S. intervention would shift that landscape. In 1967, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who worked in the Kennedy administration, wrote, “In retrospect, Vietnam is a triumph of the politics of inadvertence. We have achieved our present entanglement, not after due and deliberate consideration, but through a series of small decisions.” The Vietnam analogy is crude and imperfect for many reasons. And yet the basic logic of America’s gradual intervention is hauntingly familiar. You opt for incrementalism, hoping to get lucky. In the end, despite his inconsistencies and vacillations, I believe that Obama will keep the U.S. intervention in Syria small and limited. But he will leave his successor with a terrible dilemma in just the way that the Kennedy administration left Lyndon Johnson. The next U.S. president will face the stark reality that America’s involvement in Syria will not have resolved matters. But the U.S. government will have made commitments, sent troops, spent billions and lost lives in that conflict. At that point, can the U.S. president back down or will he — or she — have to double down, hoping to get lucky? |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #5 @#4: Correct. Lived there for ten yrs. in the '90's (albeit Hyde Park/U of C area). Outside of that 'golden ghetto' lay the 'forbidden zone'. |
| Posted by: borgboy 2015-11-08 18:50 |
| #4 The South Side of Chicago is the perfect metaphor for "The 0bama Legacy"(TM). |
| Posted by: Blossom Unains5562 2015-11-08 12:13 |
| #3 Does anyone here hoestly believe our Ebolama is doing any actual fighting against islamic porkoranimals? To put it even more bluntly, how can anyone think his actions (complete lack of real ones) are anything but treason? You better folks could come up with a list longer than Dumbo's ear droop so I only mention only a couple here. Giving the Iranian nuke and ICBM programs the complete green light. Iran will have working nukes shortly AND they will use them. Of that there can be no doubt. Not to mention funding these fundimentalists with way over 150 billion $s to continue their global Jihad. Refusing to arm the Kurds, allowing world banks to move the Islamic States oil funds the murder by neglect of our Vets and so on and so on. Treason flat and simple, what say you folk? |
| Posted by: Mike Mann 2015-11-08 10:41 |
| #2 It's the difference between primitive warfare and modern warfare. The pros prefer the latter, the pols prefer the former. You may have modern tech but you're just playing the old game of ritual displays seeking to intimidate your opponent. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2015-11-08 08:57 |
| #1 If you take into consideration that Obama's goal is not to actually win, in fact not to seriously hurt our enemies, but diminish American influence, his foreign policy makes perfect sense. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2015-11-08 00:54 |