Like a lot of
people, I was perplexed by President Obama’s decision to talk to
the press yesterday. He really had nothing to say, which he made
perfectly clear, especially when it came to talking about ISIL and
the situation in
Iraq and Syria:
“The options that I’m asking for from the Joint Chiefs focuses
primarily on making sure that ISIL is not overrunning Iraq,” Obama
said using another acronym for the militant Islamic group ISIS.“We don’t have a strategy yet. We’re seeing some news reports
suggesting we are further ahead than we are,” he said.
WTF, really? Just a week ago, he was talking about “rooting out
a cancer like ISIL,” right?
Folks on the right are saying this is because Obama is a
foreign-policy wimp who is at best a reluctant warrior. Such a
reaction may work politically, at least in the short term.
According to a new USA Today/Pew poll, Americans
are increasingly saying the U.S. is doing “too little” to
fix the world. A plurality still (wisely, IMO) believes that we’re
“doing too much,” but the numbers are shifting compared to a year
ago. Something on the order of 54 percent say Obama is “not tough
enough” when it comes to foreign policy and national
security.
Yet the idea that Obama is slow to military
action or willing to go over the top in the name of national
security is clearly at odds with his record as president. He
tripled troop strength in Afghanistan and only reluctantly pulled
out of Iraq in 2011 (according to the schedule originally put in
place by George W. Bush). Then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was
promising up until the end that a large U.S. military presence was
going to stick around for the foreseeable future. However
constitutionally dubious U.S. action in Libya was, it happened, and
it seemed clear Obama was gung-ho to start bombing Syria to
dislodge the Assad regime until public and political opinion
fomented by Sen. Rand Paul and others made that too costly. When it
comes to surveillance (legal and otherwise) and abrogating civil
rights (including claiming he has the right to unilaterally execute
American citizens), Obama has taken a back seat to no
president.
The problem, then, isn’t that the president isn’t hawkish
enough. It’s that he really doesn’t have a plan for figuring out
if, how, and when to use force effectively in the pursuit of U.S.
goals. In this, he is yet again extending the legacy of George W.
Bush, who mired the country in two long wars that quickly became
aimless.
In the wake of what can only be considered a disastrous
appearance yesterday, the Obama administration is already scurrying
to do damage control.
From the Hill:
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki appeared shortly after
Earnest on the network, also looking to clean up the president’s
remarks.“I think it’s important to note here that the president has
already begun implementing his strategy to defeat [ISIL],” Psaki
said, noting that the administration was working toward “building
international coalitions” to combat the terror group.
This sort of response is just sad. When Jen Psaki—who
famously provoked laughter from the press earlier this year
when she complained that Obama doesn’t get enough credit for all
his foreign policy achievements—is contradicting her boss, you know
the wheels have totally gone off the bus. Or maybe that there isn’t
even a bus.
Over at The Daily Beast, Eli Lake and Josh Rogin have an
exhaustive piece up about the failure of the Obama administration
to come up with a policy and it’s about what you would expect from
a bunch of people that include John Kerry.
Read the whole thing and shudder at what comes next.
A politically weak president who heads a party that since George
McGovern has worried about looking weak on defense (and who has
been called out as weak by his own former secretary of state). A
crap economy at home, disastrous midterms looming. Russia invading
Ukraine. The odds of a poorly planned intervention that escalates
U.S. involvement in the Middle East are getting better every
minute.
From
Lake and Rogin’s article:
“The whole international community should act against ISIS in
Iraq and Syria at the same time. Their advance inside Syria needs
to be halted and the only way to do that is to conduct airstrikes
against their forces,” Hadi AlBahra, the President of the Syrian
National Coalition, told The Daily Beast in an interview. “The
political process is in a coma…”
Obama, too, is in a coma. Waking up would entail actually
building an international coalition to deal with the situation in
Iraq and Syria (the idea of the United States unilaterally going
into Syria during its civil war would surely rank as one of our
country’s great strategic blunders; it would either simply
strenghten Assad’s regime, thus leading to expanded set of problems
down the road, or create absolute chaos throughout the region,
causing more problems immediately and in the future). And Obama
also needs to lead on putting together a coherent, effective, and
defensible policy for the war on terror—one that he can sell to
Republicans, allies, and especially the American people who he has
treated as an afterthought in all this. Despite the claims of hawks
and ISIL itself, the terrorist group is hardly an existential
threat to the West any more than al Qaeda was. It can and should be
contained and squeezed down everywhere as much as possible (this is
not something that mandates either an interventionist foreign
policy or expansive security state at home).
It’s way late in a presidency not to have a strategy yet but
that doesn’t mean Obama is off the hook for, you know, actually
doing his job.
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