The Consequences of Expanding Obama’s ISIS War Into Syria

It’s been clear for years that Washington would
eventually bomb Syria; the only real question was which side
it would pick. Now that that’s
settled, Daniel Drezner offers an
observation:

The United States has been
conducting hundreds of airstrikes against Islamic State targets in
[Iraq] for the past month. In contrast to Syria, there are actual
ground forces in Iraq with an interest in reclaiming territory. So,
in many ways, Iraq is an easier test of the effect of U.S. air
power on changing the balance of power on the ground. And yet,
according to The New York Times’s David Kirkpatrick and Omar
Al-Jawoshy, things
haven’t changed all that much in Iraq: “After six weeks of
American airstrikes, the Iraqi government’s forces have scarcely
budged the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State from their hold on
more than a quarter of the country.” Given that it will be months
before the Free Syrian Army receives any training, the evidence
from the Iraq campaign does not bode well for any immediate success
in Syria.

Daniel Larison offers a
forecast:

Obama has embarked on a military campaign that will
consume and thoroughly discredit the remaining years of his
presidency. I suspect that the public will sooner or later sour on
a war that was originally sold as a brief and limited operation,
and their support for an air campaign will wane as it becomes
apparent that the war cannot achieve its stated goal. Even if that
doesn’t happen, Obama will still be responsible for committing the
U.S. to exactly the sort of unnecessary and open-ended war that he
was expected to oppose.