America’s blood is up
by digby
Matt Yglesias delivers an interesting critique of President Obama’s strategy and rhetoric. I tend to agree that the regional coalition is a no-brainer and that the bombing campaign in Iraq was just inevitable. (It’s been our catch-all strategy for decades now …) The long term prospects for “eradicating” ISIS through such a strategy are not good, but they could be slowed at least in some respects. The potential of unintended consequences is growing by the minute.
However, Yglesias points out that the real danger here is exacerbating the threat with all this sabre rattling. (Apparently, everything at Vox has to be in list form …?)
7) The biggest problem with Obama’s current approach isn’t what he’s promising to do, but what he’s promising to accomplish. Over the course of 2014, Obama’s anti-ISIS statements have become increasingly dire and alarmist.
8) The shift in tone appears to have two causes. One is backlash to his ill-advised quip about ISIS being global jihad’s JV team. The other is polling indicating that the American public was profoundly affected by the execution videos, which were the single most widely-noted news event since 2009.
9) 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.
10) 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.
11) “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” Obama promised last night. Certainly we shouldn’t. But in the context of the administration’s stated aspirations, this is more of a vague hope than anything else. If Obama really wants to stick to the policy he’s outlined, he needs to find a more measured way to describe what he’s promising it will achieve.
It seems to me that he’s overreacting to criticism and that’s a bad thing in these situations. People will calm down about the beheading videos if our leadership stays calm and reassuring. The only reason not to is to gin up support for war — and if Obama has finally come around to that way of thinking it’s very disappointing. He doesn’t need the nation to be hysterical over this simply because Huckleberry Graham is waving his hands and calling for the fainting couch.
David Corn asked the right question about all this (and not just the rhetoric, but the strategy itself) in this piece:
After depicting ISIS as a peril warranting a US military response—and with much of the American public convinced of that—can he then shrug his shoulders and say never mind? Will he provide the hawks an opening for political attacks and demands for greater military intervention? In his speech, the man who ran for president with the pledge to end the Iraq war declared, “we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” But what if all else fails? He vowed to eradicate the ISIS “cancer,” noting it will take time to do so. Can he stop if his non-war counter-terrorism campaign does not defeat the disease? It is hard to put the case for war back in the box.
He’s right. Once you start with the chest beating about a mortal enemy such as the world has rarely known, you trap yourself into acting, something the president had thus far adroitly avoided. As Ed Kilgore wisely pointed out:
It doesn’t help that Obama closed his speech, as I noted last night, with an appeal to American Exceptionalism: if we don’t “destroy” IS, we’re not simply exposing U.S. interests to danger, but skewing the moral compass of the whole world. That distorted self-image of the United States as the first, last and only resort for the vindication of wrongs is also difficult to “put back in the box” after it’s projected so often, even as a rhetorical afterthought.
I think this is about America itself feeling a lack of control over all these recent chaotic events, including the collapse of the economy, and demanding that the government take some sort of action. Which is ironic since the cognoscenti are determined to portray the country as a bunch of isolationist, small government libertarian/conservatives who just want to be left alone to pray. In reality, everyone knows we’re a big, rich, badass military empire and a majority of Americans don’t like the fact that other people in the world think they have some agency to act while we sit around watching our standard of living go down and our future prospects dim. (The fact that much of our problem stems from our being a big-badass military empire hasn’t really penetrated.) So the president has simply come around to giving them what they want.
Update: Yeah, baby. Now we’re talking:
Rep. John Fleming said many see the president’s strategy as not nearly enough.
“This is a stalemate strategy,” he said. “I think that we would want to see an all-out war, shock and awe. We put troops on the ground, we put all of our assets there after properly prepping the battlefield, and in a matter of a few weeks we take these guys out … and we leave a stay-behind force to keep our friends up and going, and also maybe a no-fly zone in Syria over the area Assad controls.”
Others are worried that the situation will escalate and noted their constituents are, too. Rep. John Carter, whose Texas district includes Fort Hood and who chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said he told members in the meeting that if Congress is going to commit to this strategy, it must fund the military at a higher level.
“If we’re going to do this, nobody’s that got any sense can think any way other than we will eventually have boots on the ground. We already have 1,500. Those people are not wearing ballet slippers over there,” said Carter. “And so the reality is, if we’re asking these tired, overcommitted quite patriotic families to do this some more, we’ve got to start reinforcing them. We’ve got to start building our military back, not cutting it.”
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