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Obama and the War on ISIS

Obama has yielded to the consensus in Washington as he has done so often before.
Barack Obama Address to the Nation
10 September 2014 - Washington, D.C. - US President Barack delivers a prime time address from the Cross Hall of the White House on September 10, 2014 in Washington, DC. Vowing to target the Islamic State with air strikes "wherever they exist", Obama pledged to lead a broad coalition to fight ISIS and work with "partner forces" on the ground in Syria and Iraq. Photo Credit: Saul Loeb/CNP/AdMedia (Newscom TagID: admphotostwo072033.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

Andrew Sullivan makes a questionable claim about Obama and his new war:

We elected Obama precisely to be calm and sane enough to be able to resist what he has now done. He betrayed us.

Well, I never voted for Obama, so I can’t really say that he betrayed me. As much as I distrusted the people he ran against in 2008 and 2012, I never fully expected him to resist demands for “action” because in too many other cases in the past he endorsed armed intervention. To believe that he was able to resist the pressure for intervention this year requires us to ignore the fact that he would have started a war against Syria a year ago if the British House of Commons, the American public, and the U.S. Congress hadn’t stopped him. It requires us to forget that he launched an illegal and unnecessary war in Libya, which he then pretended wasn’t a war for eight months. It requires us to forget that he has always yielded sooner or later to the demands of hawks on almost every important foreign policy issue. Even on Iran, where he still has the chance to preside over a successful negotiated settlement, he went along with each new hawkish condition.

Obama never really hid that he was a mostly conventional interventionist. Despite what his detractors and admirers wanted everyone to believe, he never represented nearly as much of a break with previous administrations on foreign policy as many of us would have liked to see. Yes, he was less likely than his general election opponents to resort to military action, but that is damning with faint praise. “Less militaristic than McCain” doesn’t mean very much. “Less belligerent than Romney” could apply to 80% of Americans. I would still argue that either of those opponents would have been significantly worse in their foreign policy decision-making, and everything both of them have said in the years since would prove me right, but in the end that just means that Obama was always likely to make bad–but not extraordinarily bad–decisions. And so he has. Obama’s decisions to wage war in Iraq and Syria this year deserve strong criticism because they are poor decisions that will cost the U.S. in the months and years to come, but I can’t say that these decisions surprise me. On ISIS, Obama has yielded to the consensus in Washington as he has done so often before. The problem isn’t that Obama has really betrayed anyone, but that he has done exactly what we should have expected him to do from the start. The infuriating truth is that he really was better than the alternatives in the last two elections, and that’s still not very good.

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