Fareed Zakaria chides Obama for his incremental escalations of the war on ISIS:

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.

One of the many problems with Obama’s gradual escalation of the illegal war in Syria and Iraq is that each decision seems to be dictated by what Obama thinks he can get away with politically in Washington rather than anything else. The air campaign against ISIS expanded fairly quickly and without any debate or authorization because there was not much resistance to a new air war because it seemed relatively low-risk. The deployment of a few dozen soldiers in an “advisory” capacity doesn’t stir up much resistance because it is currently such a small deployment and because the administration maintains the fiction that they aren’t on a combat mission. Obama does just enough to provide a temporary sop to Syria hawks, but not so much that it alarms the broader public. Obama can continue to escalate U.S. involvement in this piecemeal fashion in part because so many people still buy into the fiction that Obama is “reluctant” to intervene, and so when he opts for escalation it seems as if it must be “necessary.” Congress makes it even easier for him to do this because there is no desire to have even partial ownership of the war, and so there will be little scrutiny and no opposition to speak of there.

Zakaria cited Micah Zenko’s recent review of how the war on ISIS has gradually expanded over the last fourteen months. On Twitter, Zenko expressed surprise that there hasn’t been more criticism of Obama’s latest decision:

I expected Obama’s increase + expansion of the war on ISIS. But I’m truly stunned by the passive responsive in DC to what he’s done.

— Micah Zenko (@MicahZenko) November 6, 2015

I wish that this were surprising, but everything we have seen from the Congress and from presidential candidates in both parties over the last year should have told us to expect just this sort of shrugging acceptance of an ever-expanding war. The opposition party has no problem with expanding the war, and they have been railing against Obama for being insufficiently aggressive and for ruling out options prematurely. As he often does, Obama has endorsed a version of the hawkish option that he derided just a few months before. He can’t make the case for staying out of the conflict once he has started the war on his own, and so he keeps taking the U.S. in far deeper than he said he would when the war began. Meanwhile, his own party’s candidates endorse Obama’s war and even relatively less hawkish members of Congress support the war, so why would they complain when Obama escalates it?