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Paul and the War Against ISIS

Sen. Paul is talking about the war against ISIS as if it were still the "limited" operation that Obama claimed it would be at the beginning.
Rand Paul question

Rand Paul talks to Reason about “conservative realism” and his support for the war against ISIS:

I see the airstrikes really as defending vital American interests, and that would be our embassy in Baghdad as well as our consulate in Erbil.

It is hard to see how this is a vital interest. While it may be preferable to keep these posts open and functioning, the U.S. wouldn’t suffer significantly from having them evacuated and shut for some period of time. If a host government is incapable of protecting our embassies and consulates against its internal enemies, that isn’t an argument for taking sides in that country’s civil war. Paul presumably wouldn’t argue that the U.S. should have resumed military operations in Libya in the name of defending the embassy in Tripoli. That embassy was quite appropriately evacuated earlier this year amid the worsening violence in that country. That doesn’t seem to have harmed U.S. vital interests, and it’s not clear why doing something similar in Iraq would have been worse than committing the U.S. to a new military campaign.

Besides, the expansion of the bombing campaign into Syria has nothing to do with defending U.S. personnel or installations. Sen. Paul is still talking about the war against ISIS as if it were still the ostensibly “limited” and defensive operation that Obama claimed it would be at the beginning. It has become something far more ambitious in the last three months, so it’s no longer sufficient to use the original justifications for the “limited” intervention in Iraq to explain support for the open-ended campaign in Iraq and Syria that has been going on for weeks.

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