Obama Follows Conservatives’ Syria Advice, Years Later

The Hill reports: President Obama would consider sending more U.S. special operations forces to Syria in the future if the latest deployment proves to be successful, the White House said Tuesday.

The president had vowed to end wars and not to put boots on the ground. It was a political promise, unsustainable at the time in the face of the spreading menace of the Islamic State.

Rather than gloat (or after gloating), critics of his passivity in Syria — including many Republicans and his entire national security team at the time (e.g. Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta) — should be relieved that he has given up the deeply cynical notion that wars were Republicans’ fault and he could end them at will. The Islamic State is America’s enemy (and the West’s, more generally), and there is no substitute for U.S. leadership, including deployment of some ground troops. Unfortunately, having been paralyzed for years, the situation in both Syria and Iraq is dire and the Islamic State has metastasized elsewhere. The incremental approach will only prolong the fight and postpone the inevitable.

Again and again, military commanders (current and former) as well as outside experts have advised that a significant U.S. force (in the tens, not hundreds, of thousands) is needed in order to gain the cooperation and confidence of regional allies who will need to make up the bulk of the force. Obama is going so slowly as to cause us to conclude that he is simply trying to prevent disaster from unfolding before he leaves office, forcing the next president to make the strategic call for adequate forces.

It is not clear which if any presidential candidates will have the spine to do what is needed to defeat the Islamist force. On the bright side, Hillary Clinton approved of the move, without limiting her options going forward. (“These Special Forces will continue to provide critical support to local forces on the ground who ultimately must be the ones to win this fight.”) More recently, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has talked about doing what is needed to defeat the Islamic State without opining that air power alone can accomplish the mission. Donald Trump has, among other things, demanded Saudi Arabia pay for our help, said he would order our troops to target noncombatant women and children and declared we should seize the Islamic State’s oil fields. Goodness knows what he actually would do.

To be clear, Obama deserves ample blame for the years of inactivity that allowed the Islamic State to take root and hundreds of thousands to die in a bloody civil war. He has been passive in the face of genocide. For that he will have to answer to his conscience and to history.

Nevertheless, Republicans who disapprove of a strategy to provide necessary troops to defeat the Islamic State risk getting to the left of Obama and Clinton and appearing irresponsible. The war cannot be won from the air, and the president is at least making it easier for his successor to ramp up. For those who seek the presidency, the question is whether they will follow his lead or, in a more limited way with a much smaller force, the example set by President George W. Bush, who put the country’s defense above partisan advantage and thereby headed off genocide and stabilized Iraq.