Perfect Foreign Policy Storm....

The past few months have not been kind to the Obama Administration. War (or what ever it is) in Ukraine, a dangerous Ebola outbreak that the World Health Organization says could infect 200,000 by the end of the year, and the alarming advance of ISIS through parts of the Middle East, ought to be more than enough to keep the President awake at night.

President Obama has certainly endured his share of criticism about his handling of foreign policy, in my view a lot of it justified. Recent events have ignited a firestorm of commentary, a lot of it more pointed and informed than anything I've pointed out. Last week, President Obama was at pains to emphasize that the campaign against ISIS would NOT involve American boots on the ground. Yet, the very next day, the CIA's assessment of ISIS's capabilities was revised significantly. ISIS is no rag-tag militia force. They are large (now estimated at 20-25K) well-financed, organized, and equipped, thanks in-part to the speed with which the Iraqi Army melted away from their US-supplied equipment. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee today on Capitol Hill, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had to conceded that US boots could end up in the middle of some combat, even if only as a result of their advisory role.

The President's speech to the nation (in prime time) gave the impression that ISIS was a significant threat and that the ultimate goal of the US was to destroy ISIS; not just contain or degrade, but destroy. That's a lofty (unrealistic?) objective for military action restricted to the air.

The debate over whether Obama took his eye off the ball in Iraq, didn't intervene when he could have made a difference in Syria, or has had the US in retreat from foreign affairs generally will go on. However, as I think about the situation with ISIS in Iraq and Syria in particular, I keep coming back to an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs in February 2002 by Michael Scott Doran entitled "Someone Else's Civil War." It is a fascinating piece that walks through a centuries long struggle for political Islam's heart and soul. Doran's focus at the time was Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, but the piece can still be read with relevance today since ISIS is largely an even more radical off-shoot of Al-Qaeda. The gist of Doran's argument is that Bin-Laden attacked the United States on 9/11 in a shift of tactics in a broader effort to unite a larger cross section of the Islamic world against a common enemy; America. However, their real target was the authoritarian regimes dominating the region.

Gruesome and as ISIS's video beheadings of westerners have been, I am struck by the way in which they have shifted public opinion and motivated the Obama Administration to action in a region the President clearly wanted to be done with. Moreover, I have seen no explicit claim by ISIS that it is at war with the west. Indeed, their main fight has been with the Assad regime in Syria and they seem mainly to want a new Caliphate established anchored in and around Iraq.

I'm not saying the US should stand by and watch from afar while a centuries-long civil war grinds on. Moreover, the United States doesn't have a great track record of getting it right in a complex part of the world it seems to understand in the vaguest of terms. However, I am also among those stooges that thinks the US is indispensable in any effort to set things right. My main concern, like Doran's, is that the President isn't being straight with the American public about the level of engagement that actually be required to make a substantive difference. As Niall Ferguson so clearly argued in his 2004 book Colossus, the United States doesn't have the stomach for long-term overseas engagement, and as a result hasn't been very good at it. America got tired of the projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will be interesting to see whether America's stomach for engaging ISIS over the long-haul will become queasy too.