Well, that was pretty anticlimactic. Here is President Obama’s shiny new plan for defeating ISIS:
- More airstrikes, including strikes in Syria.
- A few hundred advisors to work with Iraqi troops. They will provide training, equipment, and intelligence.
- Counterterrorism to prevent ISIS attacks.
- Humanitarian aid.
We are, presumably, already engaged in #3 and #4. We’re partially engaged in #1. Basically, then Obama is proposing to (a) expand the air war and (b) provide more aid to the Iraqi army. That’s really not an awful lot—which is fine with me.
Will this work? Airstrikes by themselves are obviously limited in what they can accomplish. They can frustrate ISIS plans in specific areas, but they can’t do a lot more than that. As we’ve known all along, real success depends on the Iraqi military. Unfortunately, given the fact that we spent years training Iraqi forces and ended up with an army that cut and run at the first sight of ISIS forces, I have my doubts that further training will really do that much good. But if it doesn’t, there’s little we can do anyway. So it’s probably our only option.
The big question, of course, is whether our assistance will stay limited. If the Iraqi military fails, as it may, will we start pouring in more troops? Obama was clear on this: “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” Still, sometimes events run away with things, and I’m not sure what’s going to prevent a slow accretion of more and more US forces aside from Obama’s personal convictions. This is a thinner reed than I’d like even if I believe that he’s entirely sincere in his desire to avoid escalation. We’ll just have to wait and see.
In any case, that’s really all we got tonight. I’d like to write something longer and more insightful, but there just weren’t enough specifics in the speech to justify that. The last third of the speech was mostly platitudes about partners, chairing a UN meeting, America is great, God bless the troops, etc. There wasn’t an awful lot there.
