[Occupymendocino] obama-has-gotten-us-into-a-quagmire

[Richard Karch]

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: The U.S. launches air strikes in Syria, hundreds of thousands march to protest climate-change inaction, and the race for control of the Senate enters its final stretch.

wo weeks ago, President Obama addressed the nation on his plan to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS, saying, “I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." Yesterday, the U.S. launched air strikes in Syria, targeting not only ISIS but the less-known terror network Khorasan. Obama insists that he has ruled out deploying combat troops to the region, but a growing chorus, from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair, has said they could be necessary. Could we be entering into another quagmire?

Yes. And no one knows this better than President Obama, whose political rise was tied to his opposition to “dumb wars” and who is nothing if not honest in warning that our new engagement in Iraq and Syria will last for an unspecified number of years, past his presidency. His open-ended, inchoate description of this war’s future is the very definition of a quagmire — and the very antithesis of an exit strategy. We are sinking into the quicksand even as we speak.

All summer the bipartisan Washington consensus had it that the president had to talk tougher, be “decisive,” exercise “leadership,” etc. etc. Well, now that that wish has come true, what have been the results? Even as America was poised to hit Syria this week, the Times reported that six weeks of airstrikes in Iraq had failed to dent ISIS there. Now that we’re bombing Syria, no one really knows exactly what is happening in the fog of war — we are still in the hazy, wishful thinking “coalition of the willing”/ “shock and awe” phase of that campaign. Nor do we know what this campaign will accomplish beyond a whack-a-mole obliteration of small, fast...


http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26064-obama-has-gotten-us-into-a-quagmire


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