With new military campaign, extending a legacy of war

By Peter Baker, New York Times News Service

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014 | 2 a.m.

WASHINGTON — In ordering a sustained military campaign against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq, President Barack Obama on Wednesday night effectively set a new course for the remainder of his presidency and may have ensured that he would pass his successor a volatile and incomplete war, much as his predecessor left one for him.

It will be a significantly different kind of war — not like Iraq or Afghanistan, where many tens of thousands of U.S. troops were still deployed when Obama took the oath nearly six years ago. And even though Obama compared it to the small-scale, sporadic strikes against isolated terrorists in places like Yemen and Somalia, it will not be exactly like those either.

Instead, the widening battle with the Islamic State will be the next chapter in a grueling, generational struggle that has kept the United States at war in one form or another since that day 13 years ago on Thursday when hijacked airplanes shattered America’s sense of its own security. Waged by a president with faded public standing, the new phase will not involve many U.S. troops on the ground but seems certain to require a far more intense U.S. bombing blitz than in Somalia or Yemen.

The battleground for that new phase will now extend beyond the well-known sands of Iraq into the new theater of Syria, a nation racked by more than three years of brutal civil war. After years of trying to avoid entangling the United States in another “dumb war,” as he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Obama is now plunging the United States into the middle of one of the world’s bloodiest, most vicious and fratricidal conflicts.

Whether he can wage this war in a more effective way, crushing a jihadist group while minimizing U.S. casualties, could be the central national security test of his final two years in office — and the first one confronting his successor. Obama acknowledged that “it will take time to eradicate a cancer” like the Islamic State but gave no estimates.

“This is going to be more than three years,” said former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., who was once the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “We may get done with the biggest part of this in three years, but that’s not going to take care of the threat from radical Islam.”

Obama’s move into Syria reinforces the need for an approach that draws lessons from the mistakes of both President George W. Bush and his own administration, Hoekstra said.

“What we need is a consistent doctrine that Republicans and Democrats from one administration to another can embrace,” he said.

Leading such a campaign will present a challenge to Obama perhaps unlike that confronted by any of his predecessors. While other commanders in chief enjoyed a surge in public support when they took the nation to war, the nation is not exactly rallying behind Obama this time around. A fresh battery of polls this week indicated that most Americans do want him to go after the Islamic State yet disapprove of his leadership. In other words, they support the policy but not the president.

Peter D. Feaver, a former national security aide to Bush and President Bill Clinton, said the public unease was due, in part, to Obama’s own shifting descriptions of the threat and his acknowledgment two weeks ago that he had no strategy yet.

“Until tonight, the Obama administration has done a textbook job of following the script on how to undermine public confidence,” he said.

But he added that Obama had a chance to change that and called his nationally televised speech from the White House “a strong step in the right direction” that may have “set the predicate for a rally.”

In the speech, Obama tried to strike a balance, again presenting himself as the anti-Bush while embracing a military action he had long sought to avoid. He talked almost as much about what he would not do — “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq” — as what he would do to counter the Islamic State.

But he also advanced an argument that in some ways mirrored Bush’s much-debated strategy of pre-emption — that is, acting to forestall a potential threat rather than waiting for it to gather. Obama acknowledged that the Islamic State did not currently pose a direct threat to the United States, but he contended that “if left unchecked” it could.

That left many divided about his approach. Barry Pavel, a former Obama national security aide now at the Atlantic Council, said the president might be acting too tentatively.

“I’m not sure half-steps into Syria are ultimately going to achieve the president’s goals,” he said. “It’s a fine strategy for contain and disrupt. It’s not a strategy for defeat by any means.”

But others warned against that sort of thinking, viewing it as Bush’s approach all over again. Such advocates expressed concern that Obama would be too precipitous in hunting down the Islamic State, when in fact it could be successfully contained by a regional coalition working without the risks of a deeper military engagement.

“I do hope that he’s going to resist a rush to outcome” said Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, a retired Army officer at the National Security Network, “and that the president will move in a deliberate, methodical fashion with a coalition willing to engage on the ground to resolve the problem over a period of months and years, as opposed to days and weeks.”

The campaign Obama outlined Wednesday night is likely to continue past his departure from office. Much as he was inaugurated with the challenge of finishing Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the next president will be heir to Obama’s war in Syria and Iraq.

Obama’s aides said they hoped to use the next two years to reduce the threat of the Islamic State enough so that the president’s successor would have an easier time — much as Bush’s aides strived to get Iraq under control with a troop surge and strategy change before turning it over to Obama.

“We will do as much of that work as we can with the time that is available to the president,” said a senior administration official who briefed reporters under ground rules that did not allow him to be identified.

And then it will be someone else’s turn.