Extending a Legacy of War
WASHINGTON — In ordering a sustained military campaign against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq, President 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 had left one for him.
It will be a significantly different kind of war — not like Iraq or Afghanistan, where many tens of thousands of American troops were still deployed when Mr. Obama took the oath nearly six years ago. And even though Mr. 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 in Iraq and Syria will be the next chapter in a grueling, generational struggle that has kept the United States at war in one form or another now for 13 years. Waged by a president with faded public standing, the new phase will not involve substantial numbers of American troops on the ground.
But it seems certain to result in a far more intense American bombing blitz than in Somalia or Yemen, as well as closer ties to Syrian rebels whom Mr. Obama wants to turn into a proxy force against ISIS.
And after years of trying to avoid entangling the United States in another “dumb war,” as he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr. Obama is now plunging the United States into the middle of one of the bloodiest, most vicious, fratricidal conflicts now in existence in the form of Syria’s civil war.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/extending-a-legacy-of-war.html?_r=0
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