Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2015 21:28:05 +0100
The dangers of Obama’s incrementalism
By Fareed Zakaria <http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/fareed-zakaria>
[image: Inline-Bild 1]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-dangers-of-incrementalism/2015/11/05/22aad1de-83f9-11e5-9afb-0c971f713d0c_story.html
It is difficult to find anyone in the Obama administration who believes
that putting up to 50 Special Operations soldiers on the ground in Syria
will make much of a difference in the raging civil war there. And yet, the
president has authorized this expansion of America’s military intervention
for the same reasons that he has approved incremental escalations for the
past year and a half. He believes he has to do *something* .
But what he is doing will not work. And in a few months, the United States
will face the challenge again — back down or double down. So far, President
Obama has responded each time with increased intervention.
The United States’ military involvement against the Islamic State began in
June 2014
<http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/06/16/iraq-insurgency/10569133/>
with
the limited deployment of 275 soldiers to protect the U.S. Embassy in
Baghdad. Within two months
<http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/08/mission-creep-us-has-nearly-1000-troops-iraq-now/91349/>
that
had expanded to more than 1,000 military personnel, in part to support the
embattled Yazidis. By November 2014
<http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/capitol-hill/2014/11/07/president-obama-authorizes-1500-more-troops-for-iraq-/18658715/>,
Washington had decided to send 1,500 more troops to “train, advise and
assist” the Kurds and the Iraqi army.
In a smart piece
<http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/19/official-mission-creep-timeline-us-war-in-syria-obama-administration/>
for
Foreign Policy, Micah Zenko provides a timeline of this escalation. He
notes that “what began Aug. 8, 2014, with 25 airstrikes in the first week
and food and water airdropped to save threatened Yazidis, has morphed and
expanded into 600 bombs being dropped per week and more than 100 bundles of
ammunition supplied to an unnamed faction of 5,000 Syrian rebels.” And this
was before the Special Operations forces were sent to Syria.
And yet, the strength of the Islamic State does not appear to be much
diminished, even by the administration’s account. This is hardly
surprising. The Syrian struggle is complex and ferocious, with many outside
powers — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, now Russia — aiding many different
groups, with supposed allies often at cross-purposes with each other. It’s
difficult to see how a modest U.S. intervention would shift that landscape.
The best book about the Vietnam War remains “The Irony of Vietnam: The
System Worked <http://amzn.to/20xPYp7>” by Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts.
The authors explain that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations never
believed that their interventions would succeed : “Each time they turned
the ratchet of escalation up another notch they did not believe that the
increase would provide victory in the classic sense of decisive defeat of
the enemy. At best they *hoped *they might be lucky, but they did not
*expect *to be.” Both administrations escalated because they believed that
they had to do *something*. And so, the United States went from having a
few hundred advisers in South Vietnam in 1960 to more than half a million
troops by 1968.
In 1967, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who worked in the Kennedy
administration, wrote
<https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/26/specials/schlesinger-us.html>, “In
retrospect, Vietnam is a triumph of the politics of inadvertence. We have
achieved our present entanglement, not after due and deliberate
consideration, but through a series of small decisions.”
The Vietnam analogy is crude and imperfect for many reasons. And yet the
basic logic of America’s gradual intervention is hauntingly familiar. You
opt for incrementalism, hoping to get lucky.
I have supported Obama’s reluctance to get more deeply involved in the
Syrian civil war. I do not see how U.S. intervention will resolve things
militarily or even improve the humanitarian situation there. If Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad falls, Damascus implodes in chaos and the Syrian
army goes underground and fights as an insurgency, will human rights
improve?
And yet, it is becoming hard to describe U.S. policy as one of restraint
when it now involves more than 3,500 American forces actively engaged in
Iraq and Syria in violation of many of the administration’s own stated
policies:
● U.S. troops were not supposed to be in Iraq because the Iraqi parliament
refused to pass a law providing them with immunity. (No such law exists
today.)
● The legal “authorization” for this large, multibillion-dollar
intervention against the Islamic State is murky — it rests mainly on a
congressional vote to battle al-Qaeda 14 years ago, when the Islamic State
did not exist.
● The United States was not going to put boots on the ground in Syria.
In the end, despite his inconsistencies and vacillations, I believe that
Obama will keep the U.S. intervention in Syria small and limited. But he
will leave his successor with a terrible dilemma in just the way that the
Kennedy administration left Lyndon Johnson.
The next U.S. president will face the stark reality that America’s
involvement in Syria will not have resolved matters. But the U.S.
government will have made commitments, sent troops, spent billions and lost
lives in that conflict. At that point, can the U.S. president back down or
will he — or she — have to double down, hoping to get lucky?
[image: Inline-Bild 2]
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/08/europe/zakaria-dangers-obama-incrementalism/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-dangers-of-incrementalism/2015/11/05/22aad1de-83f9-11e5-9afb-0c971f713d0c_story.html
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