AFTER years of resisting the pull of more Mideast conflicts, President Barack Obama is ready to return the US to military action in Iraq, the very country where he accused his predecessor of engaging in a “dumb war.”
The president’s authorization of airstrikes against militants in Iraq threatens to upend his legacy as the commander in chief who ended the long, unpopular war that killed nearly 4,500 American troops. It also raises fresh questions about whether Obama’s desire to end that conflict clouded his assessment of the risks of fully withdrawing US troops, as well as his judgment about the threat posed by the extremists who have taken advantage of a vulnerable Iraq.
As he addressed a war-weary nation late Thursday, Obama insisted the US was not moving toward another protracted conflict in Iraq.
“I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,” he declared, while also announcing that US military aircraft had already completed airdrops of humanitarian aid to Iraqi religious minorities under siege. To be sure, the actions unveiled by Obama are more limited in scope than the full-scale invasion of Iraq that he inherited from his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Yet the president’s maneuvers in Iraq this summer underscore the difficulty in pulling back once the military edges into a tenuous security state. The central rationale for Obama’s authorization for military strikes in Iraq is to protect American forces serving in the northern city of Irbil, including some of the same forces the president deployed earlier this summer to help train and assist Iraqi security forces struggling to contain the militants.
Obama also authorized the use of US military strikes to help struggling Iraqi security forces protect civilians. He argued that the US has a responsibility to take action to stop imminent massacres, echoing the rationale he used when the US joined the 2010 NATO bombing campaign in Libya.
Both liberal and conservative interventionists have urged Obama to use similar logic to respond to Syria’s civil war, in which more than 170,000 people have died, but he has resisted.
Aides cast Obama’s authorization of airstrikes in Iraq as a reaction to a set of fast-moving developments on the ground. Over the past week, the IS group has swept through areas in Iraq’s north.
While the situation may be evolving quickly, the conditions that returned the US to the brink of military action in Iraq can be traced back months — or to the president’s critics, even years. As recently as January, Obama was publicly dismissive of the IS, which at the time was under the Al-Qaeda banner.
“I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a Bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian,” Obama said in an interview with the New Yorker magazine.
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the associated press
