images

The Obama administration has authorized surveillance drone flights over Syria, which many have speculated could lead to airstrikes against ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

No decision has made, but this move by the administration gathers much needed intelligence on the militant group.

The question is why we haven’t been doing this until now?

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon is drafting military options that would strike the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, near the largely erased border between those two nations, as opposed to more deeply inside Syria. The administration is also moving to bolster American support for the moderate Syrian rebels who view Mr. Assad as their main foe.

The Times continued to report the reconnaissance flights would not be the first time the United States has entered Syrian airspace without seeking permission. In July, American Special Operations forces carried out an unsuccessful rescue attempt for hostages held by ISIS, including the journalist James Foley, whose death was revealed last week in an ISIS video.

Now that the president is back from his vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, he has to articulate a strategy in which he has been reluctant do so.  It also places the president in a precarious situation since he had to walk back comments he made in an interview to the New Yorker in January regarding ISIL when he stated, “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

The real question is what the president’s long term strategy is as it relates to ISIL, but also to include Syria, as this is where ISIL sanctuaries are located.

In an article in Foreign Affairs, Kenneth Pollack a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute writes, Syria is a hard one. The arguments against the United States’ taking a more active role in ending the vicious three-year-old conflict there are almost perfectly balanced by those in favor of intervening, especially in the aftermath of the painful experiences of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The cons begin with the simple fact that the United States has no interests in Syria itself. Syria is not an oil producer, a major U.S. trade partner, or even a democracy.

At some point the U.S. is going to have to decide what action it plans on how it deals with Syria, as now the situation in Iraq is a direct result of failing to deal with the crisis in Syria.

Pollack continues to write, nevertheless, the rationale for more decisive U.S. intervention is gaining ground.  As of this writing, the crisis in Syria had claimed more than 170,000 lives and spilled over into every neighboring state. The havoc is embodied most dramatically in the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, a Sunni jihadist organization born of the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq. After regrouping in Syria, ISIS (which declared itself the Islamic State in late June) recently overran much of northern Iraq and helped rekindle that country’s civil war. ISIS is now using the areas it controls in Iraq and Syria to breed still more Islamist extremists, some of whom have set their sights on Western targets. Meanwhile, Syria’s conflict is also threatening to drag down its other neighbors — particularly Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, where the influx of nearly three million refugees is already straining government budgets and stoking social unrest.

Beyond any military action contemplated by the Obama administration, the president also faces daunting challenges in building a coalition as many of our traditional allies in the region do not trust the president to follow through on anything he says.

One only has to look at the disastrous approach by the Obama administration in trying to negotiate a cease fire to the Israeli-Hamas conflict, the Syrian “redline” fiasco of last September, and other foreign policy debacles by the president.

Too many of our allies just do not trust this president to follow through on what he says.  Even members of the president’s own party have begun to question his strategy in the Middle East.

The president can’t simply ignore this problem and hope it goes away, either deal with it now or deal with later, but at some point you will have to address it.