奥巴马在叙利亚逐渐增兵是个危险动作.docVIP

The dangers of Obama’s incrementalism 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?with the limited deployment of 275 soldiers to protect the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.?Within two months?that had expanded to more than 1,000 military personnel, in part to support the embattled Yazidis. By?November 2014, Washington had decided to send 1,500 more troops to “train, advise and assist” the Kurds and the Iraqi army. In a?smart piece?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