Aaron David Miller, after reproaching President Obama for a foreign policy that is "messy" and "seemingly devoid of strategy," and after enumerating five reasons why bombing ISIS in Syria is a really bad idea, arrives at a messy conclusion that to me seems endowed with quite a bit of strategy:
Unfortunately, there is no short-term answer to the Islamic State in either Iraq or Syria. A few bombs--or a few hundred--might save innocent lives and kill a few jihadists, but it's not going to do much beyond that. A long-term strategy of arming, training, equipping, marshaling allies, addressing Iraq's political dysfunction, well ... is long-term.
And that, oddly enough, is perhaps the most compelling reason President Obama has to act in Syria.
Since Washington can't sit on the sidelines and wait for the results of a long-term approach, it'll do what it does best: find the middle ground. The battlefield will be expanded; airstrikes in Syria will happen. Does it all lack for strategy? Is it a prescription for mission creep? Yes and yes. But blowing up a bunch of very bad people feels good. And whether you approve or not, it's coming.
I fail to see how enacting a short-term strategy that allows the successful evolution of a longer-term strategy is an absence of strategy. Yes it's unsatisfying; few Americans desire reengagement in Iraq or any spillover into Syria. But this is the world Obama confronts--a damned messy one. Constructing grand and elegant strategies fit for Foreign Affairs is perhaps a pleasurable intellectual pastime, and in theory those strategies--with which Miller blesses us not--are beautiful machines of smooth logic, but they're hardly practical when an invading horde of ungodly madmen is slaughtering innocent minorities and posing a lethal threat to America's global interests.