A month after someone from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, uploaded a video of James Foley, an American freelance journalist, being beheaded, we awoke to the news that American warships, warplanes, and drones had unleashed a major air attack on targets inside Syria. That war-torn nation becomes the sixth Muslim country in eleven years that the United States military has bombed in its ongoing campaign against Islamic extremism. (Syria joins Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.) But this time it's a bit different: this is the first YouTube war.
To be sure, the U.S. Air Force was bombing targets inside Iraq before the videos of the murder of Foley and another American journalist, Steven Sotloff, were released. At that stage, the intention was to prevent the jihadi cutthroats from overrunning Erbil, the Kurdish capital, and massacring Yazidis. In public, anyway, there was little serious talk of extending the U.S. strikes to Syria, where ISIS (also known as ISIL or I.S.) is fighting against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, who is supposed to be an enemy of the United States.
The videotaped executions changed everything. Most important, they dramatically altered American public opinion, which previously had been wary of any further U.S. military involvement. And so, there we were, a few weeks later, with Barack Obama, a President who for a long time vigorously opposed getting the United States involved in the Syrian morass, standing on the South Lawn of the White House and saying that last night, on his orders, the Pentagon had blitzed numerous targets in the north of the country.
On CNN, Gloria Borger described it as 'a legacy moment.' That might be bit of an exaggeration. But it was striking to watch the former anti-war candidate explain why he had unleashed a night of Donald Rumsfeld-style shock and awe. According to the Central Command, the assault included fourteen air strikes against ISIS facilities in and around the city of Raqqa, with forty-seven cruise-missile launches; a separate bombing raid, near Aleppo, targeted a different, and hitherto obscure, militant entity called the Khorasan Group, which, purely on the basis of its name, could easily be mistaken for a management consultancy or a private-equity firm.
As expected, President Obama pointed to the participation of five Arab countries in the attack: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Exactly what role these countries had played in the overnight raids wasn't yet clear. Still, Obama, promising in a speech on September 10th to 'degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS,' had said that he would put together a coalition, and here was the proof that he'd delivered on his pledge. 'The United States is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with these nations,' he said. And he went on: 'The strength of this coalition makes it clear to the world that this is not America's fight alone.'
That's clearly true. If the onward march of ISIS were to continue, the cosseted Gulf monarchs, along with many less fortunate people in the Arab world, would be threatened. What's less clear is whether more Sunni nations, particularly Turkey and Egypt, will participate in the American-led war on ISIS, and, also, where the war goes from here.
In Iraq, the U.S. air raids appear to have slowed the advance of ISIS, but there's little sign yet of its opponents retaking ground. Next door in Syria, rebel forces have withstood three years of air attacks by the Syrian Air Force, and the situation is still a stalemate. The Pentagon's air capabilities are far more formidable than those available to Assad, but few people in the U.S. military expect air power alone to defeat ISIS.
That raises the question of who will do the ground fighting in Syria, and whether the U.S. will eventually reach a formal accommodation with Assad, an option that some military experts and adherents of realpolitik are quietly pushing. Obama, who for a long time has appeared to be sympathetic to the realist view of the world, didn't address this issue. Instead, he repeated his newfound enthusiasm for arming the 'moderate' Syrian rebels, saying that they were 'the best counterweight to ISIL and the Assad regime.'
Having approved the biggest and riskiest military escalation of his Presidency, Obama was wearing his game face. 'The over-all effort will take time,' he concluded. 'There will be challenges ahead. But we are going to do what's necessary to take the fight to this terrorist group.' With that, he headed for New York, and the United Nations General Assembly, where he will try to build more support for his war.
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