The President’s Speech on ISIS: The Disconnect Between Ends and Means

President Obama’s Wednesday night speech on the crisis in Iraq contained no great surprises. We already knew that the administration was trying to cobble together a regional coalition to combat ISIS.¹ We also knew that it was considering expanding air strikes against the group in Iraq and initiating such strikes in Syria. The pitch for additional assistance to the moderate Syrian opposition was probably thrown in to avoid accusations that air-strikes against ISIS in Syria would strengthen the Assad regime. There was no mention of Iran in the president’s speech, no doubt from fear that public inclusion of Iran in the anti-ISIS coalition would make the Gulf Arabs skittish and inflame anti-Iranian sentiment in the Congress. Informal cooperation with Tehran is another matter; I would be very surprised if it weren’t happening already, at least through interlocutors in the Iraqi government.

What the president proposed was very light on details. These will no doubt emerge in the weeks and months ahead.  Whether his policies will actually work also remains to be seen. Expanded U.S. air strikes may well be able to stop ISIS from further expansion in Iraq. With effective support from the Iraqi army and Kurdish militia, we might roll back the group’s gains. (Whether either military can provide such support is unclear, particularly in the case of the Iraqi army, which broke and ran when it confronted a much smaller ISIS force in Mosul this summer.)  With luck, we and our partners might even be able to drive ISIS underground. But destroying the group — as the president promised to do on Wednesday night — is a different matter altogether.

And there’s the fundamental problem with president’s speech: the disconnect between ends and means. Destroying ISIS may well take deployment of U.S. troops on the ground, something the president again said he would not order. But surely if ISIS represents the extraordinary threat the president described on Wednesday night, we should be prepared to commit ground forces if necessary. One thing is certain: if we fail to destroy ISIS, the president’s words will come back to haunt him.

The president’s speech was clearly a response to the real threat posed by ISIS to Iraq and to regional stability. But it also reflected an attempt to deflect mounting criticism of his handling of ISIS in particular and of foreign policy in general.  Such criticism is no longer limited to the “usual suspects” among neoconservatives and liberal interventionist long disenchanted with the president’s risk-averse approach. It now includes popular opinion, which has shifted substantially in the wake of the brutal executions of two American journalists. (Americans still remain opposed to sending ground troops to Iraq, though only by a 60-40 margin.)

And, oh, there was one thing missing from the president’s speech: an explicit exit strategy.  Our commitment to destroying ISIS appears to be open-ended. Presumably we can only declare victory if we hound every last member of the group to “the Gates of Hell,” as Vice President Biden has so colorfully promised. If our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown us one thing, it is this:  it’s much easier to get into a war than to get out of one. And we just got into one.

Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

[1] The president used the more proper term, ISIL, in his speech. It stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

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