If President Obama doesn’t change course in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, he will leave a legacy of endless war and broken promises.
Last week, President Obama announced that the United States will send special operations forces to Syria, where they will assist some rebel factions in Syria’s brutal civil war. This goes back on his 2013, promise that “I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.”
This escalation is only the latest in a series of broken promises on war and peace.
Earlier this year, President Obama broke his promise to end the war in Afghanistan, announcing instead that troops will remain there through the end of his time in office. And despite President Obama’s pledge that “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq,” a Pentagon spokesman recently admitted that “we’re in combat” after Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler was killed in a raid to free hostages held by ISIS.
Progressives and peace activists can be forgiven for believing until recently that President Obama would, by the end of his presidency, end George W. Bush’s wars. After all, he’s spent virtually his entire career as a national political figure promising us that he would.
In 2008, then-Sen. Obama pledged that “when I am Commander-in-Chief, I will set a new goal on Day One: I will end this war.”
And, after riding a wave of anti-war outrage to the White House, he kept his promise. By the time he took the stage at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte to accept his party’s nomination to run for re-election as president of the United States, America had withdrawn from Iraq, and President Obama was promising to end the war in Afghanistan by 2014:
Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. And we have. We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over.
But now, President Obama’s foreign policy legacy is beginning to look more like a continuation of two Bush wars, with one more added in.
While President Obama’s tactical choices are a shift from Bush policy of launching full-scale ground invasions, the results are likely to be the same.
The New York Times editorial board was correct when it wrote:
By incrementally increasing its combat role in a vast, complicated battleground, the United States is being sucked into a new Middle East war. Each step in that direction can only breed the desire to do more. Commanders will want to build on battlefield successes when things go their way, and they will be driven to retaliate when they don’t.
And with American troops now joining an intractable civil war being waged by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, the Russian military, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters, President Obama’s latest intervention in Syria runs the risk of sparking a far more serious conflict.
President Obama is taking us one more step toward an endless cycle of escalating military intervention. Furthermore, Congress hasn’t even legally authorized President Obama’s new war in Iraq and Syria — which began over a year ago, and has cost $4 billion dollars.
Yet this is the same president who told us, as recently as 2011, that:
Our troops are out of Iraq. Our troops are coming home from Afghanistan. And I know Americans want all of us in Washington — especially me — to concentrate on the task of building our nation here at home: putting people back to work, educating our kids, growing our middle class.
It’s also the same president who brokered an historic international agreement to dismantle Iran’s nuclear deal. On Iran, President Obama forcefully argued that military force would fail where diplomacy would succeed, and, with the help of progressive activists, beat back hawks in his own party to defend diplomacy.
His string of broken promises is especially disappointing in light of President Obama’s major success on the Iran deal.
The sad truth is that President Obama and his military advisors don’t appear to have a coherent strategy in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, and none of the three conflicts has an American solution.
As President Obama himself has said, American military intervention has not — and likely will not — substantially change the situation on the ground, let alone improve it. But it does risk dragging us into yet another brutal, full-scale war of choice.
It doesn’t have to be like this. President Obama still has time to keep his promises and end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. But doing so will take the courage to tell the American people a hard truth: That terrible things often happen in the world that American military intervention will only make worse.
President Obama won’t keep his promises unless we speak out against his dangerous military interventions. That’s why CREDO just launched ObamasEndlessWars.com — go to the website, watch the video and take action to tell President Obama to keep his promises.
