Obama’s Whac-A-Mole Strategy by Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post
It has become conventional wisdom to note that President Obama has failed in his efforts to extricate the United States from military conflicts in the Middle East. Having promised to end these wars, he has in the past year expanded U.S. interventions in Iraq, Syria and other countries. The troop drawdown in Afghanistan has slowed to a trickle. “Obama’s legacy,” says Gene Healy of the Cato Institute, is clear: “endless war.” The New York Times’ Mark Landler noted in May that Obama had just “passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.”
But these characterizations treat all military activity as alike, in a way that blurs rather than sharpens the picture. When Obama entered the White House, about 180,000 U.S. troops were engaged in active military combat in two theaters, Iraq and Afghanistan. The goal of both wars was to establish political order in these countries — to create functioning liberal democracies.
U.S. military policy under Obama has been different, narrower in its scope and more modest in its goals. The United States is actively engaged in efforts to defeat terrorist groups, deny them territory and work with local allies to keep militants on the run. But these policies mostly involve small numbers of Special Operations forces and trainers, air power and drones.
It would be fair to conclude that Obama has come to his policy of intervention-lite through trial and error. In his first term, he remarked that “the tide of war is receding,” and he undoubtedly hoped to have fewer active military missions in the last year of his presidency. But political chaos in the Middle East and the rise of the Islamic State have forced him to settle on a strategy for the region: attacking terrorist groups without expanding the mission into nation-building…