A war-weary public supports the president's campaign, though few know what it aims to achieve or how long it will last
By Lexington | WASHINGTON, DC
WITH remarkable speed, a broad American consensus has formed in support of air strikes against the Islamic State, even if that means taking the fight across the Iraqi border into Syria. Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress have offered bipartisan support to a first wave of overnight strikes in Syria. This sends a “powerful” message of unity to the world, said President Barack Obama in a brief statement on September 23rd from the White House grounds.
The consensus involves the public, too. Since last year, Americans’ willingness to see air power used in Syria has doubled, a poll for the Washington Post shows. Support for arming the Kurdish forces battling IS in Iraq rose from 45% in August to 58% in the September survey. Yet if the new mood of unity is broad, it is also shallow. Americans know that they want to do something about IS. Air strikes currently fit the bill. But there is a striking lack of agreement about what this use of force is actually for. There is no consensus about whether America is projecting power to bring greater stability to the Middle East, or whether the mission is much narrower: a counter-terrorist operation, backed by regional allies, to neutralise threats at a distance, and thus protect Americans at home.
Last year, a war-weary America hated the idea of intervening in Syria’s tangled civil war. Many bombarded members of Congress with angry calls at the very idea of limited cruise-missile strikes to punish President Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in his own country. There is little evidence that Americans are any less weary of war, especially when it comes to complex intra-Muslim conflicts.
What has changed, dramatically, is a perception that IS and other terrorists in Iraq and Syria imperil American safety, notably following the filmed beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker. Nine in ten Americans now see the militants as a serious threat to vital national interests, and roughly six in ten call them a very serious threat. That mood of public fear coincides with a collapse in public trust of Mr Obama’s foreign policy. Historians may ponder whether a consensus for air strikes in Iraq and Syria would have formed at all if those journalists had not been brutally murdered on camera. But in public, prominent members of both parties have offered their support. Senior Democrats applauded the president for taking action and finding regional allies to join him. Republican bigwigs welcomed action against IS while grumbling that the president had waited too long. A few hawks, such as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, urged Mr Obama to add special forces on the ground to the mix.
For his part, Mr Obama has done little to clarify the precise nature of this mission. On the one hand he has called IS mainly a threat to the people of the Middle East, repeatedly declaring that “this is not America’s fight alone” and presenting his country’s military power as a tool of geopolitical influence, which—by being withheld or used in the right way—can prod others in the region to assume their responsibilities. He insists that in Iraq security can only be guaranteed by a multi-ethnic, non-sectarian unity government with the trust of its own people. In Syria, after (very belatedly) moving to ramp up the arming and training of a moderate opposition, Mr Obama calls such rebels the “best counterweight” both to IS and to the Assad regime.
On the other hand, as he seeks to rally public opinion, Mr Obama and his officials have made their mission sound overwhelmingly like a counter-terrorist operation. The president called the initial Syria strikes a sign that “we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people.”
Much was made of a separate, American-only set of eight airstrikes on the night of September 22nd against the Khorosan Group, an al-Qaeda offshoot, at a base near the Syrian city of Aleppo. Though the American government first spoke of the group in public a week earlier, officials now say that they have been watching it for many months. A White House official told reporters that action was taken after intelligence services determined that Khorosan Group operatives were plotting imminent, major attacks in America or Europe, and that the Syrian government was not able to take action against that threat.
That fits with a domestic debate dominated by talk of securing America’s homeland. Several members of Congress, a few weeks ahead of mid-term elections, have demanded new laws that would cancel the American passports of those who sign up with IS, or would strip allied countries of their visa-free travel privileges if they failed to cooperate with American intelligence and security officials.
But this cannot remain a purely domestic debate for long. Politicians and the public will need to decide soon what they have begun, and what appetite they have for extended interventions far from home, involving painful trade-offs and deals with unsavoury partners.
Air strikes alone have a poor record of defeating enemies, especially when they can hide in urban areas. Though Mr Obama repeatedly says that American forces will not be sent into combat on the ground, military commanders have warned that, if the mission requires it, they may ask to deploy special forces to spot targets and help allies.
There has been much talk of the dozens of countries joining the anti-IS coalition, and the five Sunni-led nations—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar—who joined the first night of strikes over Syria. Americans have little love for those Arab allies. But realpolitik may push the country towards still trickier partners. The White House confirmed that America’s UN ambassador had told her Syrian counterpart that action was coming and warned the Assad regime not to threaten American aircraft, though without providing precise timings or targets in advance. Pentagon officials said Syrian radar had been “passive” during the air raids. But Team Obama is adamant that Mr Assad’s regime cannot be part of the solution to the IS threat, just as its officials insist that no deal is possible with Iran that would trade help against IS with concessions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
On the morning after the first air strikes on Syria a Pentagon commander, Lt General William Mayville, said that this was just the beginning of a campaign that could last years. It is not yet clear that a fearful, terrorism-focused American public is listening closely to such warnings, or is ready to hear them. That is about to change.
