According to a recent poll, 71% of Americans don't think that their president has a "clear plan" about how to handle the disaster in Syria. And hey, they might be right, and President Obama is just doing things at random, running out the clock until his term ends. But I find that unlikely. I think the reason people would even think that there is no Syria Plan is because their logic is as follows: "if someone has a plan to achieve victory, then they would use it to achieve that victory. Therefore, if someone has not achieved victory, they obviously don't have a plan to win a conflict."
Now I haven't snuck into the Oval Office lately and don't have the latest copy of Obama's Syria Plan on my desk. But I have been paying occasional attention to what's going on in and around Syria, and from America's activities I can make a guess at what the president's trying to do.
First, US forces have been performing air strikes to hit ISIS targets. Lots of air strikes, for more than a year now. Air strikes are a tempting policy tool for leaders, especially in situations like this, because their results are impressive (boom!) and, against a low-tech foe like ISIS, low-risk as well. It's not like those fanatics have an air force.
Second, America has been supporting ground forces in both Iraq and Syria to take advantage of the aforementioned air strikes and retake territory lost to ISIS. This only makes sense - if the Iraqis and Syrians aren't willing to fight for their countries, why should the US put its own soldiers at risk? Plus the local forces speak the language, know the terrain, don't have to tote supplies halfway around the world, and so forth.
Third, President Obama has been building a regional coalition to combat ISIS. After all, the Islamic State is a revisionist power that made a big point about scuffing out the old colonial border that divided Iraq and Syria. It aims to transform the entire region - or rather revert it into its idea of what the medieval Caliphate was - and therefore poses a threat to states beyond Iraq and Syria.
There you have it, Obama's mythical Syria Plan exposed. But it's not very comforting, is it? Because despite this plan, we're obviously not winning in the fight against ISIS, to say nothing of the fight to have a non-authoritarian leader in Syria.
The air strikes aren't working because you can't retake ground with planes. They have a limited amount of fuel to stay in the air, and a limited number of bombs to drop. They can't go house-to-house, clearing out insurgents, and they can't rebuild towns and comfort refugees. If no one is able to follow up on an airstrike, the enemy can simply crawl out of hiding and wheel in a new artillery piece to replace the one you blew up. Plus there's something fundamentally dissatisfying about sending a 150-million-dollar fighter jet to blow up a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the back.
The ground forces we're supporting in Iraq and Syria aren't accomplishing much because they suck. The Iraqi Army in particular should be replacing the WWII French Army when it comes to military insults, and has shown itself capable of retreating despite outnumbering threatening forces ten-to-one. $818 billion well spent, there. There is no unified Syrian resistance, just a bunch of rebel groups that aren't aligned with Assad or ISIS, and of course our attempt to train a mythical "moderate" Syrian rebel army fell so disappointingly short that the Obama Administration has put the program on hold. The exception to this bad news would be the Kurdish Peshmerga, which has shown itself capable of both holding the line and taking back territory.
The regional coalition we're building also sucks. Sure, countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia have pitched in when it comes to air strikes, but they all have their own agendas to look after as well. The Saudis are distracted by the civil war in Yemen and have to prop up the government there against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Turkey has been a major avenue for foreign fighters to pass through as they join ISIS, famously sat and watched the border town of Kobani get pounded by ISIS because it was being defended by Kurds, and even as it finally mobilizes against ISIS is also deploying against Kurdish forces fighting the same group. And of course, nobody's sending in ground forces, and see my above point about airstrikes.
The only nation that seems eager to get involved in Syria is Russia, and Putin's fighting on behalf of its dictator.
In short, the American public is not so much upset that their president doesn't have a Syria Plan as they are upset because the Syria Plan isn't working. Obviously Obama needs to change his plan, but there's a problem - part four of that plan, Do Not Get Involved In Another Ground War in the Middle East. After inheriting miserable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq from his woefully inept predecessor, President Obama has made it clear that he's eager to get Americans out of those countries as quickly as possible. He actually succeeded in withdrawing from Iraq, only for the country to all but immediately collapse in the face of ISIS' assault, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan has been delayed because the Taliban is causing the same problems there.
And because our attempts to build stable democracies in those countries have gone so badly - hell, we'd settle for a illiberal but stable country capable of defending itself at this point - you can understand why the president is in no hurry to start another military adventure in the reason. Because what would sending ground troops to Syria lead to? The evidence suggests more years of US soldiers getting picked off during patrols, more years of tribal or religious violence, more years of bundles of dollars disappearing into the desert, and the result is a corrupt and ineffective government that collapses the minute someone pokes it with a stick. It sure would be nice to think that this country has learned something after over a decade of occupation and nation-building, but since at least some of us are eager to try it again, I'm not that optimistic.
And yet, committing American ground forces seems to be the only thing that could turn this conflict around. And there's the dilemma facing the president, and if they thought about it, the American public. Either we stay our hand, refuse to put boots on the ground, and "lose" to ISIS, or we go all in yet again and probably end accomplishing very little at great cost over the next decade.
There's no clear route to victory, and that, I think, is what the disapproval about the Syria Plan is really about. Americans don't like to lose, we like to think that we have the power and know-how to fix any problem. But occasionally a situation comes along that humbles us, and it looks like Syria is one of them.
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