When America’s armed forces go into a fight, they deserve support.
All the more so in the case of the air strikes President Obama authorized against the Islamic State in northern Iraq.
Though he dismissed the al Qaeda offshoot as recently as January (“If a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” he said) it has now declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, leaving a trail of beheadings in its wake.
The president acted, he says, to secure Americans stationed in Iraq and to relieve the minorities — mostly trapped Yazidis — most immediately threatened by the Sunni extremists.
In this he has the support of the Iraqi government, whose troops proved unable to prevent the Kobe Bryant-wannabes from seizing several Iraqi cities.
Some say Obama’s order shows we pulled out too early. Certainly developments since then belie Joe Biden’s “Mission Accomplished” claim that Iraq was “one of the great achievements of this administration.”
But we’re not interested in litigating the past. We’re interested in whether this intervention will succeed.
And it doesn’t help that the president once again has accompanied a decisive order for military action with qualifiers laying out what America will not consider, primarily troops.
All this does is signal to our enemies what they do not have to worry about, and to wait us out.
We’re glad to hear President Obama acknowledge America “can and should support moderate forces who can bring stability to Iraq.” The test will be whether the actions he’s ordered are enough for the task.