Six little words. I see that six little ill-considered words--"We don’t have a strategy yet"--are dominating coverage of President Obama's press conference this afternoon, even though the president added that launching airstrikes in Syria must be "part of a broader comprehensive strategy," which already seemed rather well articulated.
The strategy, to repeat? The Iraqis need to get their political act together and their neighbors must arrive as "a consensus approach for rolling back [ISIS's] gains," as the NYT put it. Those two components, plus an arming of the Kurds. That's the strategy, and it's been the manifest strategy for some time. I'm sure Obama would love to take back those six ill-considered words (in fact I hear Josh Earnest doing that for him on CNN, as I write).
The presser's only authentically newsworthy segment regarding Syria and ISIS, it seemed to me, was that Obama is freshly determined to put Congress into a headlock: "I do think that it’ll be important for Congress to weigh in--or that our consultations with Congress continue to develop" he said, "so that the American people are part of the debate."
And since Congress takes much longer vacations than does the president, it'll be a while before that institutional cacophony of fecklessness can weasel its way out of any responsibility for Obama's in-place Syria strategy.