Taking a break from political news, this news seems to suggest a classic, uncontrolled and uncontrollable spiral. I've no idea what President Obama is thinking.
Syria is a geopolitical-sectarian snake pit, a kind of more violent Afghanistan, where our presence remains distressingly incomprehensible. Russia is there, in Syria, to its ultimate regret. The Middle East's two powerhouses, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are at each other's throats over Syria — and, naturally, its medieval "faiths," which lie at the core of Syria's madness.
What's the last place on earth the United States should have boots on the ground, a dog in the fight, a serpent among the serpents? Well, after pondering the above, let's think about that. You got it. Syria.
Yet here we go, or rather there we go. The NY Times:
President Obama will deploy a small number of American Special Operations forces to Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Syria….
While administration officials plan to characterize the deployment as an enhancement of current strategy, it is actually a huge shift for a president who has said repeatedly that he will not put American combat boots on the ground in Syria.
The decision adds a new level of risk to the Syrian enterprise, as the presence of American forces, even if they are in Kurdish territory, could bring the special operations troops into closer contact with the Islamic State.
One video, just one video of a captured American soldier being torched by some maniacal band of ISIS cutthroats, and we'll be there, en masse, for years.
This … is … fucking … nuts.
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Calling Ron Ziegler or Ari Fleischer? No need. I just watched WH Press Secretary Josh Earnest do a doubleplusgood job of explaining that although American combat troops are now entering a Syrian combat zone brimming with ISIS and Kurdish combatants, the president of the United States's multiyear pledge to keep American combat boots off of Syrian ground has in no way changed. Earnest's parsing of Obama's plain English was worthy of a second-rate public-relations hack or a third-rate ambulance chaser. Either way, it was first-rate duplicity, which is what all WH press secretaries practice.