EA September 2014
Perspective: Considering ISIL and Options for the U.S.
By John Barry, former Defense and Security Correspondent for Newsweek Magazine
Among the precepts Henry Kissinger plentifully permitted himself in his multi-volume memoirs were four which seem especially urgent now that President Obama is, step-by-slippery-slope, committing America’s military once more into the cauldron of Iraq.Confronting a crisis, Kissinger opined, the first and most essential task of statecraft is to identify what the crisis is really about. That can be hard because --- his second observation --- in government the immediate tends to crowd out the important. Next: a temptation rarely resisted is to attach labels to people or movements. Reality being invariably more complex, labels insidiously inhibit analysis. So to his final dictum: Once a President has committed America to a goal, its superpower prestige --- its clout, as a previous Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it --- requires that the goal be achieved. The corollary is that a President should not commit America to goals it cannot attain.
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