Perspective: Considering ISIL and Options for the U.S.

http://www.europeaninstitute.org/EA-September-2014/perspective-considering-isil-and-options-for-the-us.html

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.