Fragile consensus for Obama's escalated ISIL military campaign

WASHINGTON — As President Obama on Tuesday announced the first airstrikes against Islamic State of Syria and Levant (ISIL) targets in Syria — an opening salvo in what promises to be a lengthy intervention — there seemed to be a near-miracle afoot at home: some measure of consensus.

The latest public opinion polls shows broad support for the president’s military campaign — 71 percent of respondents in a September ABC News/Washington Post survey said they support strikes against the Sunni insurgency in Iraq while 65 percent said they supported expanding the strikes into Syria. A whopping 91 percent of those polled said they viewed ISIL as a threat to the “vital interests of the United States.”

In Congress, too, there has been relatively little rancor. Although some Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans have expressed reservations about wandering into another open-ended conflict in the Middle East, while other members of the GOP have grumbled that the president should have stepped into the fray months, if not years, ago, the majority of lawmakers have given the president leeway on his strategy.

As one measure of that support, the Senate approved a measure last week to train and arm moderate Syrian rebels in the battle against ISIL militants by a vote of 78-22. The House passed the authorization by a vote of 273-156.  

Even rumblings about the need to renew the Authorization of the Use of Military Force — the congressional resolution approved in 2001 that the Obama administration is using as its legal rationale for this war — have failed to come to a head, with the congressional leadership showing little appetite for challenging the president.

Gordon Adams, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at American University in Washington, D.C., said extremist threats and risks to national security had skyrocketed to the forefront of the public consciousness in the wake of the brutal beheading of two Americans, which had significantly changed the political calculus for Obama and both political parties.  

“What’s the alternative? Opposing a president who is determined to avenge beheadings is not good politics for any candidate, Democrat or Republican,” he said. 

“We’ve got nobody at risk and it looks like things are working — there’s no reason for the public to show a great deal of concern.”

Will Marshall, president and founder of the left-leaning Progressive Policy Institute, similarly said ISIL’s shocking brutality and online presence had done what no other foreign crisis had been able to since the Iraq War: awaken Americans’ appetite to engage with threats abroad.

“What has changed is the public’s sense of imminent threat and the feeling that the best way to be safe is to stay out of the angry beehive that is the Middle East,” he said. “The anti-interventionist spell has been broken.”

Moreover, the public throughout history has given commanders-in-chief more latitude when it comes to matters of foreign policy, as opposed to domestic politics.

“The public is more deferential to presidents’ judgment about threats to the U.S. and our interests,” he said. “There’s much wider scope for presidents to maneuver in.”

Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, agreed that the president appeared to be on firm political footing, both with lawmakers and the public — a rare occurrence in an age where there’s little unity on any major public policy issue.  

“You do have those like [Sens.] John McCain and Lindsey Graham or Rand Paul who are prepared to be outspoken but that’s not the case with the vast majority of Congress,” he said. “[Domestic] politics stops at the water’s edge and there’s a tendency to create a fairly united front for a president in foreign policy.”

Miller also said he wouldn’t expect that Congress would be spoiling for a fight on authorization.

“First, it’s a bad time for it — six weeks away from midterm [elections]. And second, I just don’t think they want an up-and-down vote which forces accountability and transparency,” he said. “As long as this is an air war and doesn’t involve major departures in terms of American forces on the ground — beyond special operators — the president is probably going to be fine.”

But past precedent suggests that the united front might not last indefinitely.

Historical data show that there is typically a rallying of public and congressional support in the early days of any conflict, from the Korean War to Vietnam to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the engagements drag on and there is a more visible cost, that support starts to taper off.

“Temporarily, the ISIS crisis has broken the war fatigue. I don’t think it’s far below the surface, however,” Adams said, using an alternative acronym for ISIL. If the air war devolves into a more protracted conflict, “You’re going to see the war weariness rocket to the surface.”

“It’s the unity moment that precedes the unraveling,” Adams added.