What Dan Froomkin Says

He asks the obvious question, why when we are looking at going back to war in Iraq, why have all of the discussions about this been about the politics, and not the merit, of the decision:

President Obama has started describing his new strategy to confront the Islamic State, and despite it being a mishmash of wishful thinking and perpetual militarism, the focus of the Washington elites in the press and elsewhere has been almost entirely on the optics: Is he overcoming the perception that he wasn’t doing enough? What will the political reaction be?

The question we should be asking, as I noted on Friday, is: Why the hell does he think it has any chance of working?

………

His plan calls for stepped-up airstrikes, inevitably leading to civilian casualties; for the kind of Middle-Eastern diplomatic needle-threading that has consistently eluded him in the past; for a political miracle in Iraq; and, despite all the precedent to the contrary, for American-trained indigenous military forces that actually fight.

Despite all the cause for skepticism, however, the press coverage of his remarks was largely stenographic — with the aforementioned overlay of politics and optics.

This is the discussions that we get when Obama is talking about involving us in a war that will last at least 3 years.

Seriously.

We're going to war again, for an extended period, and all that anyone appears to be concerned about is the f%$#ing optics:

All that leaves me pondering this question: Is Obama’s new plan something he genuinely believes in? Or does he recognize it’s stupid, and is just doing it for the optics?

There’s a dismal precedent for the latter option: His decision to extend what he knew was a dead-end war in Afghanistan for two years because of the bellicose promises he’d made in order to look tough during his first political campaign. That time, he traded about 1,300 American lives for optics.

Who knows what the trade might be this time?

You know, Obama's sated foreign policy philosophy, "Don't do stupid sh%$," appears to be in abeyance, and this is not a good thing.