The ever-expanding war on ISIS just got a little larger:
President Barack Obama said Monday he will send as many as 250 additional military personnel to Syria, significantly increasing the U.S. presence there in an effort to help local forces and extend recent gains against Islamic State.
The president continues to escalate U.S. involvement in Syria incrementally, and the “limited” intervention he talked about in the summer of 2014 continues to expand. When he did this last fall, he encountered little criticism and even less opposition in Congress, and the reaction to this decision will likely be much the same. Obama repeatedly pledged that he wouldn’t put American forces on the ground in Syria, and he broke that pledge last year, so it should come as no shock that he is now continuing with a policy that he said he would never implement. This week’s decision is another step on the road to a larger U.S. military presence in Syria that will almost certainly keep growing the longer that the war goes on.
It should go without saying that the president has no authority to do any of this, but apparently it has to be restated on a regular basis. The president does not have the authority to start and wage wars without Congressional approval, and each decision he makes to expand the war he started on his own in 2014 compounds the original error. He gets away with it in this case because very few members of Congress care about the president’s overreaching, and none of them disagrees with the policy. There are some in Congress that would try to stop what he’s doing, but they aren’t in charge of anything. So Obama will get to escalate the war bit by bit for the remainder of his term, and his successor will very likely keep doing the same.