American Military Boots Are on the Ground in Syria, But Does President Obama Have a Plan?
"ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror" co-author Michael Weiss on how Obama allowed a bad situation to get worse in Syria.
American military boots, 50 of them, will soon be officially "on the the ground" in Syria to fight ISIS, something President Obama promised was not something he would consider.
Is it too little too late? Or is it the beginning of yet another inept US military misadventure in the making?
Last month, Reason TV spoke with Michael Weiss, the co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, about why he has given up hope that the Obama Administration will ever develop a coherent foreign policy when it comes to battling ISIS.
Original writeup below:
"I'm out of solutions here," says Michael Weiss, a senior editor at The Daily Beast and co-author of the New York Times bestseller, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, widely viewed as the most comprehensive study of the brutal Islamist entity that controls a wide swath of land between Iraq and Syria.
Speaking with Reason TV about U.S. involvement in the disastrous Syrian civil war, Weiss laments, "I can speak glibly about no-fly zones, but at this point I just understand this administration is never going to do anything to rescue the Syrian people or prevent Assad, Iran, and Russia from killing everybody they want to."
Weiss, a foreign affairs reporter with extensive experience covering the Middle East and Russia, believes that the U.S. had options besides war that could have prevented the refugee crisis becoming the global fiasco it is today. But, charges Weiss, President Obama's determination to achieve a nuclear deal with Iran meant he refused to pursue policies that might disrupt Assad's Syria.
With Russian jets bombing non-ISIS rebel groups in Syria and Obama leaving office in early 2017, Weiss "guarantees the following: Assad will still be in Damascus. ISIS will still be in Syria [and] eventually Russia will bomb ISIS, but they haven't really been doing it yet."