Almost five years after President Barack Obama withdrew the last American troops from Iraq, the tidal waves of the war are pulling him back in. Obama has been resisting those tides, at first restricting himself to mounting airstrikes against ISIS, then sending trainers, then special operations forces initially as "advisers," but increasingly in roles that place them on the edge of combat — and, very soon now, in the thick of it.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has announced that, for the coming battle to liberate Mosul, another 217 troops will be sent to Iraq (bringing the total to 4,087, not counting the few hundred special operations forces); that they'll move to the front lines with Iraqi soldiers on the battalion level (before, American troops tended to stay on bases); that they and the Iraqis will be supported in the air not only by drones and fighter jets but also by Apache helicopters — and on the ground by new rocket systems that can fire waves of missiles from long range with great accuracy.
In short, we are going to war in Iraq against ISIS. It's not going to be like George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq: It will involve about 5,000 U.S. troops, not 150,000; and local forces — Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish peshmerga and various militias — will be in the lead. But the United States will be directly involved in the fighting and quite possibly the dying.
Senior officials claim the U.S. mission isn't changing, but it's clear that, by any reasonable definition of "mission" and "changing," it is. In fact, speaking in Hanover, Germany, on Monday, Obama widened the scope even more to include Syria, outlining plans to nearly quadruple the size of U.S. Special Operations forces in Syria to up to 300 troops, saying it was needed to keep pressure on ISIS.
What's going on with U.S. forces, in fact, is a living, looming case study in "mission creep."
Several times in the past couple years, Obama has resisted the pressures of mission creep, saying that, yes, U.S. ground forces would push ISIS out of Mosul in reasonably short order, but then what? Unless Iraqi troops came in to restore order and keep ISIS out, we'll be stuck there for years or decades. The good news is that, over the past several months, a joint force of American special-ops officers and Italian carabinieri have been training Iraqi military-police units to do just that.
In the past, the president also cited another reason for restraint: There's no point in throwing American troops into this conflict without a decent prospect for a political solution. Specifically, as long as Iraq's Shiite-led government doesn't share power with the Sunnis, ISIS (or jihadist organizations like ISIS) can't be crushed. The Baghdad government's oppressive policies and corrupt practices might not have caused the rise of ISIS, but they've helped sustain it and legitimized the grievances that ISIS has exploited, encouraging even many moderate Sunnis to tolerate the presence of ISIS as the lesser of two evils.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has more inclusive inclinations than his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Still, sectarian favoritism still dominates Iraqi politics; corruption is rife; and Sunnis have yet to be shown a compelling reason to turn against ISIS, and thus tilt in favor of the government, in large numbers.
Obama has a tendency — often historically justified — to let others do the dangerous work when America's vital interests aren't at stake. And so, when he first declared that ISIS must be destroyed, he tried to assemble a coalition of Muslim nations and militias to do the fighting on the ground, offering to support their effort with America's combat specialties — precision airstrikes, intelligence and logistical support. But it turned out there was no such coalition to be had, as its logical members — which included just about every nation and militia in the region — feared and loathed one another at least as much as they feared and loathed ISIS (a fact that ISIS has shrewdly exploited).
Yet Obama had declared, and has continued to declare, that ISIS must be destroyed — and so he stepped up the airstrikes (even though he knew that airstrikes alone can't win a war), and he sought partners where he could find them, most notably the Kurds (even though he knew they would fight only to defend their own turf, not go chasing jihadists all over the country). And so he moved, incrementally but inextricably, toward deepening America's involvement, widening its stake, heightening its risk.
This is a president who has something of an allergy to escalation, especially if it seems to be spiraling out of control. But I also suspect he thinks he can maintain his grip on the spiral. However, he is president for only another nine months, and he has set the logic for his successor to escalate the fight and still think — or at least claim — that he or she is simply continuing Obama's strategy under changing circumstances.
Fred Kaplan is the author of "Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War."
© 2016 Slate