James Taranto:

“President Barack Obama stepped in front of the cameras on Thursday to utter words he hoped he would never say as commander in chief,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “After years of resisting the pull of more Mideast conflicts, President Barack Obama has sent the military back into action in Iraq, where he once accused his predecessor of waging a ‘dumb war,’ ” the Associated Press adds.

The New York Times: “In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama on Thursday night found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition.”

The leads of the news stories thus relieve the commentator of the need to make the most obvious point: that the military action in Iraq constitutes, as the Journal’s headline understatedly puts it, a “policy reversal.”

In his televised statement [Thursday] night, the president tried to reassure his domestic audience that there were certain red lines he would not cross. “As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,” he promised. “American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.” Though the smaller crisis is crisis enough.

One could argue the point either way, but for the sake of this column let’s stipulate that America is not “fighting another war” but merely engaging in a police action. There is nonetheless an escalatory logic to Obama’s decision–a sense in which the U.S. is already being “dragged into” the conflict.

The president offered two rationales for the action:

First, I said in June–as the terrorist group ISIL began an advance across Iraq–that the United States would be prepared to take targeted military action in Iraq if and when we determined that the situation required it. In recent days, these terrorists have continued to move across Iraq, and have neared the city of Erbil, where American diplomats and civilians serve at our consulate and American military personnel advise Iraqi forces.

Those military advisers were dispatched to Iraq in June, in response to the rapid advances of ISIL (also known as ISIS). Their presence was insufficient to prevent further rapid advances, and now the advisers themselves are in some danger, so the president has ordered airstrikes to protect them. Let us hope that turns out to be enough. But what if it doesn’t?

Logic would suggest the serious possibility that further escalation will prove necessary, especially in light of Obama’s history (noted here yesterday) of grossly underestimating ISIL’s capabilities. One assumes the White House and Pentagon are considering contingency plans short of full-scale ground combat.

But publicly ruling out that last possibility, while perhaps helpful from a domestic political standpoint, seems strategically unwise. It risks emboldening the enemy by making explicit the political (and perhaps psychological) constraints on the president’s ability to act.

It makes the worst-case scenario even worse–transforming a choice between backing down and paying in blood and treasure into a choice between backing down from the fight and backing down from a promise to the American people. And while no one doubts that Obama would very much like to avoid further escalation, does anybody believe–especially given the degree to which he has already reversed himself on Iraq–that the promise not to deploy combat troops is ironclad?

The president’s second justification is ISIL’s brutal campaign against religious minorities, specifically Christians and Yazidis. He described the plight of the latter group (also noted in yesterday’s column):

In recent days, Yazidi women, men and children from the area of Sinjar have fled for their lives. And thousands–perhaps tens of thousands–are now hiding high up on the mountain, with little but the clothes on their backs. They’re without food, they’re without water. People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute genocide. . . . We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. . . . I’ve, therefore, authorized targeted airstrikes, if necessary, to help forces in Iraq as they fight to break the siege of Mount Sinjar and protect the civilians trapped there.

That’s something of a reversal, too. As we noted in 2007–in the most prescient article we’ve ever written about Iraq–then-Sen. Obama was asked by an AP reporter if preventing genocide would be a sufficient reason to keep U.S. troops in Iraq:

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now–where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife–which we haven’t done,” Mr. Obama told the AP. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”

Perhaps mindful of what he said back then, in his speech last night the president listed some criteria that set the current Iraq situation apart: “We have a mandate to help–in this case, a request from the Iraqi government,” and “we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre.”

It has the feeling of a post hoc rationalization, and Obama’s characterization of a “request” as a “mandate” does violence to the ordinary meanings of those words. (Maybe he can square that circle by invoking the taxing power.) But the qualifications do give him at least a patina of logical consistency.

It’s also true that the question he was asked in 2007 (whether to keep ground troops in Iraq) was different from the one he answered last night (whether to use air power 2½ years after the withdrawal of troops). But his remarks a few days before the last troops were withdrawn make clear that he had dispensed entirely with the premise that any dire consequences, including genocide, might follow. Obama on Dec. 14, 2011, at Fort Bragg, N.C.:

It’s harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.

Mission accomplished.

Somebody–though evidently not Winston Churchill–once observed that Americans will always do the right thing, but only after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. If that is true, then Barack Obama is a real American.

Meanwhile, Obama’s problem with the truth showed up as well, Joel Gehrke reports:

President Obama refused to take responsibility for the lack of U.S. troops in Iraq, saying that American soldiers had to pull out due to political pressure from Iraqi leaders.

“This issue keeps on coming up as if this was my decision,” Obama retorted when asked if he had any second thoughts, in light of the terrorist force taking over regions of Iraq, about having pulled all American troops out of the country. “The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq,” he said.

A report in The New Yorker showed how President Obama failed to secure the status of forces agreement necessary to leave the troops in place after 2011.

Dexter Filkins explained:

President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.

When Obama announced the withdrawal, he portrayed it as the culmination of his own strategy.

“After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011,” he said. “So today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”