Obama Wants New ISIS War Plan ASAP - The Daily Beast
▻http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/27/obama-wants-a-syria-war-plan-this-week.html
One huge unanswered question is whether the president will order the attacks, or whether he will ultimately balk, as he did this time last year after preparing for limited strikes against the Bashar al-Assad regime. One administration official working on Syria policy said the purpose of the meetings Tuesday was “to convince one man, Barack Obama,” to follow through on the rhetoric and widen the aims of the war to include destroying ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. While Obama and his top officials have said they will need to address the threat of ISIS on both sides of the Iraq/Syria border, Obama has not said specifically what that means.
Unlike in Iraq—where U.S. airstrikes are closely coordinated with Iraqi and Kurdish forces on the ground—the Obama administration has not yet consulted with ISIS’s opponents in Syria about possible strikes.
The ISIS threat metastasized so quickly, the U.S. doesn’t even have confidence that it could locate top ISIS leaders and strategic assets if the president decides to go. The administration’s sudden urgency comes after years of avoiding direct intervention inside Syria, making the prospects of conducting effective attacks much more difficult.
Former State and Defense Department official Vikram Singh added, “The advantage of taking action against ISIS on both sides of the now nonexistent border is that acting solely on one side of the border will have much less impact, if any… The downside is that you find yourself inadvertently helping Assad.”