U.S. OKs surveillance flights over Syria in advance of possible airstrikes

It's actually the right move, albeit way too late. And of course, knowing Obama, you can probably count on the likelihood that he won't go all out against ISIS out of concern for some peripheral issue like not wanting to help Bashar Assad in any way. In fact, Assad wants the U.S. to coordinate with him in launching the attacks, lest we be guilty of violating Syria's sovereign territory and he has to explain it.

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So far, the U.S. doesn't appear too interested in that idea:

Administration officials said that the United States had no plans to notify the Assad government of the planned flights. Mr Obama, who has repeatedly called for the ouster of Dr Assad, is loath to be seen as aiding the Syrian government, even inadvertently. As a result the Pentagon is drafting military options that would strike the militant Islamic State near the largely erased border between those two nations, as opposed to more deeply inside Syria. The administration is also moving to bolster US support for the moderate Syrian rebels who view Assad as their main foe. Yesterday Syria warned the US that it needed to coordinate airstrikes against the Islamic State or it would view them as a breach of its sovereignty and an “act of aggression.” But it signaled its readiness to work with the United States in a coordinated campaign against the militants. The reconnaissance flights would not be the first time the United States has entered Syrian air space without seeking permission

. I say it's the right move because, if the objective here is to destroy ISIS (as it must be), then you can't limit your aggressive action by refusing to go any number of places they might hide. Ironically, this was always to quandry faced by the Bush Administration in its pursuit of Al Qaeda. Writing in this morning's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens recalls that it was easy for Democrats to whine about go-it-alone-cowboyism when it wasn't their responsibility to grapple with threats:

Which brings us back to the questions confronting the Bush administration on Sept. 12, 2001. Are we going to fight terrorists over there—or are we going to wait for them to come here? Do we choose to confront terrorism by means of war—or as a criminal justice issue? Can we assume the cancer in the Middle East won't spread so we can "pivot" to Asia and do some more "nation-building at home"? Can we win with a light-footprint approach against a heavy-footprint enemy? Say what you will about George W. Bush: He got every one of these questions right while Mr. Obama got every one of them wrong.

Politicians can talk endlessly about the folly of overseas interventions when there is nothing like the ISIS rampage dominating the news, and voters will generally affirm this thinking because they're sick of war and they just want everything to get back to normal. These are the times when interventionists are reckless cowboys dragging the rest of us along on fruitless adventures for which there can be no possible good outcome. And that's exactly the sort of rhetoric that elected the likes of Barack Obama. Let ISIS start murdering its way across the countryside, though, and suddenly we need to take action. Credit Bush for recognizing this and staying committed to it even when the public got sick of it and wanted to watch American Idol - much to the detriment of his approval ratings. It's the sort of courage Obama will never demonstrate. I guess the best we can say is that, when a threat the likes of ISIS becomes this undeniable, the nature of the body politic is such that even Obama can't sit back and do nothing. The question is whether he will make the adjustment all the way from nothing to that which is actually necessary to deal with the problem. I'm having a hard time believing he will, but preparations to strike ISIS in Syria represent a hopeful step.