The morning after President Barack Obama’s televised speech announcing airstrikes over Syria and an additional wave of military advisers to combat the group known as the Islamic State, Scott Crichlow’s political science class discussed what comes next.

Some of his students talked about the potential for an increased U.S. presence in the Middle East to escalate the conflict.

“I think there definitely is a concern nationwide whether the longer term impact of this will be positive even if the mission itself is accomplished,” said Crichlow, chair of the West Virginia University Department of Political Science.

As the president announced that the U.S. would launch air strikes over Syria in addition to airstrikes over Iraq, he said that the U.S. would “hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” including the Islamic State, which he referred to as ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), and is often known as ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).

The group has been largely unknown to the American public until recently.

“It’s an unusual situation that we find ourselves in right now because this is the sort of dominant threat story that’s in the papers and on the TV, and yet it’s about an organization which most Americans never heard about until a couple months ago,” he said.

Crichlow, who specializes in U.S. foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics, said while the president used aggressive language to communicate his intentions in the region, it’s not likely that the Islamic State will be totally destroyed by the actions he announced.

The president used more than words to send a message to the nation, such as positioning his speech on prime time television, he said.

“Presidents don’t typically do this,” Crichlow said. “It’s very rare to have a prime-time address on a foreign policy topic.”

And that says something about the level of importance the administration places on this action, he said.

Dave Hauser, a teaching assistant professor who focuses on international conflict, said that the American public has been applying pressure to the government to act on the issue following the beheadings of two American journalists, which put faces on the issue as the public heard from grieving families.

“That sort of crystallized for the American public a sense of outrage and of ‘doing something about it,’” Hauser said.

What may not have been as clear to the public is that the U.S. has been doing something for the last several weeks with airstrikes in Iraq and hundreds of special forces advisers to Iraqi troops, Hauser said.

“My take was that it didn’t surprise me,” Hauser said of Obama’s speech. “It seemed like the best political reaction he could have to what is clearly a very complicated international and domestic issue.”

Both professors emphasize that the consequences of the decision can vary.

Obama referred to the group as a threat, though Crichlow said the threat is widely regarded as regional. A more international threat could come in the form of an organization like al-Qaeda concerned that the Islamic State is positioning itself as a leader among militant organizations.

Because the situation is so complex, there are a multitude of consequences such as worsening the Syrian civil war, weakening the Iraqi government, prompting the Islamic State to press into other nations in the Middle East, Hauser said.

“It’s a hugely complex situation,” Hauser said, “and I think that president Obama’s small changes to policy were the best he could find, given how many different actors with different interests there are.”

-WVU-

dm/09/12/14

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