Can Obama Stop at Just One Airstrike?

The real test of the U.S. air strikes in Syria will be whether they preempt or accelerate moves toward an intervention aimed at regime change, which would drag the United States inexorably into a quagmire. U.S. President Barack Obama's manifest determination not to get pulled down that slippery slope and his understanding of the implausibility of a successful limited intervention suggest that he believes that he can resist allowing the air strikes to trap America in the Syrian civil war. Let's hope he's right. The debate about Obama's Syria policy has too often been framed around the supposed existence of plausible options for ending the war through a limited military intervention -- if only the president showed more backbone. Nonsense. If there were easy options for ending Syria's bloodbath and delivering on the president's public aspiration to see President Bashar al-Assad gone, the administration would have taken them long ago. There are not.