Am I the only who thinks that President Obama wants to wait until after the mid-terms to escalate our involvement in Iraq?  My reasoning is that he does not want to turn off his base anymore than it already is. Now or later, President Obama will have to go to the nation and give this mission a name and an objective.  He needs to do it because we are "mission creeping big time", as Robin Wright wrote this week: "The U.S., however, is already doing more than containing the Islamic State. Washington has now dispatched warplanes to aggressively push back the Islamic State, and the pretense of doing anything less should end.   But so should the illusion about what  it will take to achieve that goal. The Operation Without a Name should not be an operation without a well-defined mission — or without a "winning" exit strategy.  Given the human heartache and political headache from the last Iraq intervention, not to mention the mess left behind, Washington needs to be...(Read Full Post)