Rand Paul has an op-ed today in Time, laying out his criticism of the Obama administration’s policies toward the Islamic State and offering his take on the situation. He suggests that he supports more or less everything the Obama administration has done so far, except that he would like it to be authorized by Congress (an important distinction, of course). But you might think that his fundamental assessment of U.S. interests is different from the Obama administration’s. It doesn’t seem to be. He writes:
There’s no point in taking military action just for the sake of it, something Washington leaders can’t seem to understand. America has an interest in protecting more than 5,000 personnel serving at the largest American embassy in the world in northern Iraq. I am also persuaded by the plight of massacred Christians and Muslim minorities.
The long-term challenge is debilitating and ultimately eradicating a strong and growing ISIS, whose growth poses a significant terrorist threat to U.S. allies and enemies in the region, Europe, and our homeland.
This is essentially exactly what the Obama administration has laid out as justification for air strikes (which Senator Paul says he supports — sort of). Except, you know, that the White House probably knows that northern Iraq is home to two small U.S. consulates, not an embassy with 5,000 employees. That would be in Baghdad.
(It seems most likely that “in northern Iraq” was pasted in the wrong part of the paragraph, or something. That doesn’t reflect well on Senator Paul’s staff — and is a nice symbol of the incoherence of the op-ed and Senator Paul’s positions about the Islamic State situation over the past few weeks.)