So now Obama finds himself in a wholly new predicament. He has reluctantly reactivated one war, the end of which he heralded, to forestall genocide against the Yazidis and to protect Kurdistan, the one relative success story of US intervention in Iraq. His actions have conceded that he was quite premature in dismissing the ISIS threat last January as the “jayvee team” against Osama bin Laden’s Kobe Bryant. American interests are now decidedly “involved” in Syria. Obama appears increasingly likely to expand the war against the IS to the stateless remains of that country, a campaign which will undoubtedly be of longer duration than last year’s proposed one-off airstrikes. (It may even eventually lead to what State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf once said any intervention in Syria would entail: dispatching 18-year-olds from Ohio to Damascus.) Unmentioned by his National Security Council or his surrogates in the think tank world is the awkward fact that a commander-in-chief who told the United Nations in 2011 that the “tide of war is receding” may well leave office with the United States embroiled in more simultaneous military conflicts in the Middle East than his reviled predecessor did. History has its lurid sense of humor. And suddenly everyone has become an expert again.