Obama Is Picking Targets in Iraq and Syria While Missing the Point.

US officials have big disagreements about how dangerous ISIS is, and whether bombing will hurt it or help it.

The question is confused because the term "bombing" fails to distinguish between air strikes on troops engaged in battle and drone assassinations, but this distinction is crucial. Tactical air support focuses on heavy weapons and military vehicles, and it is easy to distinguish them from civilians. People don't have heavy weapons or HUMVs at home, even in Iraq. Thus, air support causes few civilian casualties, and those few, when they occur, are understandable.

By contrast, drone assassinations often kill civilians in their homes and cars; in Pakistan and Yemen, those casualties, coming literally and figuratively out of the blue, have inspired understandable lasting hatred against the US.

For the moment, the US campaign against ISIS is mostly air support for the armies fighting ISIS. I'm in favor of providing such support. We see already that it is effective: it has prevented ISIS from conquering thousands of people and likely butchering them wholesale. It has also resulted in rather easy recapture of substantial territory, a vital dam, and some towns. As long as ISIS maintains armies fighting in the field, fighting them this way will be effective for the same reasons.

But Obama's speech shows he envisions continuing the fighting into a drone assassination campaign. A proper debate must treat those as two separate issues.

A drone assassination campaign in Iraq would be self-defeating as well as unjustifiable. Iraqi Sunnis would form ranks behind ISIS in response to the civilian casualties, producing a stalemate of suffering like that in Yemen. Such a stalemate never leads to victory; each day, the US would face the choice to terminate it and lose, or continue it and cause additional pointless suffering to preserve the status quo.

When Congress debates fighting ISIS, as is its duty, it must distinguish these two forms of fighting. If I were a member of Congress, I would vote for air support on the battlefield, for as long as ISIS keeps fighting on battlefields, but insist on prohibiting assassination campaigns.