Photograph by Saul Loeb/Bloomberg/Getty

“Just two hours ago, allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait.”

—President George H. W. Bush

January 16, 1991

“Good evening. Earlier today, I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq.”

—President Bill Clinton

December 16, 1998

“My fellow citizens. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

—President George W. Bush

March 19, 2003

“My fellow Americans. Tonight, I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.”

—President Barack Obama

September 10, 2014

Every American President in the past quarter century has now gone on television during prime time to tell the nation and the world that he has decided to bomb Iraq. Last night was Barack Obama’s turn, and it was a vexing performance. This is a President who has been stubbornly dedicated to extricating the United States as much as possible from its post-9/11 wars and resisting—in the absence of any good options for decisive action—being drawn into Syria’s catastrophic civil war. “The greatest responsibility I have as President is to keep the American people safe,” he said, two years ago. “That’s why I ended the war in Iraq.” And he repeated that boast last night, even as he told a very different story, effectively declaring a new war of staggering scope and complexity against forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, and other enemies, in Iraq and Syria—a war that he described as having no end in sight.

Our previous three Presidents began their war speeches by announcing that the bombing was already underway, and went on to elaborate the long, often public, political and diplomatic campaigns that they had conducted to win support in Congress and at the United Nations, and to build coalitions of allies to fight alongside America. Whether they had won such broad international support (like Bush the father) or had been refused it (like Bush the son), their point was the same: they had exhausted all other channels and had no choice but to take action. Obama, too, made it clear that he felt he had no alternative, but he didn’t say what had changed his mind in favor of a larger war.

Until now, the pretext for our more limited air war against ISIS has been that we were protecting American personnel in Iraq. Obama said that he “insisted that additional U.S. action depended upon Iraqis forming an inclusive government.” That new government was put together “in recent days,” and so he said that he was ready for action. He did not discuss the heaviness of America's hand in creating it. Are we really to believe that this untested client regime in Baghdad is the foundation for Obama's drastic reversal of course? Or was it the beheadings of the American journalists by ISIS butchers who taunted Obama directly in their grisly propaganda snuff films?

Obama said flat out that ISIS poses no immediate threat to our national security. But then he sowed confusion, saying that he would not hesitate to order strikes against ISIS in Syria, as well as Iraq, because, as he put it, “This is a core principle of my Presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”

Beneath this swirl of contradiction and swagger lay a mess of questions about the legal justification for Obama’s war. The White House, it turns out, is claiming that the President is covered by the 2001 congressional authorization for the war on terror against Al Qaeda—a dubious proposition, not least because ISIS is repudiated by Al Qaeda and the two organizations see each other as enemy parties.* In any case, Obama took care to speak of his war plans almost entirely in the future tense, sketching them so vaguely that they remained largely notional.

Nothing that Obama said in his speech was as revealing as what he didn’t say. He said that he’d consulted with Congress about taking the war to ISIS, but he did not say what that meant. He allowed that it’s always better to have congressional support, but he did not say that he would defer at any formal level to congressional approval or authorization (which may be fine with Congress). He never once spoke the words, “United Nations,” only noting that he would swing by the “U.N. Security Council” to chair a meeting in the next couple of weeks and pull together international support. He made this sound like a casual matter, never raising the possibility of trying to obtain—as his predecessors all fought long and hard to do—a Security Council resolution to legitimize the war.

Obama did speak generally of friends and allies joining America in Iraq and Syria, but he did not pretend that he had succeeded in recruiting a viable coalition. When that happens, America and its partners, whoever they are, will eventually destroy ISIS, he said. He did not say why we should expect to succeed in this case when we have failed to destroy Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

Obama and his spinners were adamant that this won’t be like those old wars of ours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather, Obama said, his model this time was our largely clandestine campaigns of air strikes in Yemen and Somalia. That was hardly reassuring. Yemen and Somalia are broken, violent realms wracked by war, and with no end to those wars in sight, it is bewildering that Obama could hope to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis and Syrians by using these examples. In any case, he acknowledged that his war can’t be won from the air. For that, he said, we will depend on the very Iraqi and Syrian fighters who he has said in the past can’t be relied on.

Obama did not specify which moderate Syrian rebel forces we will count as our allies, and why such a partnership will work out better than similar ones have in other war zones, where our former client forces have turned into our most fearsome enemies. He said that we would not ally with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but it is hard to see how our fighting against his strongest opponents will not benefit him. Obama did not say how he plans to work both with Iran and against Iran; both with the Saudis and against the Saudis; and with Qatar and Turkey but not entirely, not wholly with them.

The President never mentioned Libya. That was the last time he attempted to wage a war on the spur of the moment, getting into it, at first, as a rescue mission to prevent a predicted massacre, then escalating fast and hard—but remaining always in the air—in support of rebel ground forces whom we barely knew, and whom we understood even less, with no clear end but total regime change, and with no commitment whatever beyond the first rush of the revolution. That war then spilled over into Mali, and turned inward in Libya, so that today the country is an absolute catastrophe—far worse off than when NATO joined its troubles, with Tripoli in the hands of forces much like ISIS.