Has a U.S. leader ever dispatched a military force overseas with less enthusiasm than President Obama displayed in the White House briefing room on Thursday, where he announced that he’s sending three hundred military personnel to Iraq? Not that I can recall.

Throughout his question-and-answer session, Obama talked in a soft, almost resigned voice, giving the impression that he’d rather do almost anything else than direct Americans soldiers to return to Baghdad and northern Iraq. But despite his description of the U.S. mission as one of advising and supporting the Iraqi government forces rather than doing the fighting, that’s what he’s done.

Short of declaring his willingness to watch Iraq collapse around the unappealing figure of Nuri al-Maliki, President Obama really didn’t have much choice. Although the forward march of the jihadis from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) appears to have stalled well north of the Iraqi capital, there is no assurance that the advance won’t resume, and, seemingly, little prospect of the Iraq Army—supplied and trained at great expense to the U.S. taxpayer—regaining lost ground on its own initiative.

As Steve Coll and Dexter Filkins point out on this week’s Political Scene podcast, it’s a horrible dilemma with no easy solutions on offer. In dispatching some military trainers but ruling out immediate air strikes, Obama did about the minimum he could consistent with his stated determination to confront Islamic militancy wherever it threatens U.S. interests, and the maximum he could do consistent with his promise that American troops won’t be engaged on the ground.

It must be said, however, that the President’s statements raised at least as many questions as they answered. The first one is: What did he mean by saying, “American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again”? Presumably, the military advisers won’t be shooting it out with the ISIS forces on the streets of Baiji and Mosul, but some U.S. military personnel will be engaging the jihadis in other ways. Obama said that the United States has already “significantly increased our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets so that we’ve got a better picture of what’s taking place inside of Iraq,” and he added that the Pentagon was “prepared to create joint operation centers in Baghdad and northern Iraq, to share intelligence and coördinate planning to confront the terrorist threat of ISIL.”

In Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other places, we’ve seen how these types of operations work in practice: U.S. intelligence personnel and special forces are located on the ground, providing intelligence, selecting targets, and, where necessary, calling in air strikes. Most of the U.S. advisers, meanwhile, will presumably be located on Iraqi military bases, trying to stiffen the resolve of the Army and improve its effectiveness. To suggest that this level of involvement doesn’t amount to the U.S. playing a combat role seems to be stretching things.

Albeit reluctantly, the United States is, once again, throwing its lot in with the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. But what does that mean? In a front page article on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama Administration wants Maliki to step down, allowing a more unifying figure to take over. The President made no direct mention of this in his public remarks, but he did say that the recent elections in Iraq have provided an “opportunity to begin a genuine dialogue and forge a government that represents the legitimate interests of all Iraqis.” Is Maliki’s departure a condition for the stepping up of U.S. military assistance, including the arrival in Iraq of the military advisers? “It’s not the place for the United States to choose Iraq’s leaders,” Obama said. “It is clear, though, that only leaders that can govern with an inclusive agenda are going to be able to truly bring the Iraqi people together and help them through this crisis.”

Another nagging question is whether the U.S. presence in Iraq will stop at three hundred advisers and a few hundred more soldiers protecting the U.S. Embassy and other sensitive sites. Obama said that he is wary of mission creep—he didn’t need to say it; we can see it from his body language—but what happens if ISIS takes further ground in the north or the west? And if the President does eventually approve U.S. air strikes against ISIS positions, which seems likely, won’t that inevitably constitute a greater level of U.S. involvement, including, possibly, the eventual use of Iraqi air bases?

In the late nineteen fifties, President Eisenhower dispatched a U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group to South Vietnam. That was supposed to be limited to few hundred individuals. In 1961, President Kennedy upped the number to more than two thousand. By the end of 1962, there were more than nine thousand of them on the ground, and we all know where things went from there. Iraq isn’t Vietnam, obviously. The United States has invaded and occupied the country once with terrible consequences, and it would take something seismic to draw its ground forces back in large numbers. But it’s also hard to view this mission, even if it is successful in beating back the jihadis, as a discrete, time-limited initiative.

If the past few years have demonstrated anything it’s that the Iraqi state, as currently constituted, is too weak to overcome the country’s ethnic and religious divisions. Perhaps that could change with the formation of a government that gave more of a voice to the Sunnis and the Kurds. So far, though, there’s little indication that such a regime will be forthcoming. With Iraq’s Shiite leaders summoning their followers to arms, it’s looking more and more like a sectarian civil war in the offing. And even if healing Iraq’s wounds is possible, it’s a long-term project. In the interim, there will need to be some stabilizing mechanism, such as an international military presence, or an agreement amongst neighboring countries to stop stoking up sectarian tensions, or, most likely, a combination of the two.

What we have now is something much more limited: a hastily-improvised, emergency military bailout for a country on the brink. In her post yesterday, my colleague Amy Davidson asked: “How does a mission like that end?” The most optimistic answer is that it succeeds in its immediate aims and evolves into a broader effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq, with the assistance of interested parties internal and external. Sadly, there are countless other possibilities, many of them dreadful. That’s why President Obama was looking so glum.

In a previous post, I suggested that the United States, in invading Iraq, opened Pandora’s Box. It seems unlikely that, eleven years later, a few hundred military advisers will be able to close it.

Photograph by Haider Hamdani/AFP/Getty.