He’s only talking about a “limited,, narrow attack” because he knows that’s the only way he can get the war started. Then, when that inevitably fails and Assad gives him the rigid digit, he’ll say we have to “support the troops” and go in all the way, just as he planned and wanted from the get go. The part of Kerry’s speech where he denounced Assad s a monster almost as bad as Hitler, without using Hitler’s name, was a dead giveaway as to where the Mahdi intends to take us.
What you say is, alas, plausible.
But, I have taken comfort in one thing. In the past, dictators intent on expanding through war have built up their militaries. Obama has done the opposite. He may very well want to lose (how treasonous is that) in the cause of setting up a caliphate, but that’s so devious he’d have to be a very smart, farsighted planner.
I give him and his cabal a high rating for skill in a legalistic, destructive community organizing sort of way, but they are complete babes in the land of military planning.