U.S. President Barack Obama plans to deploy dozens of special operations forces to northern Syria to advise opposition forces in their fight against Islamic State, a major shift and a step he has long resisted to avoid getting dragged into another war in the Middle East.

The number of special operations troops in Syria would be fewer than 50, said a senior administration official, speaking ahead of an announcement on Friday by the administration. One U.S. official said the number was likely to be in the range of 20 to 30 but could not provide details.

The decision by Obama, deeply averse to committing troops to unpopular wars in the Middle East, would mark the first sustained U.S. troop presence in Syria and raise the risk of American casualties, although U.S. officials stressed the forces were not meant to engage in front-line combat.

The Obama administration is under pressure to ramp up America's effort against Islamic State, particularly after the fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to Islamic State in May and the failure of a U.S. military program to train and arm thousands of Syrian rebels.

The planned deployment adds to an increasingly volatile and complex conflict in Syria, where Russia and Iran have increased up their military support for President Bashar al-Assad's fight against rebels in the four-and-a-half year civil war.

Russia said when it began air strikes last month that it would also target the Islamic State militant group, but its planes have hit other rebel groups opposed to Assad, including groups backed by Washington.

The new U.S. strategy to assist in the fight against Islamic State in Syria will be accompanied by a new special operations force in Erbil in northern Iraq, "intensified" cooperation with Iraqis in retaking Ramadi and expanded security assistance to Jordan and Lebanon, a senior congressional source said....

Many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war? One man wrote to me that we are “still recovering from our involvement in Iraq.” A veteran put it more bluntly: “This nation is sick and tired of war.”

My answer is simple: I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan. I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo. This would be a targeted strike to achieve a clear objective: deterring the use of chemical weapons, and degrading Assad’s capabilities.

...The Syrian Conflict has been costly with no end in sight

I would like to ask the question, where does it end and why the hell is America fighting in Syria in the first place?

As a staunch Libertarian, I only believe in using America’s military to fight a preemptive war is a war that is commenced in an attempt to repel or defeat a perceived imminent threat. This commentator does not see how sending American forces into Syria prevents an imminent threat.

I personally do not agree with President Obama’s policy and activities in Syria in the first place. Syria is a quagmire within a quagmire and we should not have assisted the rebels in the Arab Spring movement in the first place.

Hopefully America will not engage in another endless and fruitless war in Syria as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. The time for these sorts of wars and interventions into places we do not belong must come to an end. With American troops in Syria, is a military conflict with Russia next?

Hopefully President Obama is not launching America into another Vietnam, a war in which there is no end. I say we pull out of Syria right now and get the hell out of there. We should have never been there in the first place. America is not the world’s policeman, we have no business trying to right every wrong and fight every war in this sorry world.

I say hell no to American involvement in Syria and we must not send any troops in there at all.

History is like a nagging friend, a back-seat driver or a Monday morning quarterback always ready to tap you on the shoulder with an often annoying reminder of the obvious, of something startling that’s been forgotten in the dust of time passed. And fifty years isn’t exactly in yesterday’s rear view mirror.

I found myself thinking about something the other day that took place exactly 50 years ago. The ghost of that long gone time jumped off the page of the newspaper as I read about the Obama administration’s decision to announce publicly for the first time that a small unit, less than 50, of Special Operations troops would soon be on the ground inside Syria. They will be advising, working and fighting alongside one element or another of rebels combating both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad, the killer who leads what’s left of his broken state.

Fifty Novembers ago, the war in Vietnam totally changed in a place called the Ia Drang Valley. There, for the first time, the United States Army used tactics that brilliant minds like Robert McNamara felt would result in victory over the North Vietnamese.

We would use a combination of air power, fire power, air mobility and increasing numbers of American soldiers and Marines to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate an end to war. Our combat superiority would result in so many enemy casualties that they would sue for peace rather than suffer such massive losses.

So in the second week of November 1965 elements of the First Air Cavalry Division boarded helicopters and flew into the Ia Drang Valley to take on about 2,000 NVA soldiers. It was the first and perhaps only classic set-piece battle of our years in Vietnam: two tough, battle hardened armies going against each other on a single field of fire.

In December 1964, there were 23,000 Americans fighting in Vietnam. By December 1965 the number had jumped to 185,000. At the end of 1964, the war had claimed the lives of 216 Americans. One year later the casualty count was 1,928 Americans killed.

War and the cost of fighting one is and always has been a growth industry. Fifty years ago the appetite of politicians and the Pentagon was fed largely by the draft. Today less than one percent of our population puts their lives on the line, puts their families fate at risk, for the rest of us here at home....

...Why didn’t the president announce the deployment himself? There are a few possible explanations, none of which ought to reassure us.

The first is that Obama genuinely believes that this isn’t a big deal, or at least wants to project that it isn’t a big deal, and that it is an action entirely consistent with his past statements—including his assertion in 2013 that “I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria”—which we must now consider to be abrogated, or just give up on the English language entirely.

The second possibility, not necessarily mutually exclusive with the first, is that the president is signaling through his silence that he doesn’t wholeheartedly support this deployment. As shocking as this accusation might seem—that a commander-in-chief would approve a military action that he doesn’t believe in—remember that the president nonchalantly admitted to Steve Kroft only a few weeks ago that he had been “skeptical from the get go” about the now-failed effort to train a Syrian rebel force. Since what would have seemed like a shocking betrayal by a leader of his troops only a few years ago can now be casually admitted in passing on 60 Minutes, I don’t think we should rule presidential half-heartedness out.

The third possibility is that the president and his advisers have concluded that there is little to be gained from publicly addressing the issue. Any talk of the war in Iraq and Syria distracts from the president’s domestic agenda—today, prison reform is on the docket—and forces the president into a position where he has to explain to the American people why they are still not winning a war against a (relatively) small terrorist army that is no match for the U.S. military. But actually explaining why this is so, and why the White House isn’t going to do much about it, would require emphasizing aspects of this administration’s policy that would likely be deeply unpopular with voters....

...A majority of both Republicans (56%) and conservatives (54%) support sending ground troops to Iraq and Syria to combat Islamic State militants.

Meanwhile, less than half of moderates (41%) and political independents (39%) favor the deployment of ground troops. Liberals (31%) and Democrats (37%) are equally or less likely to support that action....