...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....