Following the gruesome beheading of James Foley, by a terrorist group called “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” and the group’s threats to behead other captives in August 2014, The New York Times headline on page A19 reads, with Kafkaesque “logic”: “U.S. Invokes Defense of Iraq in Legal Justification of Syria Strikes.” US/NATO had failed, for three years, to get UN Security Council authorization for military action against Syria, and unilateral military action against Syria would be a violation of international law.
However, the very visible emergence of ISIS, now defined as the most dangerous terrorist organization in the Middle East, or, perhaps, globally, and their widely publicized video beheadings of James Foley, Steve Sotloff and others, appeared to give some form of de facto justification for broader military action, including against Syria. On August 22, 2014, The New York Times reported, page A6:
“When the United States began airstrikes in Iraq this month, senior Obama administration officials went out of their way to underscore the limited nature of their action. ‘This was not an authorization of a broad-based counterterrorism campaign,’ a senior Obama administration official told reporters at the time. But the beheading of an American journalist and the possibility that more American citizens being held by the group might be slain has prompted outrage at the highest levels of the American government.”