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Obama to Speak on Strategy for ‘Destroying’ ISIS White House Faces Series of Hurdles for Military Operations in Syria
(about 9 hours later)
WASHINGTON — President Obama will address the nation at 9 p.m. on Wednesday about how the United States plans to confront the threat from the Sunni extremist group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. WASHINGTON — The White House is wrestling with a series of hurdles in preparation for military operations in Syria, including how to train and equip a viable ground force and intervene without aiding President Bashar al-Assad, people briefed on the plans said Tuesday.
In the speech, Mr. Obama will lay out a strategy for “degrading and ultimately destroying the terrorist group,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. As President Obama cobbles together a coalition of countries to fight the Sunni militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he is also encountering tensions from would-be partners like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which are reluctant to battle ISIS too publicly.
The decision to schedule the address during prime time, from the state floor of the White House, underscores the gravity of the challenge from ISIS. It comes after an intense internal debate and diplomatic outreach to assemble a coalition to target ISIS. In a prime-time address on Wednesday evening, Mr. Obama is to explain to Americans his strategy for “degrading and ultimately destroying the terrorist group,” the White House said in a statement. The people briefed on the president’s plans described a long-term campaign far more complex than the targeted strikes the United States has used against Al Qaeda in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere.
Mr. Obama plans to meet with Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate on Tuesday afternoon to build Congressional support for his action. On Monday evening, he and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. invited nine foreign-policy experts to a three-hour dinner to preview his policy. On Tuesday, the president briefed Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and the Senate about his plans. Mr. Obama told them he believed he had the authority needed to order an expanded operation, though he would “welcome action by the Congress that would aid the overall effort,” the White House statement said.
Mr. Obama, who was joined by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Secretary of State John Kerry, and other senior officials, looked “forward to engaging with this group and hearing their views on a range of national security and foreign policy issues,” the White House said in a statement. But Congress is divided on the need for a vote on military action before the midterm elections, and both sides appeared to be searching for a way to enlist congressional support without an explicit authorization of force. One way under discussion would be for lawmakers to approve $500 million in funding to train and arm Syrian rebels who would fight ISIS. But the legislation has been languishing on Capitol Hill.
But the purpose of the gathering seemed more for Mr. Obama to give his guests, several of whom are fixtures on television talk shows and op-ed pages, a preview of the plan for confronting the threat from the Sunni militant group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a plan he has promised to reveal on Wednesday. Mr. Obama’s speech to the nation, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is the culmination of weeks of anguished internal deliberations, followed by days of intense lobbying of allies by the president — at a NATO meeting in Wales, with Congress, and even over a three-hour dinner Monday night with members of the Democratic and Republican foreign-policy establishment.
On Tuesday afternoon, the president will meet at the White House with Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, hoping to build congressional support for what administration officials warn could be a prolonged military campaign against ISIS. The White House has been galvanized by the beheadings of two Americans, James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff, both journalists, by a masked ISIS fighter. The harrowing images, captured on video and circulated around the world, have turned American public opinion in favor of military action against the militants, recent polls show, and appear to have moved a president who had long resisted military engagement in Syria
The White House has said little about the details of Mr. Obama’s speech, which officials said was still being written Monday. But the carefully orchestrated buildup underscored the stakes for a president who was harshly criticized for confessing two weeks ago that he did not have a strategy for dealing with the militants in Syria. But Mr. Obama is encountering complications as he works to assemble support at home and a coalition abroad. The Turkish government, for example, has been fearful of an aggressive retaliation against ISIS because of concerns that the group would harm the 49 Turkish citizens it is holding, including its consul general, after ISIS raided the Turkish consulate in the Iraqi city of Mosul.
The guest list, which included national security advisers to three former presidents from both parties, represented a full range of views about the risks of returning to Iraq. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel met with Turkish leaders to discuss their contribution to the effort, but emerged with no concrete commitments. A Turkish official expressed concerns that weapons sent to Syrian rebels to fight ISIS could end up in the hands of Kurdish fighters whom Turkey regards as a terrorist group.
Two of the guests — Stephen J. Hadley and Richard N. Haass — worked for the George W. Bush administration and have direct experience with the Iraq war and its chaotic aftermath. Mr. Hadley was national security adviser to Mr. Bush in 2007, when his administration undertook the troop surge in Iraq. Mr. Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department during preparations for the war in 2003. The White House is dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to Saudi Arabia this week to enlist the Saudis, who have been a vital source of funding to groups opposing the Assad government. The Saudis, while supportive of the United States, worry that going to war with ISIS could provoke a backlash among Sunni extremists in its own population.
Now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Haass recently criticized what he views as Mr. Obama’s overstretched foreign policy. “There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy,” he said. “The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago.” At the dinner on Monday, several participants said, Mr. Obama expressed confidence that, over time, a robust coalition would coalesce against ISIS. They said he presented a comprehensive plan that included military, diplomatic and ideological components, based on trying to counter the story line that ISIS has propagated in the Arab world.
Two of the other guests, Samuel R. Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised Democratic presidents during foreign crises: Mr. Berger, while Bill Clinton was weighing airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo; Mr. Brzezinski, while Jimmy Carter was dealing with the Iran hostage crisis. “The big picture is that this is going to be a very long-term proposition, that American leadership is necessary, and that this can’t turn into a U.S. vs. Sunni battle,” said one of the guests, Samuel R. Berger, who served as national security adviser to President Bill Clinton. “It has to be us helping the Sunnis battle the Sunni extremists.”
Mr. Obama also invited three veterans of his administration who were involved in counterterrorism policy: Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser; Michele Flournoy, the former No. 2 official at the Pentagon; and Michael J. Morell, a former deputy C.I.A. director. Another participant, Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state who is the president of the Brookings Institution, said, “He regards ISIS as a new phenomenon that requires not thinking about it as ‘some of them here, some of them there,’ but ‘wherever it is, to go after it.’ ”
Rounding out the table were Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution, who served in Mr. Clinton’s State Department, and Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman from California who now runs the Woodrow Wilson Center. Ms. Harman criticized Mr. Obama last week for not making a public statement immediately after the beheading of the second American journalist, Steven J. Sotloff, by an ISIS militant. “I think it’s time for him to say more and do more,” she said on CNN. Jane Harman, the president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, said she and other participants told Mr. Obama that he could order military action in Syria without fear of helping Mr. Assad, since ISIS was occupying ungoverned territory that the Assad government was unlikely to reconquer, even if airstrikes drove out the militants.
But Ms. Harman, a former Democratic representative from California, said she made a fervent case that Mr. Obama should obtain congressional authorization for any action. Her call was not picked up many of the Democrats currently serving in Congress.
The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, told reporters that public attitudes toward military action were far different than a year ago, when Mr. Obama faced deep opposition in Congress to missile strikes against the Assad government for its use of chemical weapons.
But asked about authorization, she said, “Where the president is now, we feel pretty good about his authorities.”
Ms. Pelosi suggested that the only vote Congress was likely to take before the Nov. 4 elections would be to fund the military campaign, but Republican leaders are not even promising that.
A stopgap spending bill expected to come to a vote in the House on Thursday will include spending for overseas military operations from Oct. 1 into December, but the money will be embedded in the broader bill to keep the government open. And so-called overseas contingency operations will be funded at the same level as spending for such efforts in the current fiscal year, House Republican aides said.
“As a practical matter, I don’t really see the time that it would take to really get this out and have a full debate and discuss all these issues,” Representative Howard “Buck” McKeon, Republican of California and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said he favored congressional approval of military action. But, he added, it is up to the president to present Congress a clear plan to defeat ISIS before any authorization vote should be taken.
A spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner said he would support the deployment of American military forces “to help train and play an advisory role for the Iraqi security forces and assist with lethal targeting” of ISIS leaders. But he made no mention of a House vote.
On Wednesday, before the speech, the White House will send a delegation to meet with senators in a classified briefing. Among those going to the Capitol will be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey; the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Matthew Olsen; and the deputy national security adviser, Antony J. Blinken.
The brewing confrontation is already proving to be a dividing line between the interventionist wing of the Republican Party and a resurgent isolationism. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a brief, closed-door speech to House Republicans on Tuesday morning, implored his party to back more military spending and confront ISIS.
“He discussed at length the risk of establishing a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma.