Paths to War, Then and Now, Haunt Obama
WASHINGTON — Just hours before announcing an escalated campaign against Islamic extremists last week, President Obama
privately reflected on another time when a president weighed military
action in the Middle East — the frenzied weeks leading up to the
American invasion of Iraq a decade ago.
“I was not here in the run-up to Iraq in 2003,” he told a group of visitors who met with him in the White House before his televised speech to the nation, according to several people who were in the meeting. “It would have been fascinating to see the momentum and how it builds.”
In
his own way, Mr. Obama said, he had seen something similar, a virtual
fever rising in Washington, pressuring him to send the armed forces
after the Sunni radicals who had swept through Iraq and beheaded
American journalists. He had told his staff, he said, not to evaluate
their own policy based on external momentum. He would not rush to war.
He would be deliberate.
“But I’m aware I pay a political price for that,” he said.
His
introspection that afternoon reflected Mr. Obama’s journey from the
candidate who wanted to wind down America’s overseas wars to the
commander in chief who just resumed and expanded one. For Mr. Obama,
that spring of 2003, when President George W. Bush sent troops to topple Saddam Hussein, has framed his own presidency. He has spent nearly six years trying to avoid repeating it.
In forming a plan to destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
using airpower and local forces, but not regular American ground
troops, he searched for ways to avoid the mistakes of the past. He felt
“haunted,” he told his visitors, by the failure of a Special Forces raid
to rescue the American hostages James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff
— “we just missed them,” he said — but their subsequent murders were
not the real reason he opted for war, although he noted that gruesome
videos released by ISIS had helped galvanize public support for action.
He
was acutely aware that the operation he was about to embark on would
not solve the larger issues in that region by the time he left office.
“This will be a problem for the next president,” Mr. Obama said
ruefully, “and probably the one after that.” But he alternated between
resolve as he vowed to retaliate against President Bashar al-Assad if
Syrian forces shot at American planes, and prickliness as he mocked
critics of his more reticent approach to the exercise of American power.
“Oh,
it’s a shame when you have a wan, diffident, professorial president
with no foreign policy other than ‘don’t do stupid things,’ ” guests
recalled him saying, sarcastically imitating his adversaries. “I do not
make apologies for being careful in these areas, even if it doesn’t make
for good theater.”
Mr.
Obama went on to reveal his thoughts on challenges he faces in
combating the threat from ISIS. He expressed his frustration with the
French for paying ransoms to terrorists, asserted that Americans are
kidnapped at lower rates because the United States does not, resisted
the idea of Kurdistan’s breaking away from Iraq and even speculated on
what he would have advised ISIS to do to keep America out of the war in
the region.
This
account of Mr. Obama’s thinking as he arrived at a pivotal point in his
presidency is based on interviews with 10 people who spoke with him in
the days leading up to his speech Wednesday night. In quoting his
private remarks, the people were recalling what he said from their best
memories.
The
president invited a group of foreign policy experts and former
government officials to dinner on Monday, and a separate group of
columnists and magazine writers for a discussion on Wednesday afternoon.
Although three New York Times columnists and an editorial writer were
among those invited to the second session, this account is drawn from
people unaffiliated with The Times, some of whom insisted on anonymity
because they were not supposed to share details of the conversations.
The
president they described was calm and confident, well versed on the
complexities of the ISIS challenge and in no evident rush to end the
discussions. A briefing book sat in front of him during the second of
the sessions, but he never opened it. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
and Secretary of State John Kerry joined him for the dinner, and Denis
McDonough, the White House chief of staff, and Susan Rice, the national
security adviser, sat in on the meeting with the journalists, but none
of them said very much.
Mr.
Obama was relaxed enough, as he discussed the array of foreign policy
crises facing him, that at one point he ridiculed President Vladimir V.
Putin’s rationale for intervening in Ukraine to protect Russian speakers
by saying the United States should intervene in Mexico to protect
enclaves of Americans. When a writer jokingly asked if he was announcing
plans to invade Mexico, he laughed and said no, Canada, because it has
more oil.
The
guests came away with different impressions; some said they thought he
still seemed ambivalent about the course he was taking in Iraq and
Syria, while others said he appeared at peace.
“It’s
fair to say when the president imagined where he’d be in this sixth
year, I doubt he expected to be here,” said Richard N. Haass, president
of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Bush administration
official who was among the guests at the dinner Monday. “But he’s been
forced to react to events here.”
Jane
Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman from California who now heads
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said she thought
Mr. Obama had evolved. “He was all in,” she said. “I don’t know what the
definition of reluctant is, but I certainly think he’s totally focused,
this man at this time.”
If
his thinking has evolved, Mr. Obama admitted no errors along the way.
While some critics, and even his former secretary of state, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, have faulted him for not arming moderate Syrian rebels
years ago, Mr. Obama does not accept the premise that doing so would
have forestalled the rise of ISIS.
“I
have thought that through and tried to apply 20-20 hindsight,” he told
some of his guests, as one recalled. “I’m perfectly willing to admit
they were right, but even if they were right, I still can’t see how that
would have changed the situation.”
He
defended his decision to wait to approve airstrikes until last month in
Iraq and last week in Syria, saying he wanted first to force Iraq to
replace its government with a more inclusive coalition that could draw
disaffected Sunnis away from supporting ISIS and take on the task of
combating it.
But
while Mr. Obama sees bolstering the new Iraqi government as his path to
ultimate success on that side of the border, he struck his guests as
less certain about the endgame on the Syrian side, where he has called
for Mr. Assad to step down and must now rely on the same moderate Syrian
rebels he refused to arm in the past.
Mr.
Obama acknowledged it would be a long campaign, one complicated by a
dearth of intelligence about possible targets on the Syrian side of the
border and one that may not be immediately satisfying. “This isn’t going
to be fireworks over Baghdad,” he said.
Asked
by one of the columnists what he would do if his strategy did not work
and he had to escalate further, Mr. Obama rejected the premise. “I’m not
going to anticipate failure at this point,” he said.
He
made clear the intricacy of the situation, though, as he contemplated
the possibility that Mr. Assad might order his forces to fire at
American planes entering Syrian airspace. If he dared to do that, Mr.
Obama said he would order American forces to wipe out Syria’s air
defense system, which he noted would be easier than striking ISIS
because its locations are better known. He went on to say that such an
action by Mr. Assad would lead to his overthrow, according to one
account.
Mr.
Obama dwelled on the killings of the two American journalists, Mr.
Foley and Mr. Sotloff, telling guests that he had authorized the
Pentagon to develop a rescue attempt this summer on the same day the
matter was brought to him. It was conducted within days and executed
flawlessly, he said. He noted that the United States does not pay ransom
to terrorists, but remarked with irritation that President François
Hollande of France says his country does not, when in fact it does.
Mr.
Obama had what guests on Wednesday afternoon described as a bereft look
as he discussed the murders of Mr. Foley and Mr. Sotloff, particularly
because two other Americans are still being held. Days later, ISIS would
report beheading a British hostage with another video posted online
Saturday.
But
the president said he had already been headed toward a military
response before the men’s deaths. He added that ISIS had made a major
strategic error by killing them because the anger it generated resulted
in the American public’s quickly backing military action.
If
he had been “an adviser to ISIS,” Mr. Obama added, he would not have
killed the hostages but released them and pinned notes on their chests
saying, “Stay out of here; this is none of your business.” Such a move,
he speculated, might have undercut support for military intervention.
It
was clear to the guests how aware Mr. Obama was of the critics who have
charged him with demonstrating a lack of leadership. He brought up the
criticism more than once with an edge of resentment in his voice.
“He’s
definitely feeling it,” said one guest. At one point, Mr. Obama noted
acidly that President Ronald Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon only to have
hundreds of them killed in a terrorist attack because of terrible
planning, and then withdrew the remaining ones, leaving behind a civil
war that lasted years. But Reagan, he noted, is hailed as a titan
striding the earth.
“He’s
not a softy,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to
President Jimmy Carter and attended the dinner Monday, said of Mr.
Obama. “I think part of the problem with some of his critics is they
think he’s a softy. He’s not a softy. But he’s a person who tries to
think through these events so you can draw some long-term conclusions.”
Mr.
Haass said attention to nuance was a double-edged attribute. “This is
someone who, more than most in the political world, is comfortable in
the gray rather than the black and white,” he said. “So many other
people in the political world do operate in the black and white and are
more quote-unquote decisive, and that’s a mixed blessing. He clearly
falls on the side of those who are slow or reluctant to decide because
deciding often forces you into a more one-sided position than you’re
comfortable with.”
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