http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/president-obama-war-iraq-112730.html?ml=tbThe war over President Obama’s new war in Iraq
The key question: Who's in charge?
By Michael Crowley
11/9/14 9:58 PM EST
Updated 11/10/14 3:56 AM EST
One Friday in late August, President Obama’s national security team met at the White House to discuss their response to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. A few days earlier the group had posted horrific video of the beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, and calls for a severe response were growing fast. The United States was already conducting limited air strikes in Iraq to try to halt the group’s alarming spread across the country, but Obama’s advisers now were recommending more controversial strikes across the border in Syria.
Yet Obama, who had fended off calls for military action in the region for more than two years at such meetings despite pleas from his advisers, was still frustrated with his options. While he grasped the urgency of the ISIL threat, Obama said, he still wasn’t convinced he had a coherent plan to justify action in Syria. “We don’t have a strategy yet,” he had said a day earlier, drawing chortles from his critics. “We need to make sure that we’ve got clear plans.” In private, he reiterated that view to his national security team.
After the meeting, Secretary of State John Kerry called together his top aides and asked them to work through the weekend to produce a memo that would answer Obama’s question. The document — which spelled out a comprehensive strategy that included military, diplomatic, humanitarian and communication efforts — argued that Syria and Iraq could not be treated as two separate theaters, and helped to sell the reluctant president on strikes in Syria, which began two weeks later. Obama called the war he’d been so wary of starting a “relentless effort” to help ensure that “those who offer only hate and destruction [are] vanquished from the Earth.”
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