President Barack Obama speaks on the phone to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah from his desk at the White HouseCharles Dharapak
In a speech to war-weary Americans, President Barack Obama will lay out his case Wednesday for a new war in Iraq, an open-ended fight against terrorists that could include bombing Islamic State targets in war-ravaged Syria.
Mr. Obama, who captured the White House six years ago on a promise to end the "stupid" war in Iraq launched by his predecessor George W. Bush and who has studiously avoided the phrase "war on terrorism," will outline his reasons for sending U.S. soldiers and warplanes back to Iraq and perhaps to Syria.
In place of Saddam Hussein and the never-found weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Obama must recast the conflict as one against a new evil – the rising terror of the Islamic State – that is not just a vile and brutal group given to the ritual beheadings of innocent Americans but, he will argue, one that poses a threat to U.S. national security.
"We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities; we're going to shrink the territory that they control; and, ultimately, we're going to defeat them," Mr. Obama said in a weekend curtain-raiser to the nationwide address.
Mr. Obama told leaders of Congress on Tuesday that he did not need for them to authorize his strategy to fight the Islamic State.
The President met Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and Republican counterparts Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, to discuss the next phase of his campaign against the militants.
"The President told the leaders that he has the authority he needs to take action against ISIL in accordance with the mission he will lay out in his address [Wednesday] night," the White House said in a statement, using an acronym for Islamic State.
The new war Mr. Obama will announce in his address to the nation seems certain to outlast his presidency and may define it.
"It may take a year, it may take two years, it may take three years," admits John Kerry, the President's secretary of state. "But we're determined it has to happen."
Making it happen also means taking the war beyond Iraq and striking at the Islamic State's heartland in Syria.
It will mean war against a common enemy that will put Mr. Obama on the same side as Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. Already Iranian Quds forces are in Syria and Iraq fighting the Islamic State and other Sunni extremists and helping prop up the Assad regime.
Mr. Obama, at a dinner Monday, reportedly said he wants to strike the Islamic State without regard to location, a significant shift from the Iraq bombings which have been requested by Baghdad.
"This is not an organization that respects international boundaries, said Michèle Flournoy, who heads the Center for a New American Security, a left-leaning Washington think tank, and was at the presidential dinner.
"You cannot leave them with a safe haven. … I expect him to be very candid," she told the Washington Post.
It's likely a war against the Islamic State cannot be won without boots – tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands – on the ground. The grim lessons of an air-only war, like the one in Libya which is now riven by civil war, make clear that bombing isn't enough.
But the President has ruled out sending significant numbers of U.S. ground combat forces back to Iraq, meaning he needs local allies. They would include moderate rebels in Syria, Kurdish peshmerga militiamen in both Syria and Iraq, and, although it's a long shot, a refashioned multi-ethnic Iraqi army controlled by an inclusive new government in Baghdad.
It's unclear whether the Kurds and Shia militias, both so far the territorial beneficiaries of U.S. air strikes, can spearhead the creation of an inclusive state that would attract Iraq's largely disenfranchised Sunnis.
To date, more than 1,000 U.S. troops – Special Forces called advisers – are on the ground in Iraq. U.S. warplanes and pilot-less Reaper drones have launched more than 150 air strikes since Islamic State jihadis advanced perilously close to Baghdad, expanding their nascent caliphate from its Syrian base down both the Tigris and Euphrates valleys to create a proto-state bigger than New Brunswick.
But war against a transnational Sunni jihadi movement that controls swaths of two violence-wracked nations will make for odd and uncomfortable bedfellows.
In Iraq, Mr. Obama faces tough choices about allies of convenience and whether a unified Iraq can be maintained. In Syria, the choices are even tougher ones, over whether President al-Assad can be allowed to remain in power as long as his forces are usefully attacking Islamic State.
For defeating the Islamic State in Iraq, or even driving the black-clad warriors – whose gruesome ruthlessness has revolted much of the civilized world – back into Syria, won't suffice. No less an authority than General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirms that victory over the Islamic State means battling them beyond Iraq. "Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria? The answer is no," he said.
Internationally, Mr. Obama's bugle call has rallied nine nations – including Canada which passed on Mr. Bush's Iraq war but will send Special Forces this time. But all of them, save Turkey, are Western majority-Christian states, and the coalition seems certain to be seen, and denounced, by many disaffected Sunnis as a new Crusader alliance. Turkey, the only NATO front-line state in the group, must also tread gently. Forty-nine of its diplomats, captured by the Islamic State in Mosul, could face beheading and Ankara's government has slapped a media blackout on news about those hostages.
The Arab world, including close U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have offered nothing more than vague declarations of support.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama must weigh whether to seek congressional approval for this new war.
A year ago, he said that "having made my decision as commander-in-chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I'm also mindful that I'm the president of the world's oldest constitutional democracy." And then he sought congressional support for air strikes on Syria to punish Mr. al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people. Congress balked, a majority of Americans told pollsters they were opposed, and the President scrapped his plans.
This time, the public, still enraged by gruesome recent beheadings of two U.S. journalists by the Islamic State, may need less convincing. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found than 90 per cent of Americans surveyed say they regard the Islamic State as a serious threat and more than two-thirds back air strikes against the jihadis both in Syria and Iraq.