One day after a new coalition of Arab allies helped President Obama launch a war in Syria that he had long avoided, he faces the far more arduous task of convincing them to sustain it.
On the world stage and under an intense spotlight, Obama will try to hold the fragile alliance of Arab and Western partners together while calling on them to commit more resources.
The president is set to make to make a major address to world leaders gathered in New York Wednesday morning for the U.N. General Assembly meeting.
Later in the afternoon, he will chair a U.N. National Security Council summit on the threat posed by Western and other foreign fighters who have joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria who could return to their home countries to carry out terrorist attacks.
It’s a pivotal moment for the Obama presidency and a robust new phase of the war on terrorism. The president’s advisers say he plans to enlist additional international support on several fronts — against the Islamic State, the outbreak of Ebola and Russian aggression in Ukraine.
“It’s a very important moment for the president to put everything that we’re doing in the context of U.S. leadership in the world,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said Tuesday.
“There are so many different issues at play in the world today — we believe the constant thread between them is U.S. leadership,” he added.
But rallying international troops against the Islamic State is an awkward role reversal for a president who eschewed the term “global war on terror” and was swept into office on promises to get the U.S. out of two wars in the Middle East.
“Because of the almost unprecedented effort of this coalition, I think we now have an opportunity to send a very clear message that the world is united,” he told reporters Tuesday. “That all of us are committed to making sure that we degrade and ultimately destroy not only [the Islamic State], but also the kind of extremist ideology that leads to so much bloodshed.”
A reporter then asked Obama if he is comfortable being viewed as a war president.
He simply smiled and said, “thank you.”
Obama made the comment after a meeting that Secretary of State Kerry conducted at the U.N., with leaders from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Kerry is at the U.N. summit and is scheduled to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi Wednesday morning to discuss efforts for the Iraqi army and Kurdish Pershmerga forces to lead a ground offensive against the Islamic State.
A senior administration official said several meetings with coalition partners at the U.N. this week will focus on coordinating efforts with each of them — some have agreed to participate in strikes, others want to focus on training and equipping Iraqi security forces and Syrian rebels, while others are providing humanitarian assistance.
“There are actually a lot of countries coming forward who want to do something,” he said.
When Kerry held an anti-Islamic State summit with regional countries in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia two weeks ago, for instance, their early level of interest surprised him.
“The questions from the countries in the region were not whether they could be involved, but how,” said another senior administration official.
Kerry also stressed that Turkey is very much part of the coalition and will be “engaged on the front lines of the effort” but has been slow to act while it negotiated with the Islamic State for the release of 40 of its citizens the group was holding hostage.
Even with a coalition of partners more than 40 countries strong, U.S. officials say defeating the Islamic State and other terrorist groups operating in Syria will be long and challenging.
“Last night’s airstrikes were only the beginning,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon’s spokesman, said Tuesday.
Lt. Gen. William Mayville, the director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Americans and allies should think of the fight in terms of years.
Administration officials also faced scrutiny about the exact level of Arab allies’ commitment.
At one point, Mayville said the U.S. would leave it up to each participating country to describe their involvement in the Syrian airstrikes so far.
He declined to say what percentage of munitions Arab allies dropped in the first day of bombing, but noted that most of their participation took place in the third wave of attacks while Qatar served only a “supporting” role.
“The preponderance of force came from U.S. platforms,” he said.
The president’s harshest critics on Tuesday offered tepid praise for his ability to build a coalition of Middle Eastern countries willing to take on the Islamic State in their own backyard, but they said the president still has some serious questions to address.
Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham repeated their argument that defeating the Islamic State would require the U.S. and its partners to provide a “limited presence” of troops on the ground not to invade and occupy Syria or Iraq but to “advise local forces, direct air strikes, gather intelligence, and conduct Special Forces operations.”
They also said the administration must resolve a policy contradiction: the choice to deal with the Islamic State first and defer the challenge posed by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his regime.
“Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury,” they argued.
The administration, they said, “must recognize that it is neither effective nor moral to train and equip thousands of Syrians to fight the Islamic State, but make no commitment to defend them from Assad’s continued air strikes and barrel bombs.”
