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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But two months later, Obama is once again seeking strategic clarity amid mixed results on the ground and a rising call of complaints that he launched the war without fully committing to doing what was necessary to win it. Even as Obama dispatched another 1,500 troops to Iraq Friday, nearly doubling the existing force — and with a new senior general headed to the country soon, according to a Defense Department source — coalition allies and his own secretary of defense are warning that his war plan needs a rethink.

That problem has been compounded — according to interviews in recent days with more than a dozen current and former administration officials, experts and diplomats — by a lack of senior officials with deep expertise in Iraq and Syria and by a policymaking process hounded by rivalries and unclear leadership. Kerry’s State Department has clashed with the Pentagon, Congress is complaining about not being consulted – and officials say there’s no clear very senior owner of the war in the White House since the president finally made the call to embark on it.

“No one’s in charge of the policy. That’s a really big problem,” said one former U.S. government official with detailed knowledge of the ISIL fight.

In Obama’s first term, that person was Vice President Joe Biden: “Joe, you do Iraq,” Obama told Biden in mid-2009. But Biden’s role has receded since the December 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops. As a result, when ISIL rampaged through Iraq earlier this year, U.S. policy toward the country it occupied at the cost of so much blood and treasure just a decade ago was managed by a mid-level State Department official — former George W. Bush aide Brett McGurk, who had been called back into service by a shorthanded administration desperate for his detailed knowledge of Iraq’s political dynamics.

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The September appointment of retired Marine General John Allen as a special State Department envoy to manage the anti-ISIL coalition added gravitas and experience, and in the seven weeks since McGurk and Allen have traveled to 13 foreign capitals seeking allies and troop commitments to aid the American effort, with the pair becoming the unlikely public face of a war that no one else seems to own.

Allen’s naming added a new player with influence but not true authority and rankled turf-conscious Defense Department officials who didn’t hide their annoyance that a senior general had joined the effort outside the military chain of command. Several people interviewed described a slow-moving process involving endless meetings and deliberation without action, along with basic uncertainty about who in the administration is really in charge.

Asked about this, a top administration official argued that any complex policy – never mind one that involves a multi-front war in two countries – includes many voices. “As with any issue you’ll find multiple people who do multiple aspects,” the official said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find one who runs China.”

Regardless of who’s running it, few dispute that Obama’s war against ISIL is off to a frustratingly slow start. After hundreds of U.S. airstrikes, the militant group still holds vast swaths of territory in both civil war-torn Syria and Iraq, including Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul. Dozens of American strikes have failed to rescue the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane along the Turkish border; a planned program to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight ISIL has yet to commence; and members of Congress from both parties, along with foreign allies, complain that the campaign appears half-hearted and more about containing ISIL than truly destroying it, as the president has vowed.

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After weeks of such complaints, Obama’s Friday announcement of the 1,500 additional troops to Iraq seemed to implicitly acknowledge the criticism and a weekend airstrike appears to have hit senior ISIL figures, possibly even the group’s self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (A Pentagon official could not confirm those reports on Sunday.) But some military planners continue to insist that defeating ISIL will eventually require placing thousands of American troops near the battlefront, in the form of Special Forces and forward air controllers who can designate highly accurate air strike targets.

“There are obviously differing views on the policy,” a former senior U.S. commander said in an interview. “Should there or not be joint tactical air controllers on the ground? Should there be special forces liaisons or forward adviser teams?”

“No one’s in charge of the policy. That’s a really big problem,” said one former U.S. government official with detailed knowledge of the ISIL fight.

As for Syria, Obama has called for the departure of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, but he has not made Assad a target of the military campaign, insisting the fight for now is limited to taking out ISIL — despite the pleas of America’s Sunni allies in the region and moderate Syrian rebels who are being enlisted as ground forces in the anti-ISIL fight. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently sent Obama his own memo asking what one Defense Department official calls “hard questions about the degree to which our strategy needs to change.” In particular, Hagel urged more clarity on U.S. policy toward Assad. This followed remarks by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey publicly differing with the White House on whether U.S. ground troops might eventually be needed to defeat ISIL.

As Obama grasps for a winning policy, he is hamstrung by an expertise deficit on the two countries it now finds itself bombing. After U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, the Obama team failed to maintain a deep roster of officials fluent in the country’s complex sectarian and tribal relationships. In the past two years, meanwhile, Obama’s two top Syria hands — Ambassador Robert Ford and State Department adviser Fred Hof — departed in frustration over what they have described as a hapless U.S. policy, taking their granular knowledge of the Syrian opposition with them.

President Obama meets with members of the recently formed special presidential envoy for the coalition to counter the Islamic State group and some of his advisers. | Doug Mills/The New York Times

The current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Stuart E. Jones, arrived in June from a posting in Amman, Jordan. His predecessor served less than two years in the country. The State Department’s new top Syria official, Daniel Rubenstein, arrived in March from Jerusalem. Meanwhile, there is no senior U.S. military commander in Iraq today. The air campaign is managed from Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, by Centcom chief Lloyd Austin — although that will soon change, according to a Defense Department official. The Pentagon plans to send a three-star general to Iraq soon to manage the effort from there. “We’ve reached a point of maturity where we need a command structure,” the official said.

Back in Washington, the Iraq account in the White House technically belongs to a relatively junior national security aide, Andrew Kim. Biden stepped back from his lead role months ago, before the rise of ISIL, in part because the White House wanted to begin normalizing its relationship with Baghdad. But Biden still makes regular phone calls to senior Iraqi leaders—including two in three days last month to Iraq’s new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, one of them hours before Abadi’s October 20 visit to Tehran. Biden has met with or spoken to Abadi at least seven times since the Iraqi took power in mid-August.

Biden’s former longtime aide, Antony Blinken, had remained as the White House’s unofficial Iraq guru — “the go-to guy,” as Biden told the New York Times last year. On Friday, however, Obama nominated Blinken, who is now deputy national security adviser, to fill the number-two post at the State Department, where he will have a broad portfolio.

That may only increase the Obama team’s reliance on McGurk, whose obscure title — deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran — belies his fundamental role shaping U.S. Iraq policy over the past two years.

A 41-year-old lawyer and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, McGurk had no national security experience before he left a law firm in 2004 to serve as a legal adviser to U.S. officials in Baghdad. He later joined the Bush National Security Council staff and helped orchestrate Bush’s 2007 troop surge.

McGurk was among just a few Bush officials who stayed through the transition after Obama’s election. After leaving government he was summoned back to Baghdad in 2010 by then-U.S. ambassador James Jeffrey, and again the next year to help negotiate for a status of forces agreement that would have allowed some American troops to stay in the country. The agreement failed, but McGurk has remained in the Obama administration ever since. In 2012 Obama nominated him to be ambassador to Iraq — but the nomination was withdrawn after the leak of racy emails between McGurk and a Wall Street Journal reporter, whom he later married.

Veteran Iraq hands strain to think of anyone with as much cumulative experience in the country as McGurk, including the celebrated duo who helped turn the American effort there around in Bush’s final days, General David Petraeus and veteran Ambassador Ryan Crocker. “Not me, not Petraeus, not Crocker… nobody,” said Jeffrey. “He knows more about Iraq than any other American.”

That comes with pros and cons. “Opinion is evenly divided between those who think he’s heroically labored on Iraq for ten years — and those who think he’s responsible for much of the problem,” a former U.S. official who handled Iraq policy said.

When most of Washington was happily ignoring Iraq in 2013 and early 2014, McGurk issued increasingly urgently warnings about the rise of ISIL in congressional testimony, diplomatic cables and videoconferences from Baghdad. McGurk warned that the Iraqis were not up to the task of stopping the group, but Washington was slow to listen.

Still, several internal critics argued McGurk had been too tolerant of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite whose repression of Iraqi Sunnis bred resentment that allowed ISIL to roll through Sunni areas. McGurk did believe that Maliki could only be replaced through an Iraqi political process, not by American muscle. But he was no yes man: When Maliki tried to cancel provincial elections in Sunni areas last year, McGurk flew to Baghdad and insisted they be restored. Maliki complied. And when Maliki began a violent crackdown on growing Sunni unrest in Iraq’s western Anbar province early this year, McGurk insisted that only political reform could solve the problem. “This will be your Vietnam,” he warned the Iraqi leader.

After ISIL took the Iraqi city of Mosul in June and Baghdad seemed in danger of falling to the Islamic militants, McGurk camped out in the country for seven weeks as he helped orchestrate the September political deal that pushed Maliki from power and enabled the formation of a new Iraqi government. President Obama had called that step a prerequisite for U.S. military action against ISIL.

But in September, McGurk found himself answering to a new boss: General Allen, named by Kerry to the newly created role of special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIL. McGurk is technically Allen’s deputy, although he also retains his former position.

Allen’s appointment instantly irritated some military officials — including Centom chief Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Dempsey — who wondered why the State Department was enlisting a military man for a supposedly diplomatic role, according to several sources. Allen commanded U.S. forces in Iraq’s Anbar province from 2006 to 2008 and later led U.S. forces in Afghanistan before retiring to civilian life in early 2013.

The angst was first articulated in public by former Centcom chief Anthony Zinni, who told the Tampa Tribune a days after Allen’s appointment, “John Allen is a great guy, but does it take a retired general to coordinate a coalition? … Who is really leading here?”

Zinni said publicly what military leaders were venting inside the administration. “He’s supposed to be forming the coalition but he talks all the time about military stuff and Dempsey doesn’t like it,” a former senior Obama administration official said.

Marine Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan is pictured in the left image. On the right, President Barack Obama is greeted by Allen. | Getty

The sniping grew so pointed that one senior Bush-era defense official quipped that “the Pentagon is fighting John Allen harder than it’s fighting ISIL.”

Several officials acknowledged the tensions but said they have eased after Allen’s responsibilities were clarified. “Everyone is working to resolve an extraordinarily complex security challenge. We’re a learning organization, and learning always generates some disagreement as you work through issues,” said a spokesman for Dempsey, adding: “Disagreement isn’t disloyalty. Quite the opposite in fact.”

Allen does receive constant pleas for help from the Sunni leaders of ISIL-infested Anbar province, with whom he has relationships from his years leading U.S. forces there. “Every night when General Allen finishes a long day of meetings he opens his personal email to find messages and requests from tribal leaders,” a spokesperson for Allen said. But Allen has no authority to order air strikes, and “is up at all hours connecting those requests to CENTCOM and others within the U.S. government for immediate action,” the spokesperson added. The message: Allen is not meddling in the military’s business.

Still, several officials interviewed said Allen could prove to be an important shaper of Obama’s policy. He has been joining the president’s weekly meetings on the ISIL threat, typically by video link, given his constant travel to consult with anti-ISIL coalition partners. That’s significant because Allen has been a hawk on ISIL— he called for striking the group months before Obama actually did so. Some critics hope that by providing a fresh voice in the Situation Room Allen could help Obama to move his strategy in a bolder direction.

“Allen may be a wild card,” said a congressional source who hopes Obama will re-evaluate his strategy. “It’s like Obi Wan Kenobi,” the source said, recalling a famous line from Star Wars: “You’re our only hope.”

But Obama has repeatedly vowed not to send ground troops into the fight, and, along with key aides like Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, remains wary about escalation of any kind.

Ultimately, then, it’s Obama who counts most.

“Brett McGurk is not the one deciding whether we’re going to send a couple thousand mentors out with the Iraqi army,” Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said.

“The fundamental issue here is, how willing is the president to get involved?” O’Hanlon said. “Obama is the person setting the constraints on how much we will do.”