Apart from an occasional Thursday afternoon meeting between Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the White House, Gen. Martin Dempsey—the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—rarely has opportunities to get face time with the president. So when he does, he presses his advantage. One of the few times this happened was during the early evening hours of Aug. 6, when Dempsey joined Obama in his limousine at the State Department, where the president had been attending a session of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. The ride to the White House allowed Dempsey his first one-on-one with Obama in several weeks. As the two sat across from each other in the presidential limousine, Dempsey turned to his commander-in-chief.

“We have a crisis in Iraq, Mr. President,” Dempsey said, according to a senior Pentagon official who spoke with the chairman about his discussion with Obama that same day. “ISIS is a real threat,” he added, using an alternative acronym for the military group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL. The senior Pentagon official with whom I spoke, and who paraphrased the Obama-Dempsey exchange, added that “Dempsey really leaned into him” on the crisis, saying it demanded “immediate attention.”


By that point, ISIL had overrun Mosul, a city of one million people in northern Iraq, seized stockpiles of heavy weapons from the hapless Iraqi military and was attacking thousands of ethnic Yazidis who had fled the conflict. According to the senior Pentagon official, the president listened carefully as Dempsey outlined the militants’ rapid military gains in western Iraq and warned that ISIL fighters were threatening Baghdad. “It’s that bad?” Obama asked, according to this person’s account. Dempsey was blunt. “Yes, sir,” he said, “it is.” (The White House, asked to characterize the president's reaction, declined to comment.)

Obama surely wasn’t surprised by what Dempsey said, though it was a stark message to hear from his normally phlegmatic Joint Chiefs chairman. After Dempsey’s intervention, Obama convened a meeting of his top foreign-policy team that evening that included Dempsey, national security adviser Susan Rice, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and others, then conducted two lengthy discussions on the crisis the next day, Aug. 7. That same night, a Thursday, he appeared on national television to announce that he had authorized U.S. airstrikes on ISIL positions.

While Obama’s actions reflected the quick and decisive action of a president faced with an immediate threat, reports of ISIL’s gains had been circulating in administration circles for weeks. And while the president told the American people on Aug. 7 that he would “not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” he now found himself drawn back into a conflict that he desperately wanted to avoid.

As far back as late June, in fact, the danger of the burgeoning crisis had been made clear in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry from three Sunni leaders in Anbar province that outlined the ISIL threat and asked for help, according to an Iraqi official who provided me with a copy of the correspondence.

Kerry received the letter after his June 24 visit to Irbil, where he met with Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. Barzani sketched a vivid portrait of what his peshmerga forces, fighting ISIL just miles from where he and Kerry were meeting, were facing. Irbil was in danger of being overrun, Barzani told Kerry, unless his militia received modern American weapons. At one point, according to an Iraqi official who spoke to Barzani about the meeting, the Kurdish leader grew angry, telling Kerry that the United States had “failed to meet its commitments” to arm the Kurds—with the result that the weapons ISIL were using, including American weapons captured from Iraqi stores, were much more lethal than what his troops employed. The vaunted peshmerga, he told Kerry, were in danger of being overwhelmed

The letter that Kerry subsequently received from Iraq’s Sunni leaders began by thanking the secretary for his visit to Irbil and his “tireless efforts to help resolve” the Iraq crisis. It went on to request U.S. help in rolling back the ISIL threat: “We ask your help [and] American counsel to advise us on the best course of action to prevent ISIL from extending their evil dominion from Syria into Iraq.” The letter concluded by requesting that the United States appoint a military adviser to oversee the efforts. “We believe that the best person to advice [sic] Iraq on the security side of the crisis is General John Allen, who has the best reputation among the people of Anbar and beyond. As you know he worked hand-in-hand with us during his service in Anbar to defeat the extremists and defended our people from their crimes.”

The letter was dated June 30 and signed by Sabah Abdul Khroat (chairman of the board of Anbar province), Ahmed Abu Risha (a powerful Sunni sheikh in Anbar province) and Ahmed Khalaf al-Dulaimi (the governor of Anbar Province). The three are the most important leaders of Iraq’s Sunni community, known in Washington for their role in the 2006 and 2007 Anbar Awakening—and as adamant opponents of Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

According to an Anbar leader who oversaw the drafting of the request, the letter was “the result of a lot of debate and consultation.” The three men, along with a wider group of supporters opposed to Maliki, had also developed an extensive proposal that included a list of grievances against Maliki and a political program for addressing them. The five-page paper, which was forwarded to me by this same Anbar leader, accused Maliki of launching an “authoritarian/sectarian revenge campaign” against Iraq’s Sunni community. At the heart of the proposal was a demand that the United States abandon its support for Maliki and support the establishment of a Sunni “National Guard” with “an enduring command structure” that could not be undermined from Baghdad. But the appointment of a U.S. adviser to oversee the effort was key.

According to this official, “there were three names that they [the Iraqis] came up with who they thought could serve as good advisers—Ryan Crocker, David Petraeus and Allen. These were three people they could trust. But they narrowed it down to Allen.”

But while Kerry’s June 24 trip to Irbil, the June 30 letter from Anbar’s leaders and Dempsey’s August 6 warning provided solid evidence of just how quickly Iraq was unraveling, a former high-level Iraqi official close to Barzani said the Kurdish leader wasn’t satisfied that the message was getting through. So, just six days after Dempsey told Obama “we have a crisis in Iraq,” Barzani arranged a private videoconference briefing for members of the Aspen Strategy Group, the prestigious foreign policy forum compose of current and former government policymakers, academics and journalists.

The Aug. 11 presentation featured Barzani lecturing a select group of former policymakers from the Bush administration and senior policymakers from the Obama administration in a session moderated by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.

“Barzani went through them one by one, and named names,” a former senior U.S. official who served in the Bush administration said of the Kurdish leader’s Aspen monologue. “He pointed to each one of the officials, from [former national security adviser Stephen] Hadley to [former Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright and ticked off what they had promised the Kurds and what was actually delivered. You could tell they were embarrassed. It was pretty grim.” After the talk, this observer said, a number of participants shared Barzani’s message with the White House.

The next day, Ignatius wrote about the Barzani call in his Washington Post column . Under the headline “How Obama can show he is serious about helping Iraq,” Ignatius quoted Barzani as telling the group: “This is the last chance for Iraq.” Barzani then added, according to Ignatius, that while the Kurds need military support, “we will never ask you to put boots on the ground.” Ignatius also noted the need for a new and more “inclusive” Iraqi government and floated the idea of creating a Sunni National Guard. He concluded: “If Obama wants to send a signal that he’s serious about helping a new Iraqi government, he should consider sending retired Gen. David Petraeus and former ambassador Ryan Crocker—the two Americans who probably know Iraq best—to Baghdad as his special envoys.”

That Obama needed to do something quickly became apparent when, starting in early August, reports emerged that upwards of 15,000 Yazidis (a Kurdish ethnic group) had fled from ISIL units that had overrun Sinjar, a town in northern Iraq. The Yazidi crisis was tracked closely by both the Pentagon’s crisis management group at the National Joint Military Intelligence Center and the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center. Intelligence officers at the U.S. Central Command, both at its headquarters in Tampa and at Al Udeid Air Base, CENTCOM’s forward headquarters in Qatar, were also monitoring the situation closely.

The crisis spurred Obama to order U.S. airstrikes against ISIL positions besieging Yazidi refugees near Mount Sinjar and provide them with relief through U.S. humanitarian airdrops. But five days after an assessment team of 18 U.S. marines and Special Forces soldiers said that crisis was at an end, ISIL released a video showing the beheading of American James Foley. The beheading sparked public outrage and gave new urgency to Barzani’s July message.

By the end of August, according to a senior Pentagon official, the president had decided to escalate the U.S. response to the ISIL threat. Over the next few weeks, the final pieces of the administration’s policy fell into place, which included maneuvering to replace Maliki as prime minister with Haidar al-Abadi, a supposedly more moderate Shiite politician, and teeing up Allen’s appointment.

The Sunni leaders’ choice of Allen had been politically astute: According to a retired Pentagon official familiar with the administration’s decision-making process, Crocker, who served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009, was thought to be in poor health and Petraeus, who resigned as Obama’s CIA director after news of his affair with his biographer surfaced, likely did not have the president’s confidence. There was more: “Crocker is more of a diplomat than a military man, and they needed a military man,” the senior Pentagon official told me after Allen’s appointment, “and Petraeus was seen as politically tone deaf, [someone] who’d spent his time as CIA director sidling up to the neocons. Allen was really a perfect choice. He’s respected by Obama and viewed as a team player.”

As this official went on to explain, Allen gained Obama’s confidence after turning down an appointment as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, announcing that he would retire instead. Allen had also been tangled up in the Petraeus affair—investigated for purported “inappropriate communications” with Tampa socialite Jill Kelley—and he had been bruised by the allegations. He pleaded, too, that his wife’s poor health required that he turn down the job. In fact, as White House officials close to Obama saw it, Allen didn’t want to tar the administration with the allegations he was facing over the Kelley incident. “From that moment on, the Obama people loved him,” this former Pentagon official says, “because they looked on him as a guy who ‘took one for the team.’ And if there’s anything the president prizes above all else, it’s loyalty.”

Obama announced his plans for Iraq and Syria in a television address on Sept. 10, vowing to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.” He formally named Allen as a special envoy to oversee the effort the next day. By mid-September, Obama had sent some 1,600 troops back to Iraq, despite his pledge to put no “boots on ground.”

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Finally, Barzani and Iraq’s top Sunni leaders were getting some of what they asked for. General Allen was coming. More troops and air support were on the way. The United States was getting serious about ISIL and weapons to counter the threat were finally in the pipeline.

But what had taken so long?

In an interview with “60 Minutes” on Sept. 28, Obama stated that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.” Obama went on to explain that after the U.S. military crushed al Qaeda in Iraq, the group “went back underground” but “were able to reconstitute themselves”—reemerging as ISIL in western Iraq. It was a startling admission—and confirmation of a significant failure for U.S. intelligence.

Obama’s statement was puzzling to many of those who worked with Anbar’s tribes in 2006 and 2007, during the Anbar Awakening. “There’s a difference between not knowing and not paying attention,” James Clad, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs in the Bush years, told me. “The simple truth may be too hard to admit: The U.S. was wedded to Nouri al-Maliki and he gulled us. He kept telling us that everything would be fine—and we believed him. We wanted him to succeed so bad that when there were problems, we just looked the other way.”

“You know, a lot of people in this country believe that for every Iraqi or Syrian or whoever, there’s a little American desperately trying to get out,” retired Col. David E. Johnson, who has written extensively on the U.S. military’s engagement in Iraq, says. “That all that needs to be done is to write a constitution and have a vote, and ‘presto’— the problem is solved. Well, it’s not true. These hatreds are very deep, they go back a long ways, and they’re not going to be solved just because we want them solved.” Johnson, who is currently a senior political scientist at Rand Corporation, adds that U.S. policymakers underestimated the impact of Sunni oppression of Iraq’s Shia population under Saddam Hussein—particularly during the Shia uprising that followed Operation Desert Storm. “This was a real bloodletting,” he notes, “and we’re deluding ourselves if we think that the Shia aren’t going to exact a price for that now.”

A former career intelligence officer agrees with both assessments, but says that even if Obama bet too heavily on Maliki, or simply underestimated the ISIL threat, the failure in Iraq is a failure of the U.S. intelligence agencies. The crisis in Iraq, he points out, had begun in early December of last year, when Maliki declared martial law in Ramadi, Anbar’s capital. Within days, ISIL had overrun both Ramadi and Fallujah, a city of 300,000 mostly Sunni Iraqis just 35 miles from Baghdad. That was six months before John Kerry visited Irbil, seven months before Massoud Barzani spoke to the Aspen Group and eight months before General Dempsey issued his warning to the president.

“The bottom line is that we’ve spent billions of dollars so that we wouldn’t be surprised and we were,” this former intelligence officer says. “The president and secretary of state were poorly served by their own bureaucracies. When you need to be told that there’s a problem in Iraq by an Iraqi, there’s something wrong. The system is broken—and we need to find out why.”