The five minutes that spurred Obama to act

PRESIDENT Obama’s decision to strike Iraq, one that could redefine his legacy, grew out of a five-minute conversation last Wednesday.

US President Barack Obama delivers a statement at the White House.

PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s decision to strike Iraq, one that could redefine his legacy, grew out of a five-minute conversation last Wednesday night in the back of the President’s armoured limousine.

Joining Mr Obama on the short trip to the White House from an Africa summit at the State Department was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who detailed a dramatic turn in events in Iraq. Islamic extremists were overtaking Kurdish forces, reports from the region were saying, and slaughtering religious minorities.

Mr Obama continued the briefing in the Oval Office with others on his national security team. In that hour-long meeting, the President and his senior aides first began to discuss taking military action in Iraq, said a senior administration official who was there.

Within 24 hours, Mr Obama had ordered the first US airstrikes in Iraq since the end of the war in 2011. That put the President, who sees withdrawing US troops from Iraq as a fundamental piece of his legacy, in the position of being the fourth president in a row to take new military action there.

The President had been jarred by a number of developments he had heard from US intelligence and diplomatic officials, senior administration officials said. Women were being taken as slaves. Children were dying of thirst after escaping to a remote mountain. Mass executions were being carried out.

This past weekend, the Iraqi government made a request to the State Department for assistance in helping the minority Yazidis, who were being harried by the Islamic State, the radical Islamic group that has swept out of Syria and across Iraq.

At US Central Command in Tampa and at the Pentagon, it was increasingly clear the Islamic State wasn’t targeting religious minorities as an afterthought. Rather, that was a core mission.

In recent years, General Dempsey has developed a reputation for being reluctant to use force. A military official said General Dempsey wasn’t reluctant to use force when “it is well-planned and well-executed”.

Within the National Security Council, General Dempsey and others began arguing that a humanitarian intervention would be necessary.

On Wednesday night, the White House convened a deputies committee meeting to discuss the possibilities of a humanitarian airdrop, but no decisions were made. The discussion within the Pentagon and the White House, officials said, increasingly evoked the lessons of Rwanda’s mass killings. “Rwanda and other times when we did not act loomed large in the minds of leaders,” an official said. One voice pushing for an intervention was UN ambassador Samantha Power, who rose to fame through her writing on Rwanda.

Mr Obama was particularly sobered on Thursday when one of his national security advisers used the word “genocide” to describe the scenes playing out in Iraq.

No one on Mr Obama’s national security team had used the word “genocide” in the Situation Room before, a senior administration official who was in the meeting said. Aides said it became clear to the President this situation was unlike any other he had confronted. “This was qualitatively different from even the awful things that we’ve confronted in different parts of the region because of the targeted nature of it, the scale of it, the fact that this is a whole people,” the official said.

At the same time, the military also was growing increasingly worried about the capabilities of Kurdish military forces in the same areas. On Wednesday, they fell back from the Mosul Dam, ceding a critical piece of infrastructure to the Islamic State and seeding doubts at the Pentagon about the ability of the Kurdish regional government to defend itself. By Thursday, the discussion had shifted from primarily a humanitarian mission to the need for a military intervention on behalf of the Kurds.

Mr Obama gave his advisers orders to come up with military options to present at an afternoon meeting, leaving them with the clear impression he had decided to authorise airstrikes, before leaving for a bill-signing. When he returned, he convened another meeting in the Situation Room. This time he was joined remotely by Secretary of State John Kerry and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel. He discussed for two hours the objectives of the mission, and also its limits, aides said.

US officials were focused on the legal authorities behind airstrikes. Officials said the operations needed to be framed as part of a mission to defend US military personnel and diplomats in Erbil. That would give the President clear ability to act without an authorisation from congress.

The humanitarian crisis would give the administration even wider latitude, officials said.

What began as planning for a military aid drop was now two missions: to save the Yazidis and offer a defence of Erbil and save the Kurds.

The Wall Street Journal