History > 2014 > USA > President / White House (III)

President Obama Addresses the Nation on the ISIL Threat        10 September 2014

Speaking from the State Floor in the White House

on September 10, 2014,

President Obama addressed the nation on the situation in Iraq

and the United States’ strategy to degrade and defeat ISIL,

a terrorist organization.

YouTube > The White House

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvRd17vXaXM

Related > Transcript

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/obamas-remarks-on-the-fight-against-isis.html

Obama Unbound

DEC. 19, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Timothy Egan

There may not be a lightness to his step, a lilt in his voice or a bit of jauntiness returned to his manner. The office ages everyone prematurely, and makes spontaneity all but impossible. But President Obama is acting like a man who’s been given the political equivalent of a testosterone boost.

Perhaps the best thing to happen to him was the crushing blow his party took in the midterm elections. Come January, Republicans will have their largest House majority in 84 years — since Herbert Hoover was president. Granted, no politician wants to join Hoover and history in the same sentence. But Obama is not cowering or conceding. He’s been liberated by defeat, becoming the president that many of his supporters hoped he would be.

He promised to be transformative. Instead, especially in the last two years, he’s been listless, passive, a spectator to his own presidency. Rather than setting things in motion, he reacted to events. Even Ebola, the great scare that prompted so much media hysteria it was awarded Lie of the Year by PolitiFact, was somehow his fault. No more. Of late, the president who has nothing to lose has discovered that his best friend is the future.

On normalizing relations with Cuba, on a surprising climate change initiative with China, on an immigration gamble that’s working, and executive orders to protect the world’s greatest wild salmon fishery in Alaska or try to root out gender pay disparities, Obama is marching ahead of politicians fighting yesterday’s wars. In setting an aggressive agenda, he has forced opponents to defend old-century policies, and rely on an aging base to do it.

Are Republicans really going to spend the first year of their new majority trying to undo everything the president has done — to roll back the clock? Will they defend isolation of Cuba against the wishes of most young Cuban-Americans? Will they restore a family-destroying deportation policy, when Obama’s de-emphasis on sending illegal immigrants home has already given him a 15-point boost among Latinos? Will they take away health insurance from millions who never had it before? Will they insist that nothing can be done on climate change, while an agreement is on the table for the world’s two biggest polluters, the United States and China, to do something significant?

The President Obama of the last six weeks is willing to take that bet. The tediously cautious, adrift president who governed before his party was rejected in November never would have.

Of course, it helps to have the wind at his back — gusts of good news.

Remember when Mitt Romney promised to bring unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of his first term? Obama has done him one better: two years ahead of schedule, unemployment is 5.8 percent. The economy added 321,000 jobs last month and average hourly wages actually rose, on pace to make 2014 the best year for financially battered Americans in almost a decade. And if there’s a Republican somewhere who predicted that gas prices would be well below $3 a gallon in year six of the Obama presidency, bring that prescient pol forward.

Remember, also, the man-crush that Republicans had on Vladimir Putin? Ohhh, Vlad — such a leader! Forceful, militarily aggressive, a manly man. Obama the plodder was getting played by Putin the Great. Now, the Russian president better keep his shirt on, for his country is teetering, increasingly isolated, its currency in free fall. Plunging oil prices have shown just how fragile a nation dependent on oil can be.

And speaking of oil, the incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has vowed, as one of his first orders of business, to push forward Keystone XL, the proposed pipeline to move Canada’s dirty oil though the American heartland. There’s one problem: With low energy prices, the pipeline may no longer pencil out. It’s a bust, potentially, in a free market awash with cheap oil.

With the Cuba opening, one of those events that seem obvious to all the minute it takes shape, the president has Pope Francis as a diplomatic co-conspirator. This leaves Republican opponents of fresh air in Havana lecturing the most popular man on the planet. Even after that all-dogs-go-to-heaven thing turned out to be something that was lost in translation, the pope’s blessing of the Cuba initiative will beat hot air from a half-dozen senators.

Obama’s trademark caution in a crisis still serves him well. He kept his head during the Ebola meltdown when everyone else was losing theirs. Had we gone jaw to jaw with Putin over Ukraine, rather than building the case for sanctions, the world would be far messier. But in finally learning how to use the tools of his office, Obama unbound is a president primed to make his mark.
 

Gail Collins is off today.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Unbound.

    Obama Unbound, NYT, 19.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/obama-unbound.html

Obama Vows a Response

to Cyberattack on Sony

DEC. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By DAVID E. SANGER,

MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

and NICOLE PERLROTH

WASHINGTON — President Obama said on Friday that the United States “will respond proportionally” against North Korea for its destructive cyberattacks on Sony Pictures, but he criticized the Hollywood studio for giving in to intimidation when it withdrew “The Interview,” the satirical movie that provoked the attacks, before it opened.

Deliberately avoiding specific discussion of what kind of steps he was planning against the reclusive nuclear-armed state, Mr. Obama said that the response would come “in a place and time and manner that we choose.” Speaking at a White House news conference before leaving for Hawaii for a two-week vacation, he said American officials “have been working up a range of options” that he said have not yet been presented to him.

A senior official said Mr. Obama would likely be briefed in Hawaii on those options. Mr. Obama’s threat came just hours after the F.B.I. said it had assembled extensive evidence that the North Korean government organized the cyberattack that debilitated the Sony computers.

If he makes good on it, it would be the first time the United States has been known to retaliate for a destructive cyberattack on American soil or to have explicitly accused the leaders of a foreign nation of deliberately damaging American targets, rather than just stealing intellectual property. Until now, the most aggressive response was the largely symbolic indictment of members of a Chinese Army unit this year for stealing intellectual property.

The president’s determination to act was a remarkable turn in what first seemed a story about Hollywood backbiting and gossip as revealed by the release of emails from studio executives and other movie industry figures describing Angelina Jolie as a “spoiled brat” and making racially tinged lists of what they thought would be Mr. Obama’s favorite movies.

But it quickly escalated, and the combination of the destructive nature of the attacks — which wiped out Sony computers — and a new threat this week against theatergoers if the “The Interview,” whose plot revolves an attempt to assassinate the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, opened on Christmas Day turned it into a national security issue. “First it was a game-changer,” one official said. “Then it became a question of what happens if we don’t respond? And the president concluded that’s not an option.”

But as striking as his determination to make North Korea pay a price for its action was his critique of Sony Pictures for its decision to cancel “The Interview.” Mr. Obama argued that the precedent that withdrawing the movie set could be damaging — and that the United States could not give in to intimidation.

“I wish they had spoken to me first,” Mr. Obama said of Sony’s leadership. “I would have told them, ‘Do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.’ ”

In a clear reference to Mr. Kim, he said, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” That would encourage others to do the same “when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.”

The chief executive of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, immediately defended his decision and said Mr. Obama misunderstood the facts. He argued that when roughly 80 percent of the country’s theaters refused to book the film after the latest threat, “we had no alternative but to not proceed with the theatrical release,” Mr. Lynton told CNN. “We have not caved, we have not given in, we have not backed down.”

In a follow-up statement, Sony said that it “immediately began actively surveying alternatives” to theatrical distribution after theater owners balked. But so far no mainstream cable, satellite or online film distributor was willing to adopt the movie.

Mr. Obama did not pass up the opportunity to take a jab at the insecure North Korean government for worrying about a Hollywood comedy, even a crude one.

“I think it says something about North Korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie,” he said, smiling briefly at the ridiculousness of an international confrontation set off by a Hollywood comedy.

The case against North Korea was described by the F.B.I. in somewhat generic terms. It said there were significant “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods and compromised networks” to previous attacks conducted by the North Koreans.

“The F.B.I. also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyberactivity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea,” the bureau said. “For example, the F.B.I. discovered that several Internet protocol addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with I.P. addresses that were hard-coded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.” An Internet protocol address is the closest thing to an identifier of where an attack emanated.

Some of the methods employed in the Sony attack were similar to ones that were used by the North Koreans against South Korean banks and news media outlets in 2013. That was a destructive attack, as was an attack several years ago against Saudi Aramco, later attributed to Iran. While there were common cybertools to the Saudi attack as well, Mr. Obama told reporters on Friday he had seen no evidence that any other nation was involved.

The F.B.I.’s announcement was carefully coordinated with the White House and reflected the intensity of the investigation; just a week ago, a senior F.B.I. official said he could not say whether North Korea was responsible. Administration officials noted that the White House had now described the action against Sony as an “attack,” as opposed to mere theft of intellectual property, and that suggested that Mr. Obama was now looking for a government response, rather than a corporate one.

The F.B.I.’s statements “are based on intelligence sources and other conclusive evidence,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Now the U.S. has to figure out the best way to respond and how much risk they want to take. It’s important that whatever they say publicly signals to anyone considering something similar that they will be handled much more roughly.”

While American officials were circumspect about how they had collected evidence, some has likely been developed from “implants” placed by the National Security Agency. North Korea has proved to be a particularly hard target because it has relatively low Internet connectivity to the rest of the world, and its best computer minds do not move out of the country often, where their machines and USB drives could be accessible targets.

Private security researchers who specialize in tracing attacks said that the government’s conclusions matched their own findings. George Kurtz, a founder of CrowdStrike, a California-based security firm, said that his company had been studying public samples of the Sony malware and had linked them to hackers inside North Korea — the firm internally refers to them as Silent Chollima — who have been conducting attacks since 2006.

In 2009, a similar campaign of coordinated cyberattacks over the Fourth of July holiday hit 27 American and South Korean websites, including those of South Korea’s presidential palace, called the Blue House, and its Defense Ministry, and sites belonging to the United States Treasury Department, the Secret Service and the Federal Trade Commission. North Korea was suspected, but a clear link was never established.

But those were all “distributed denial of service” attacks, in which attackers flood the sites with traffic until they fall offline. The Sony attack was far more sophisticated: It wiped data off Sony’s computer systems, rendering them inoperable.

“The cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment was not just an attack against a company and its employees,” Jeh C. Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. “It was also an attack on our freedom of expression and way of life.”
 

David E. Sanger and Michael Schmidt reported from Washington, and Nicole Perlroth from San Francisco. Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Vows a Response to Cyberattack on Sony.

    Obama Vows a Response to Cyberattack on Sony, NYT, 19.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/world/
    fbi-accuses-north-korean-government-in-cyberattack-on-sony-pictures.html

Why Congress Can Impeach Obama

The Impeachment of Obama on Immigration
May Be Legal — But It’s Wrong

 

NOV. 21, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By PETER H. SCHUCK

NOW that President Obama has granted legal relief to as many as five million undocumented immigrants, Republicans are thrashing about for an effective response. Only a few hard-liners are talking about impeachment now, but more could join them out of frustration with their other options.

Many people in both parties have tried to quell such talk by saying the president is within his powers to issue the order. The problem is, the pro-impeachment Republicans are right: There is a plausible case for taking that step.

By constitutional design, impeachment for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” is a political accusation and initiates a political remedy, not a legal one. It is pretty much up to Congress to define and apply “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and no court would second-guess it. The next Congress could find that the president had violated his oath to “faithfully execute” the laws by refusing to enforce important provisions of the Affordable Care Act, No Child Left Behind and, now, the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The president surely has some power to withhold prosecution, but granting legal status and work permits to millions of people most likely exceeds his discretion. No judge can decide the precise scope of his discretion because no one, including Congress, has legal standing to challenge his order in court.

Of course, many lawyers at the Justice Department and elsewhere disagree, noting that prosecutorial discretion is pervasive, that there isn’t enough money to prosecute all violators, that the president will continue to prosecute criminals and illegal border crossers, and that earlier presidents have done the same thing. These are serious arguments. But as an immigration and administrative law teacher who strongly favors more legal immigration and even broader legislative relief than Mr. Obama’s order grants (and who voted for him twice), I find them unconvincing.

In the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress carefully limited prosecutorial discretion by allowing the president to waive exclusions and deportations only under narrowly defined conditions. The act also granted the president broad power to suspend the entry of “any class of aliens” he finds detrimental to the national interest — but, significantly, did not give him corresponding authority to legalize “any class” of undocumented people he thinks deserve it.

President Obama has cited several cases of suspended enforcement as precedent. But in those cases, Congress had authorized the immigrants in question to apply for green cards; the president merely suspended enforcement against their closest family members until they, too, could get their own cards.

Most telling, Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, once rejected the very arguments he now embraces. Last year he said that extending amnesty beyond the so-called Dreamers (the children of undocumented immigrants brought here at an early age) would be “ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally.” It is hard to think of a confession more damning to his position in a court of law, in a congressional court of impeachment and in the court of public opinion.

Still, does his overreaching constitute an “impeachable offense” under the constitutional standard? History suggests that it might. In the early 1800s, two federal judges were impeached for far less: noncriminal intoxication, indecency, bias and other judicial improprieties.

True, the standard for impeaching presidents should be more demanding than for judges. Even so, in 1868 President Andrew Johnson was impeached by a deeply partisan, Radical Republican-dominated House. Johnson — a conservative Democrat who rose from the vice presidency when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, was assassinated — was impeached mainly for firing a cabinet member (which he almost certainly had the legal right to do), but also for obstructing policies that Congress enacted. (Impeachment proceedings against Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton involved criminal conduct more egregious than Mr. Obama’s policy unilateralism.)

But even if Congress has constitutional authority to impeach the president, that doesn’t mean it should. Quarrels between a president and Congress over the statutory limits on his authority are common, and the precise boundaries can be hard to discern. However truculent Mr. Obama’s defiance may be on this issue, Congress has other ways to stymie it — for example, barring the action by statute. Such tactics are within the normal give-and-take of interbranch disputes. Americans, including many like me who want a legislative amnesty, would support Congress’s use of them here.

Impeachment, moreover, would tend to normalize its use as a political weapon, even though the framers intended that it be used only in extreme cases that endanger the republic. Only inveterate Obama haters think that is true here.

The new Congress would accomplish nothing of consequence despite urgent national needs and voters’ demands for cooperation. This would deepen the public’s growing disgust with our government, a disgust that, properly directed, can spur needed reform, but if taken too far erodes the government’s capacity to do what only government can and must do. Perhaps most dangerous, impeachment of an already lame-duck president would further disable him for the next two years from defending American security and interests in a remorselessly turbulent, perilous world. All Americans should fervently pray that it doesn’t come to that.
 

Peter H. Schuck is a professor at Yale Law School and the author, most recently, of “Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 22, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Congress Can Impeach Obama.

    Why Congress Can Impeach Obama, NYT, 21.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/opinion/
    the-impeachment-of-obama-on-immigration-may-be-legal-but-its-wrong.html

Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan

NOV. 21, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama’s speech Thursday night on immigration ended on a high, hopeful note. Mr. Obama, quoting Scripture’s admonition to welcome and protect the stranger, told millions who have lived and worked here for years, many of them Americans in all but name: We cannot fix your situation yet, but for now we will not expel you, because we have better hopes for you here.

A speech is not a solution, of course, and now that it is over, the hard work begins. Efforts over the last decade to repair immigration have repeatedly ended in failure, leaving the meanness of the broken status quo.

Now, though, there are reasons for encouragement, tempered with caution. Mr. Obama’s plan to register and give working papers to perhaps four million to five million people has rightly gained the most attention, but he and the Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, have also declared a sweeping reordering of immigration enforcement. They are ending Secure Communities, a blighted program that used local police to funnel arrested immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In theory, this widened the dragnet for dangerous criminals. But in practice, it terrorized the innocent, alienated immigrant neighborhoods from their police protectors and encouraged — nationalized — Arizona-style campaigns of indiscriminate immigration crackdowns and racial profiling.

The replacement for Secure Communities will be called the Priority Enforcement Program, and it is meant to pursue only high-priority deportation targets. The local police will no longer routinely be asked to detain immigrants on ICE’s behalf — in violation of the Fourth Amendment — but asked instead simply to notify ICE when a wanted suspect is about to be released.

This could fulfill Mr. Obama’s promise to use the deportation machinery only against real threats. But history is littered with similar efforts at reprioritizing that failed. It is unclear how this fixes the problems of abusive and discriminatory policing that arise before an immigrant is jailed. Immigrant advocates are right to greet this apparent improvement with caution.

Other worries are administrative. There is a crying need for legal representation for immigrants, and adding an immense new program covering millions will burden the system still more. Many gaps are filled by energetic networks of nonprofit and low-cost legal advocates, but also by fraudsters. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in New York, where a groundbreaking effort, the Immigrant Justice Corps, has announced that it is doubling its outreach — with 50 lawyers and 30 community advocates — in response to the Obama plan.

Other advocacy groups nationwide are helping immigrants as they start collecting documents and saving money for what is expected to be an expensive application process. Executive action will be a big undertaking, and it’s reasonable to be concerned about the ability of the administration and legal services organizations to handle it.

But these are good worries to have. Mr. Obama’s initiative is a real gain, which must be held against the blowback from Republicans, who are grasping for justification to match their outrage and to block him on legal grounds. Presidential precedent, the law and Supreme Court affirmation all favor Mr. Obama.

The reality of the status quo is paralysis, in which nobody is ever legalized and most people are never deported. That is another form of amnesty — the amnesty of inaction — though none on the right who oppose reform would ever admit it. The White House is beginning a campaign to defend its action by stressing the economic and law enforcement benefits of bringing millions in from outside the law. The most immediate and profound benefit is the lifting of fear in immigrant communities, even though perhaps half of the undocumented population will still be left out. Many parents will be excluded, and many families will be broken. Their struggle will continue.

A version of this editorial appears in print on November 22, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan.

    Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan, NYT, 21.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/opinion/mr-obamas-wise-immigration-plan.html

Obama Condemns

Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig

 

NOV. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Islamic State militants released a chilling videotape on Sunday showing they had beheaded a fifth Western hostage, an American aid worker the group had threatened to kill in retaliation for airstrikes carried out by the United States in Iraq and Syria.

President Obama on Sunday confirmed the death of the aid worker, Peter Kassig, a former Army Ranger who disappeared more than a year ago at a checkpoint in northeastern Syria while delivering medical supplies.

Mr. Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group,” Mr. Obama said in a statement from aboard Air Force One that was read to the news media in Washington.

In recent days, American intelligence agencies received strong indications that the Islamic State had killed Mr. Kassig, the group’s third American victim. The president’s announcement was the first official confirmation of his death.

“Today we offer our prayers and condolences to the parents and family of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, also known to us as Peter,” Mr. Obama’s statement said. The president used the Muslim name that Mr. Kassig adopted after his capture, making the point that the Islamic State had killed a fellow Muslim. He acknowledged the “anguish at this painful time” felt by Mr. Kassig’s family.

The footage in the video released Sunday was of poorer quality than some of the group’s previous, slickly produced execution videos.

The video shows a black-robed executioner standing over the severed head of Mr. Kassig. Though the end result of the footage was grimly familiar, it was strikingly different from the executions of four other Western hostages, whose recorded deaths were carefully choreographed.

In the clip released early Sunday, the Islamic State displays the head of Mr. Kassig, 26, at the feet of a man with a British accent who appeared in the previous beheading videos and has been nicknamed Jihadi John by the British news media. Unlike the earlier videos, which were staged with multiple cameras from different vantage points, and which show the hostages kneeling, then uttering their last words, the footage of Mr. Kassig’s death is curtailed — showing only the final scene.

“This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen of your country. Peter, who fought against the Muslims in Iraq while serving as a soldier under the American Army, doesn’t have much to say. His previous cellmates have already spoken on his behalf,” the fighter with a British accent says in the video. “You claim to have withdrawn from Iraq four years ago. We said to you then that you are liars.”

Analysts said that the change in the videos suggested that something may have gone wrong as the militants, who have been under sustained attack from a United States-led military coalition and have faced a series of setbacks in recent weeks, carried out the killing.

“The most obvious difference is in the beheading itself — the previous videos all showed the beheading on camera,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in Washington, and a former director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization. “This one just shows the severed head itself. I don’t think this was the Islamic State’s choice.” He added, “The likeliest possibility is that something went wrong when they were beheading him.”

Among the things that could have gone wrong, analysts surmise, is that the extremists did not have as much time outdoors as they did when they killed the others. The United States announced soon after the first beheading in August that they would send surveillance aircraft over Syria and residents contacted on social media have reported seeing objects in the sky that they believe are drones.

The first four beheadings were carried out in the open air, with a cinematic precision that suggests multiple takes, filmed over an extended period of time. Carrying out a similar level of production as surveillance planes crisscrossed the skies above would result in extended exposure — heightening risk.

Another possibility, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross said, is that Mr. Kassig resisted, depriving the militants of the ability to stage the killing as they wanted.

“We know that this is a very media-savvy organization, and they know that you only have one take to get the beheading right,” he said.

An Indianapolis native, Mr. Kassig turned to humanitarian work after a tour as an Army Ranger in Iraq in 2007. He was certified as an emergency technician, and by 2012 he returned to the battlefield, this time helping bandage the victims of Syria’s civil war who were flooding into Lebanon. He moved to Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, where he founded a small aid group and initially used his savings to buy supplies, like diapers, which he distributed to the Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

In the summer of 2013, he relocated to Gaziantep in southern Turkey, roughly an hour from the border, and began making regular trips into Syria to offer medical care to the wounded.

He disappeared on Oct. 1, 2013, when the ambulance he and a colleague were driving was stopped at a checkpoint on the road to Deir al-Zour, Syria. He was transferred late last year to a prison beneath the basement of the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo, and then to a network of jails in Raqqa, the capital of the extremist group’s self-declared caliphate, where he became one of at least 23 Western hostages held by the group.

His cellmates included two American journalists, James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning, who were beheaded in roughly two-week intervals starting in August. Mr. Kassig was shown in the video released in October that showed the decapitation of Mr. Henning.

The previous videos of beheadings produced by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, appeared to be filmed in the same location, identified by analysts using geo-mapping as a bald hill outside Raqqa. Each video was relatively short — under five minutes on average — and included a speech by the hostage, in which he is forced to accuse his government of crimes against Muslims, while the masked killer stands by holding the knife.

By contrast, Mr. Kassig’s death appears in the final segment of a nearly 16-minute video, which traces the history of the Islamic State, from its origins as a unit under the control of Osama bin Laden to its modern incarnation in the region straddling Iraq and Syria. In one extended sequence, a mass beheading of captured Syrian soldiers is shown, filmed with long close-ups of details, like the shining blade of the executioner’s knife, mirroring the high production quality of the first four beheading videos.

The part showing Mr. Kassig’s body is amateurish compared with both the footage of the soldiers being killed and previous executions of Westerners.

“The final Kassig execution section is definitely different from previous videos,” said Jarret Brachman, a counterterrorism expert who advises the United States intelligence community. The “message to President Obama from Jihadi John is sloppy, jumbled and redundant. His joke about Kassig having nothing to say seems like a defensive way of covering up the fact that they don’t have a video of his actual beheading or weren’t able to make one.”

In the months leading up to his death, Mr. Kassig seemed to know the end was near.

In a letter to his parents smuggled out this summer, he described his fear: “I am obviously pretty scared to die but the hardest part is not knowing, wondering, hoping, and wondering if I should even hope at all,” he wrote. “Just know I’m with you. Every stream, every lake, every field and river. In the woods and in the hills, in all the places you showed me. I love you.”
Correction: November 16, 2014

An earlier version of this article misidentified the country where Peter Kassig went in 2012 to help care for those wounded in and those living as refugees from Syria’s civil war. It is Lebanon, not Libya.

Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Gaziantep, Turkey, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Confirms That ISIS Killed Third American.

    Obama Condemns Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig,
    NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/middleeast/
    peter-kassig-isis-video-execution.html

Why the F.C.C.

Should Heed President Obama

on Internet Regulation

 

NOV. 14, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Big telecommunications companies and many Republicans in Congress have criticized President Obama’s proposal for strong rules to prevent the creation of fast and slow lanes on the Internet. They claim this is heavy-handed government regulation. But in fact, it is correcting an old mistake.

Mr. Obama says the Federal Communications Commission should reclassify broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service, rather than the lightly regulated information service it is now. This would give the commission the authority to prevent broadband providers from slowing the delivery of some web content to favor content from companies that have paid a fee for faster delivery.

The F.C.C., an independent agency, is not obligated to do what Mr. Obama asks. But the checkered regulatory history shows the soundness of Mr. Obama’s idea.

The agency decided to classify broadband as an information service in 2002, after debates over how to expand the availability of affordable Internet service. One option was to require “open access,” which would have forced cable companies to lease their networks to competing Internet service providers like AOL and EarthLink. That would have increased competition and lowered prices, but it could have been done only if the commission had classified broadband as a telecommunications service, over which the agency has more control.

The cable companies, of course, strongly opposed such a move, and the chairman of the commission at the time, Michael Powell, thought it was unnecessary because he believed there would be strong competition from phone and wireless companies that would become ever bigger players in the broadband business. He and his colleagues also reasoned that cable modem service was an information service because companies like Comcast offered it with email, web hosting and other services.

In 2005, a 6-to-3 majority of the Supreme Court upheld the commission’s classification decision as a “reasonable” interpretation of the Communications Act of 1934. But plenty of people criticized that ruling. In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that it was “perfectly clear that someone who sells cable-modem service is ‘offering’ telecommunications.”

Many of the assumptions the F.C.C. made in 2002 have since proved false. Cable companies dominate the broadband business and face only limited competition. And it is clear that consumers need protection from efforts by broadband companies to start charging different rates for different types of Internet traffic.

Even if broadband is reclassified as a telecommunications service, no one is talking about having federal regulators approve consumer rates or requiring companies to lease their networks to competitors. What Mr. Obama wants is an Internet where service providers handle all content sent and received by consumers equally. His approach takes into account what has happened in the past decade, and it levels the playing field for businesses and protects consumer choice.

A version of this editorial appears in print on November 15, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Why the F.C.C. Should Heed Mr. Obama.

    Why the F.C.C. Should Heed President Obama on Internet Regulation,
    NYT, 11.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/
    why-the-fcc-should-heed-president-obama-on-internet-regulations.html

Big and Bold on Immigration

 

NOV. 13, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama is apparently ready to go big, as he promised, to fix immigration on his own — to use his law-enforcement discretion to spare perhaps five million unauthorized immigrants from deportation. Aides speaking anonymously have told The Times that Mr. Obama is considering some options for executive action that would give parents of children who are citizens or legal residents, as well as people who were brought here illegally as children, temporary legal status and permission to work.

Details are lacking, and praise for presidential action will have to wait until it becomes clear whether the often-too-cautious Mr. Obama goes through with it, and how comprehensive his order is — whether it includes those who have been living here five years, for example, or 10 years and what other hurdles applicants may have to meet to qualify.

Our view on executive action is: the sooner the better, and the bigger the better, because so many have been waiting so long for the unjust immigration system to be repaired, while vast resources have been wasted on deporting needed workers and breaking up families instead of pursuing violent criminals and other security threats.

In one sense, the value of presidential action can easily be measured by the ferocity of the Republican opposition it has already provoked.

“Congress has opposed it. The American people have opposed it. And the president persists unilaterally,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, speaking apocalyptically. He called it “a threat to the constitutional order.”

Mr. Sessions and his Republican colleagues have it backward. For all the protestations of presidential tyranny, Congress has more power than Mr. Obama to make meaningful immigration changes. His adversaries won’t admit it, but they could have — and still could — banish talk of executive action by dusting off a bill, S.744, that has passed the Senate and contains all they have been demanding, starting with a surge of border enforcement.

The president cannot rewrite immigration law. But he does control the enforcement apparatus; no Republicans have complained about his using executive authority to deport more people more quickly than all his predecessors. Using his discretion to focus on deporting violent criminals, terrorists and other threats is not lawlessness. It is his job.


A version of this editorial appears in print on November 14, 2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Big and Bold on Immigration.

    Big and Bold on Immigration, NYT, 13.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/opinion/big-and-bold-on-immigration.html

Obama Plan May Allow

Millions of Immigrants

to Stay and Work in U.S.

 

NOV. 13, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR,

JULIA PRESTON

and ASHLEY PARKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama will ignore angry protests from Republicans and announce as soon as next week a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration enforcement system that will protect up to five million unauthorized immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide many of them with work permits, according to administration officials who have direct knowledge of the plan.

Asserting his authority as president to enforce the nation’s laws with discretion, Mr. Obama intends to order changes that will significantly refocus the activities of the government’s 12,000 immigration agents. One key piece of the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.

That part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people.

Extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces. White House officials are also still debating whether to include protections for farm workers who have entered the country illegally but have been employed for years in the agriculture industry, a move that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Mr. Obama’s actions will also expand opportunities for legal immigrants who have high-tech skills, shift extra security resources to the nation’s southern border, revamp a controversial immigration enforcement program called Secure Communities, and provide clearer guidance to the agencies that enforce immigration laws about who should be a low priority for deportation, especially those with strong family ties and no serious criminal history.

A new memorandum, which will direct the actions of enforcement and border agents and immigration judges, will make clear that deportations should still proceed for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks and recent border crossers, officials said.

White House officials declined to comment publicly before a formal announcement by Mr. Obama, who will return from an eight-day trip to Asia on Sunday. Administration officials said details about the package of executive actions were still being finished and could change. An announcement could be pushed off until next month but will not be delayed to next year, officials said.

Announcing the actions quickly could hand critics like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas a specific target to attack, but it would also give immigration advocates something to defend. Waiting until later in December could allow the budget to be approved before setting off a fight over immigration.
Continue reading the main story

“Before the end of the year, we’re going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference a day after last week’s midterm elections. “What I’m not going to do is just wait.”

The decision to move forward sets in motion a political confrontation between Mr. Obama and his Republican adversaries that is likely to affect budget negotiations and the debate over Loretta E. Lynch, the president’s nominee to be attorney general, during the lame-duck session of Congress that began this week.

Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday afternoon that if Mr. Obama went forward on his own, House Republicans would “fight the president tooth and nail.”

Mr. Boehner is considering suing Mr. Obama over immigration — as Republicans have said they might do on the president’s health care law — and on Thursday he refused to rule out a government shutdown, despite saying that was not his goal.

“We are looking at all options, and they’re on the table,” Mr. Boehner said.

In the Senate, a group of Republicans — led by Mr. Cruz, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama — is already planning to thwart any executive action on immigration. The senators are hoping to rally their fellow Republicans to oppose efforts to pass a budget next month unless it prohibits the president from enacting what they call “executive amnesty” for people in the country illegally.

“If the president wants to change the legal structure, he should go through Congress rather than acting on his own,” Mr. Lee said Thursday. “I think it’s very important for us to do what we can to prevent it.”

But the president and his top aides have concluded that acting unilaterally is in the interest of the country and the only way to increase political pressure on Republicans to eventually support a legislative overhaul that could put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to legal status and perhaps citizenship. Mr. Obama has told lawmakers privately and publicly that he will reverse his executive orders if they pass a comprehensive bill that he agrees to sign.

White House officials reject as overblown the dire warnings from some in Congress who predict that such a sweeping use of presidential power will undermine any possibility for cooperation in Washington with the newly empowered Republican majority.

“I think it will create a backlash in the country that could actually set the cause back and inflame our politics in a way that I don’t think will be conducive to solving the problem,” said Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and supports an immigration overhaul.

Although a Republican president could reverse Mr. Obama’s overhaul of the system after he leaves office in January 2017, the president’s action for now will remove the threat of deportation for millions of people in Latino and other immigrant communities. Officials said lawyers had been working for months to make sure the president’s proposal would be “legally unassailable” when he presented it.

The major elements of the president’s plan are based on longstanding legal precedents that give the executive branch the right to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” in how it enforces the laws. Those precedents are also the basis of a 2012 decision to protect from deportation the so-called Dreamers, who came to the United States as young children.

“I’m confident that what the president will do will be consistent with our laws,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday.

The White House expects a chorus of outside legal experts to back the administration’s legal assessment once Mr. Obama makes the plan official.

In several “listening sessions” at the White House over the last year, immigration activists came armed with legal briefs, and White House officials believe those arguments will form the basis of the public defense of his actions.

Many pro-immigration groups and advocates — as well as the Hispanic voters who could be crucial for Democrats’ hopes of winning the White House in 2016 — are expecting bold action, having grown increasingly frustrated after watching a sweeping bipartisan immigration bill fall prey to a gridlocked Congress last year.

“This is his last chance to make good on his promise to fix the system,” said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “If he delays again, the immigration activists would — just politically speaking — jump the White House fence.”
 

Michael D. Shear and Ashley Parker reported from Washington, and Julia Preston from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on November 14, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: MILLIONS MAY STAY AND WORK IN U.S. IN OBAMA’S PLAN.

    Obama Plan May Allow Millions of Immigrants to Stay and Work in U.S.,
    NYT, 13.11.2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/us/obama-immigration.html

In Climate Deal With China,

Obama May Set 2016 Theme

NOV. 12, 2014

The New York Times

By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s landmark agreement with China to cut greenhouse gas pollution is a bet by the president and Democrats that on the issue of climate change, American voters are far ahead of Washington’s warring factions and that the environment will be a winning cause in the 2016 presidential campaign.

A variety of polls show that a majority of American voters now believe that climate change is occurring, are worried about it, and support candidates who back policies to stop it. In particular, polls show that majorities of Hispanics, young people and unmarried women — the voters who were central to Mr. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 — support candidates who back climate change policy.

But Republicans are betting that despite the polls, they can make the case that regulations to cut greenhouse pollution will result in the loss of jobs and hurt the economy.

“This announcement is yet another sign that the president intends to double-down on his job-crushing policies no matter how devastating the impact for America’s heartland and the country as a whole,” said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio.

President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China announced a climate change agreement on Wednesday that includes a new goal for U.S. carbon emissions and a commitment by China to curb its emissions and increase the share of its energy consumption that comes from renewable and nuclear sources.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the soon-to-be majority leader, was no less critical. “This unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs,” he said in a statement.

Mr. McConnell’s remarks were a hint of a line of attack Republicans are certain to use on Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is expected to run for president in 2016. The architect of Mr. Obama’s climate change plan is none other than his senior counselor, John D. Podesta, who is likely to leave the White House next year to work as the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

The climate plan that Mr. Podesta has drafted for Mr. Obama is expected to serve as a blueprint for Mrs. Clinton’s climate change policy, should she run.

Since the deal Mr. Obama made with China calls for the United States to cut its planet-warming carbon pollution by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, he has effectively placed the obligation on his successor to meet that goal.

That dynamic sets up climate change as a potentially explosive issue on the 2016 campaign trail, which may pit Mrs. Clinton against a field of Republican candidates who question and deny the science that human activity causes global warming. A number of prospective Republican presidential candidates have already attacked what they say is Mr. Obama’s “war on coal.”

Mr. Obama has muscled through his climate change agenda almost entirely with executive authority, bypassing a Congress that has repeatedly refused to enact sweeping new climate change laws. In addition to the agreement with China announced Wednesday in Beijing, Mr. Obama has used the 1970 Clean Air Act to issue ambitious Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to cut pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power-plant smokestacks.

Mr. Podesta, a political veteran who was also President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, devised the 2025 targets to ensure that they could be reached without new action from a future Congress. Abandoning them would require the next president to overturn them. From the Republican point of view, a Democratic candidate who might instead issue still more environmental regulations would be a ripe target for 2016.
Continue reading the main story

“They’re giving Republicans fertile ground for attack,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist. “Overregulation is clearly a job killer and jobs and the economy and middle-class wages are going to be a huge issue in the 2016 presidential. And it does seem like an inside job, with Podesta setting up Hillary’s position. Politically, they’re going to put themselves in a weak position on this.”

As evidence, Republican strategists point to their recent wave of victories in this year’s midterm elections, when they campaigned aggressively against Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations.

But Democrats are increasingly emboldened by polls showing that in national elections, candidates who push climate change policies will win support from voters.

According to a 2013 poll by Stanford University, 73 percent of Americans believe that the earth has been warming over the past 100 years, while 81 percent of Americans think global warming poses a serious problem in the United States. In addition, 81 percent think the federal government should limit the amount of greenhouse gases that American businesses can emit.

Twenty-one percent of Americans think producing electricity from coal is a good idea, while 91 percent of Americans think making electricity from sunlight is a good idea.

A 2014 poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that majorities of women, minorities and young people support candidates who strongly endorse climate action. That poll found that 65 percent of Hispanics, 53 percent of blacks and 53 percent of unmarried women support candidates who back climate change action.

It found that 44 percent of people in their 20s favor candidates who support climate change action, compared with 17 percent who oppose climate action.

“These groups were hugely important in the 2008 and 2012 elections,” said Anthony A. Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale project. “And they will be more important in 2016, because they are starting to make up a greater portion of the electorate.”

Mrs. Clinton has not laid out a specific climate change policy that she might pursue as president, but she has enthusiastically supported efforts to reduce carbon pollution — including Mr. Obama’s regulations. At a September conference on clean energy in Nevada she called climate change “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world,” and said that Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations put the United States in “a strong position” in international negotiations.

Democrats also believe that Wednesday’s announcement weakens at least one crucial Republican argument against climate action. For years, Republicans have argued that the United States should not take unilateral action on climate change because it would hamstring the economy while China, the world’s largest carbon polluter, failed to act. But the agreement with China undercuts that argument.

For Republicans, the issue of climate change, like immigration and same-sex marriage, is one that potential candidates and their advisers are starting to grapple with as they try to carve a path to the presidency, while winning support from a new generation of more diverse voters.

Republicans who seek to win their presidential nomination will have to win support from their conservative base — white and older voters, who, polls show, are less likely to believe that climate change is a problem. More important, Republicans do not want to be targeted by conservative outside groups like Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, has said that his group intends to aggressively attack any Republican candidate in the 2016 primaries who endorses carbon regulations.

But some Republican strategists worry that the position on climate change that could help win them their party’s nomination could hurt them in a general election, particularly in a contest with a larger number of young and minority voters.

Ashley Parker contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Climate Deal, Obama May Set A Theme for 2016.

    In Climate Deal With China, Obama May Set 2016 Theme,
    NYT, 12.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/world/asia/
    in-climate-deal-with-china-obama-may-set-theme-for-2016.html

Decision Time on Immigration

NOV. 6, 2014

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

President Obama said on Wednesday that he would act on his own by the end of the year to “improve” the immigration system, presumably by giving many — perhaps millions — of the country’s unauthorized immigrants temporary protection from deportation and permission to work. He has said this before, only to back off in deference to election-year politics.

Now the election is over, and the only thing to say to the president is: Do it. Take executive action. Make it big.

He must not give in to calls to wait. Six fruitless years is time enough for anyone to realize that waiting for Congress to help fix immigration is delusional. Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative John Boehner have warned Mr. Obama that executive action would destroy any chance of future legislation.

But Republicans have had many, many opportunities to move on immigration, and never have. They killed bipartisan reform in 2006 and 2007, and again this year. The party, whose hard-core members tried to stoke national panic at the border this summer, shrieking about migrant children, Ebola and the Islamic State, is not ready to be reasoned with.

The arguments for protecting a broad swath of immigrants through executive action, meanwhile, are firmly on Mr. Obama’s side.

IT HONORS THE LAW Mr. Obama should direct the Department of Homeland Security to focus its limited enforcement resources on removing violent criminals, terrorists and other public-safety threats — and not people who have deep roots in this country and pose no threat. This use of discretion is customary and entirely legal.

IT HELPS THE COUNTRY Having such a large immigrant population living here outside the law also undermines the law. Ever more stringent crackdowns waste resources by chasing down people who pose no threat. Allowing unauthorized immigrants to live and work without fear, and keeping families together, will boost the economy, undercut labor exploitation and ease the strain on law enforcement. This has been the goal of a comprehensive immigration overhaul. A deportation reprieve would not be permanent, but it would have many of the same benefits as legislative reform.

IT CUTS TO THE HEART OF THE DEBATE For years the immigration discussion focused obsessively on border security and avoided the question of what do with 11 million immigrants already living here. If Mr. Obama acts, he will be declaring that this population has a stake in our country’s future. That is starkly opposed to the view espoused by Republican hard-liners like Senators Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, Representatives Lamar Smith and Steve King, who take their cues from anti-immigration pressure groups that embody the country’s old strains of nativism. Millions of Americans-in-waiting need an answer. It should be a welcoming one.

There is reason to worry that Mr. Obama’s as-yet-unannounced plan for executive action will be too cautious, small and narrow. He has not said how big a group might qualify for protection. He should start with those who would have qualified for legalization under the bill that passed in the Senate in 2013 but died in the House.

That bill, a serious attempt at a once-in-a-generation overhaul, would have given millions with clean records a shot at legalization if they paid fines and back taxes and went to the back of the citizenship line, among other things. Mr. Obama strongly endorsed the bill. His executive action should be just as broad.

There will surely be intense debate when Mr. Obama draws the lines that decide who might qualify for protection. Some simple questions should be his guide: Do the people he could help have strong bonds to the United States? Does deporting them serve the national interest? If it doesn’t, they should have a chance to stay.


A version of this editorial appears in print on November 7, 2014, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Decision Time on Immigration.

    Decision Time on Immigration, NYT, 6.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/opinion/
    mr-obamas-moment-on-immigration.html

America’s Broken Politics

NOV. 5, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Let’s face it: The American political system is broken.

The midterm elections were a stinging repudiation of President Obama, but Republicans should also feel chastened: A poll last year found Congress less popular than cockroaches.

So congratulations to those members celebrating election victories. But our democratic institutions are in trouble when they can’t outpoll cockroaches. Which didn’t even campaign.

“Politics is the noblest of professions,” President Eisenhower said in 1954, and politics in the past often seemed a bright path toward improving our country. President Clinton represented a generation that regarded politics as a tool to craft a better world, and President Obama himself mobilized young voters with his gauzy message of hope. He presented himself as the politician who could break Washington’s gridlock and get things done — and we’ve seen how well that worked.

I’m in the middle of a book tour now, visiting universities and hearing students speak about yearning to make a difference. But they are turning not to politics as their lever but to social enterprise, to nonprofits, to advocacy, to business. They see that Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America in her dorm room at Princeton University, has had more impact on the education system than any current senator, and many have given up on political paths to change.

A national exit poll conducted by Edison Research found that a majority of voters disapproved of Republicans and Democrats alike, and only 20 percent trust Washington to do what’s right most or all the time.

President Obama is licking his wounds in the White House, and he doesn’t seem to accept that the election is a judgment on his presidency. I’m sorry. When Democrats lose in Colorado and struggle in Virginia, when voters say they’re sending a message to the White House, it’s time for Obama to shake up his staff, reach out beyond his insular circle of longtime aides, and recalibrate.

Critics are right that he should try harder to schmooze with legislators, although I’m skeptical that Republicans are that charmable. After all, some polls have shown more than a third in the Republican Party said he was born abroad and about one-fifth suspected that he could be the antichrist.

Yet it’s not just Obama who is looking ragged today. The entire political system is. Political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have charted the attitudes of the political parties back to 1879, and they found party polarization in recent years to be greater than at any time since their charts began.

That’s partly because Democrats have become more liberal, but mostly because Republicans have become more conservative — indeed, more conservative than at any time since 1879.

Politicians have also figured out what works for their own careers: playing to their base, denouncing the other side, and blocking rivals from getting credit for anything. Since many politicians are more vulnerable in a primary than in a general election, there’s not much incentive for compromise.

After Obama took office, Republicans assiduously tried to block him, even shutting down the federal government. Republican governors prevented their own citizens from getting health insurance through federally financed Medicaid. I see that as obstructionism, but it paid off in these midterms.

Bravo to Obama’s comments Wednesday about trying to cooperate with Republicans on issues including early education. But I’m not holding my breath. Incentives today militate against bipartisan cooperation, and that’s one reason the current Congress is on track to be the least productive in the post-World War II era.

(Maybe we taxpayers could save money by paying members of Congress not by salary but by the piece, so much for each enacted law?)

One bright spot in the midterms was voter action on ballot measures. They did actually break the gridlock. Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia legalized marijuana in some situations. Five states supported an increase in the minimum wage. Washington State approved universal background checks for gun purchases. California reduced prison sentences.

So even if politicians are stalemated, voters managed to get things done. Yet we also get the national government we deserve, and that’s an indictment of all of us.

I find America’s political dysfunction particularly sad because I’ve spent much of my journalistic career covering people risking their lives for democracy, and sometimes dying for it — from Taiwan to Ukraine, Congo to South Korea. It was 25 years ago that I saw people massacred near Tiananmen Square for demanding political change. They risked their lives because they dreamed that democracy would improve their lives and give them greater freedom and dignity.

For those of us in the United States it was easy. We painlessly inherited democracy, yet I’m afraid we’ve botched it.
 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 6, 2014, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: America’s Broken Politics.

    America’s Broken Politics, NYT, 6.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/opinion/
    nicholas-kristof-americas-political-dysfunction.html

The Midterms Were Not a Revolution

 

NOV. 5, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By FRANK LUNTZ

ON election night 1994, as Republicans recaptured the House for the first time in 40 years, I stood in the audience and watched my client Newt Gingrich, who would soon become speaker of the House, declare the beginning of the “Republican revolution.”

I knew immediately that the smartest man I had ever worked for was making the worst rhetorical blunder of his career. Nobody voted Republican to start a revolution. They did so because they were fed up with a Democratic president overreaching on health care and a government seemingly incapable of doing even the smallest thing effectively. We all know what happened when Mr. Gingrich tried to turn his rhetoric into action.

Sound familiar? No one is quite saying “revolution” this week, but Republicans across the country, in their glee over Tuesday’s elections, are coming dangerously close to making the same mistake.

True, there will now be more Americans under Republican representation than at any time in decades. And the re-elections of G.O.P. governors in blue states like Michigan and Wisconsin are certainly a validation of their policies. It was a tsunami; someone needs to get the Democrats a towel. But that anti-Democrat wave was not the same as a pro-Republican endorsement. In many races that went from blue to red, Republican success was hardly because of what the G.O.P. has achieved on Capitol Hill. In fact, if Americans could speak with one collective voice — all 310 million of them — this is what they said Tuesday night: “Washington doesn’t listen, Washington doesn’t lead and Washington doesn’t deliver.” Purple states tossed out their Democratic senators for being too close to Washington and too far from the people who put them there.

The current narrative, that this election was a rejection of President Obama, misses the mark. So does the idea that it was a mandate for an extreme conservative agenda. According to a survey my firm fielded on election night for the political-advocacy organization Each American Dream, it was more important that a candidate “shake up and change the way Washington operates.”

I didn’t need a poll to tell me that. This year I traveled the country listening to voters, from Miami to Anchorage, 30 states and counting. And from the reddest rural towns to the bluest big cities, the sentiment is the same. People say Washington is broken and on the decline, that government no longer works for them — only for the rich and powerful.

They voted out those who promised to do more in favor of those who said they would do less, but do it better. That’s why the Democratic candidates for governor who condemned their opponents for spending too little on education, transportation and programs for the poor and unemployed still lost. The results were less about the size of government than about making government efficient, effective and accountable. Our election night survey showed that 42 percent chose their Senate candidate because they hated the opponent more. One pre-election poll had over 70 percent willing to throw everyone out and start fresh.

Winning on Election Day is not the end. The objective can’t be just to bide time for the next election; that’s a losing strategy. The mission has to be a restoration of confidence in the future. The question is: What can Republicans at all levels do to make this happen, and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

First, hold Washington accountable. From the cover-ups of veterans dying while being denied care to using the I.R.S. to target conservative groups, recent scandals highlight the chasm between hard-working taxpayers and Washington. But this also means holding your colleagues accountable. No turning a blind eye to broken promises. If you’re truly different, act truly differently.

Second, make the people’s priorities your priorities. In our survey, the top priorities were making the government more efficient and controlling spending. So tackle deficits and the national debt, and root out the waste and abuse of government programs. Reduce the crippling red tape and regulations that are strangling small businesses. As the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said, show that a Republican Congress has both the wisdom to listen and the courage to lead.

Third, stop blustering and fighting. Americans despair of the pointless posturing, empty promises and bad policies that result. Show that you are more concerned with people than politics. Don’t be afraid to work with your opponents if it means achieving real results. Democrats and Republicans disagree on a lot, but there are also opportunities of real national importance, like national security and passing the trans-Atlantic trade deal.

Aside from a small activist constituency, Americans are not looking for another fight over same-sex marriage or abortion. This isn’t to say that voters want their leaders to co-opt their convictions. People are simply tired of identity politics that pit men against women, black against white, wealthy against poor. More than ever, they want leadership that brings us together.

This isn’t about pride of ownership regarding American progress; this is about progress, period. Americans don’t care about Democratic solutions or Republican solutions. They just want common-sense solutions that make everyday life just a little bit easier. But they can’t get their houses in order until Washington gets its own house in order.
 

Frank Luntz, a communications adviser and Republican pollster, is president of Luntz Global Partners, a consulting firm.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 6, 2014, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: The Midterms Were Not a Revolution.

    The Midterms Were Not a Revolution, NYT, 5.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/opinion/
    the-midterms-were-not-a-republican-revolution.html

Obama to Seek Congressional Backing

for Military Campaign Against ISIS

 

NOV. 5, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Obama said on Wednesday that he would seek specific authorization from Congress for the military campaign against the Islamic State, opening the door to a lengthy, potentially contentious debate over the nature and extent of American engagement in Iraq and Syria.

Mr. Obama’s announcement, at his post-election news conference, was not wholly unexpected. But it represented a significant shift from his earlier position that while he would welcome congressional backing, he had legal authority to take military action under existing statutes.

Administration officials said Mr. Obama still believed he had that authority, but with the elections over, he concluded that the time was right to petition Congress for more explicit authority.

“The world needs to know we are united behind this effort and that the men and women of our military deserve our clear and unified support,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he would begin a dialogue with congressional leaders when they come to the White House on Friday.

He also increased the pressure on Iran’s leaders ahead of a deadline this month to reach a nuclear deal, saying that the United States has now “presented to them a framework that would allow them to meet their peaceful energy needs,” without leaving Iran the ability to “break out and produce a nuclear weapon.”

The president suggested that he was now waiting for a political decision in Tehran about whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would accept that framework.

While Mr. Obama gave no specifics, he appeared to be referring to a plan under which Iran would ship much of its uranium stockpile to Russia, where it would be converted into fuel for the country’s single nuclear plant.

Iranian officials dismissed the report without fully denying it, but American officials have said they suspect a struggle is underway within the Iranian government on the wisdom of reaching an accord. “They have their own politics, and there’s a long tradition of mistrust between the two countries,” Mr. Obama said.

The president was guarded about the progress of the military operation against the Islamic State. He said it was too soon to say whether the United States and its allies were winning, noting that it would take a long time to upgrade Iraqi forces to the point where they could reclaim territory now held by the militants. He was even more circumspect about Syria.

“Our focus in Syria is not to solve the entire Syria situation, but rather to isolate the areas in which ISIL can operate,” he added, using an alternative name for the Islamic State.

That statement appeared somewhat at odds with a recent memo sent to the White House by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, in which he criticized the administration’s Syria policy for failing to connect the campaign against the Islamic State to the broader struggle against President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr. Hagel wrote that unless the United States clarified its intentions against the Assad regime, it would fail to enlist allies like Turkey and France for the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, since those countries are intent on ousting Mr. Assad. Other officials said that in internal debates, Mr. Hagel has not advocated taking a strong line against Mr. Assad, and in fact has echoed the Pentagon’s resistance to going to war with the Syrian government.

That will be one of the issues likely to come up in a congressional debate over authorization. Before the election, Congress passed limited authorization to pay for the training and equipping of Syrian rebels. Now the White House is seeking an authorization to use military force that would be tailored to a prolonged fight against ISIS.

Until now, the White House had justified its airstrikes in Iraq and Syria under two existing laws: a 2001 authorization passed after the 9/11 attacks, which Mr. Obama has invoked to carry out drone and missile strikes against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, and a 2002 authorization sought by President George W. Bush for the Iraq war.

“The idea is to right-size and update whatever authorization Congress provides to suit the current fight rather than previous fights,” Mr. Obama said. “We now have a different type of enemy.”

Lawmakers welcomed the announcement, even as they noted it would set off complicated political crosscurrents in both parties. Many lawmakers were privately relieved that the White House did not petition Congress before the midterm elections.

“This is an extended military campaign and it has nothing to do with the 9/11 authorization,” said Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont. “It is expensive, long term, and it’s not clear where it’s going. You’re going to see a complicated debate in Congress.”

Among the issues he predicted would come up would be the deployment of American ground forces, which Mr. Obama has ruled out but which Mr. Welch said would almost certainly be needed to root out the militants.

Still, he added: “In some ways, it will probably be a better debate. People will have more latitude to consider it on the merits than they would have before the election.”

In part because the battle with the Islamic State is likely to last beyond Mr. Obama’s presidency — and soak up resources he wanted to commit elsewhere — there is an increasing sense that the White House is more eager than ever to strike even an agreement in principle with Iran by the Nov. 24 deadline for the end of negotiations.

Mr. Obama seemed intent on answering critics who have said he wants a deal too much. “Whether we can actually get a deal done, we’re going to have to find out over the next three to four weeks,” he said, suggesting that the “framework” given to Iran was essentially an effort to determine the sincerity of the country’s insistence that it was simply looking for a reliable way to produce fuel for nuclear reactors.
 

A version of this article appears in print on November 6, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama to Seek Congressional Backing For Campaign Against Islamic State.

    Obama to Seek Congressional Backing for Military Campaign Against ISIS,
    NYT, 5.11.2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/world/middleeast/
    obama-to-seek-congressional-backing-for-military-campaign-against-isis.html

Mr. Obama’s Offer to Republicans

 

NOV. 5, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama refused on Wednesday to submit to the Republican narrative that his presidency effectively ended with the midterm elections.

He said he will not agree to the repeal of health care reform, as many Republicans demand. He will not sit around doing nothing while they look for the courage to enact immigration reform. He will continue to demand a higher minimum wage and new spending on public works, and expansion of early education programs.

“Obviously, Republicans had a good night,” he said, a quiet admission that his party got drubbed, losing control of the Senate, as well as at least 14 House seats. But he said he hopes to meet regularly with Republican leaders and work on areas where there is mutual agreement.

The tone of the questions at his post-mortem news conference suggested that that wasn’t enough. There were demands that he take personal responsibility for the Democratic losses, or exhibit public contrition, or describe exactly where he plans to give in to Republican demands. He was right to ignore all of that, and instead he got directly to heart of Tuesday’s message from the public:

“What’s most important to the American people right now, the resounding message not just of this election, but basically the last several is: Get stuff done,” he said. “Don’t worry about the next election. Don’t worry about party affiliation. Do worry about our concerns.”

Republicans ran on no message except that Mr. Obama was always wrong, and voters on Tuesday said they were angry with the country’s direction and political gridlock, taking their fury out on the president’s party because he is in charge. (As he noted, two-thirds of eligible voters didn’t even show up.)

Under those circumstances, Mr. Obama was justified in sticking with what he called “the principles that we’re fighting for,” which got him elected twice: creating job opportunity by expanding the economy, the top issue on the minds of most voters. There is no need to backtrack on goals like a higher minimum wage or expanded health insurance when most voters say they want those things.

But Mr. Obama said there were several areas where he thinks agreement could be reached with Republicans, and several of them were the same ones outlined by Senator Mitch McConnell, who will be the new majority leader, in his post-election news conference. One is a trade agreement with Pacific nations, which he said would help open those markets to American goods. (Though it needs to include strong labor and environmental regulations.) Another is corporate tax reform that would eliminate many deductions and breaks, though unfortunately Republicans continue to insist on applying any revenues generated toward reducing corporate tax rates rather than using that revenue on federal projects that would create new jobs.

Mr. Obama also said he would request $6.2 billion to fight the spread of Ebola and would ask Congress to formally authorize the military action against the Islamic State. Mr. McConnell seems open to cooperation on these issues, saying he would work with the White House on trade and corporate taxes and wants to hear its requests on Ebola and the Islamic State.

Immigration is a different story. Mr. Obama said that, if Republicans continued to block a reform bill, he would take executive action to improve the immigration system before the end of the year. Mr. McConnell warned that any such action would “poison the well” for legislation.

Mr. McConnell also promised continued divisiveness over regulations on business and the energy industry through demands made in spending bills, and he vowed to take action against big pieces of the health care reform law, including the individual mandate.

Mr. Obama said he would never agree to end the mandate, which would gut the health law, and there is no reason he should. Voters said they wanted the two parties to stop bickering and work harder, not erase the progress made in the last six years.


A version of this editorial appears in print on November 6, 2014, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama’s Offer to Republicans.

    Mr. Obama’s Offer to Republicans, NYT, 5.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/opinion/mr-obamas-offer-to-republicans.html

After Election,

President Vows to Work With,

and Without, Congress

 

NOV. 5, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama shook off an electoral drubbing on Wednesday and said he was eager to find common ground with Republicans during the final two years of his presidency, but he swiftly defied their objections by vowing to bypass Congress and use his executive authority to change the nation’s immigration system.

In a sign of how he intends to govern under a new political order with ascendant Republican leaders, Mr. Obama renewed his commitment to act on his own to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country.

His remarks, at a news conference in the East Room of the White House, were meant to put the vitriol of the campaign behind him — he responded to disaffected Americans by saying that “I hear you” and that his election mandate was to “get stuff done.” But his promised action on immigration underscored the profound partisan disagreements that persist in Washington.

Republicans quickly accused the president of reaching out to them with one hand while slapping them with the other.

President Obama said he looked forward to the Republicans putting forward their governing agenda after they regained control of Congress in the midterm elections.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a Republican who is in line to be the majority leader in the new Congress, warned Mr. Obama in a news conference in Louisville not to act on immigration on his own.

“It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull,” Mr. McConnell said.

The back-and-forth came on a grim day at the White House after an election that cost the Democrats the Senate and called into question the president’s capacity to accomplish much of substance in his remaining time in office.

For all the talk of cooperation, Mr. Obama confronted the reality that gridlock may still rule Washington, curtailing his legacy and frustrating his lofty ambitions.

Mitch McConnell, who will most likely become majority leader in the Senate next year, said the two sides in the Senate would work together but also warned of partisan divisions.
Video by Associated Press on Publish Date November 5, 2014. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.

Mr. Obama seemed determined not to let the setback consume what is left of his presidency. Relentlessly cheerful during his afternoon news conference, Mr. Obama congratulated Republicans on their election success and offered words of conciliation. But he volunteered little regret or a sense that he needed to change course.

“It doesn’t make me mopey. It energizes me, because it means that this democracy’s working,” Mr. Obama said of his party’s defeat. He struck a carefully upbeat tone, declining to “read the tea leaves” of the election or to be baited into giving it a name, along the lines of the “shellacking” he said his party had taken in the 2010 congressional elections.

Still, he noted that Republicans had had a “good night,” and conceded that he was responsible for allaying the concerns of Americans who have become convinced that Washington is dysfunctional and unresponsive to their needs.

“As president, they rightly hold me accountable to do more to make it work properly,” Mr. Obama said.

The Republicans took control of the Senate on Tuesday, picking up at least seven seats, and expanded their majority in the House. Their victory in the Senate was significant but not the largest historically — though it could rank among the top five election year swings since 1946.
OPEN Graphic

The ultimate lesson of the election, he said, was that both parties should do more to work together. He called on Congress to quickly pass an emergency request for funding to combat Ebola, and announced that he would seek congressional authorization for his military campaign in Iraq and Syria.

He also said he would seek compromises in the coming months on trade deals, tax changes, infrastructure spending and an immigration overhaul. He offered no details.

“But what I’m not going to do is just wait,” he said of action on immigration. “I think it’s fair to say I’ve shown a lot of patience and tried to work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible, and I’m going to continue to do so. But in the meantime, let’s see what we can do lawfully through executive actions to improve the functioning of the system.”

In Louisville, Mr. McConnell signaled that he wanted to find compromise on key issues and make the Senate “work again” by changing the rules in the chamber. He flatly promised that Congress would not shut down the government or default on the national debt in disputes about the nation’s finances.

“When the American people choose divided government, I don’t think it means they don’t want us to do anything,” Mr. McConnell told reporters. “We ought to start with the view that maybe there are things we can agree on to make progress for the country.”

But he, too, foreshadowed disagreements ahead, saying, “We will certainly be voting on things as well that we think the administration is not fond of.”

The new political landscape continued to take shape on Wednesday as the Republican majority in the House neared modern records and Republicans closed in on another Senate seat, this one in Alaska.

Alaskans were still counting thousands of ballots, and the state is not likely to certify a winner until next week at the earliest. But Dan Sullivan, a Republican, led Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat, by about 8,000 votes, a small number but an edge of nearly four percentage points in a sparsely populated state.

Democrats were able to eke out wins for governor in Colorado and Connecticut, and they vowed to fight to protect the thin lead that Senator Mark R. Warner, Democrat of Virginia, held in his surprisingly tight race. But Gov. Patrick J. Quinn of Illinois conceded defeat in a re-election effort that included a visit by the state’s once-favored son, Mr. Obama.

As members of Mr. Obama’s party sifted through the wreckage, the president was determined to find something positive. He made a surprise appearance at the daily White House staff meeting, telling exhausted aides who had spent the previous night watching losses far more crushing than they had anticipated that he was eager to get to work and squeeze every last moment out of his remaining time in office.

It was a sign of a president now liberated from the political strictures that have bound him over the past year, when Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking him and his policies and Mr. Obama felt constrained from defending himself, worried about the potential harm it could do to vulnerable Democratic candidates.

But it also reflected a president unwilling to play what he considers the Washington game of self-flagellation after a political defeat.

Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush, who fired Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld the day after the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Obama made no personnel changes, and aides said they did not expect any.

White House officials say that Mr. Obama values Denis R. McDonough, his White House chief of staff, who seemed unflustered by the setback and flashed a broad smile in the minutes before the news conference began.

The president, for his part, made a point of showing off his good cheer in defeat — “I’m having a great time,” he said at one point during the news conference — and even of challenging his image as an aloof executive unwilling to engage in the rituals that power compromise in the capital. He said he would like to have a glass of Kentucky bourbon with Mr. McConnell.

“If the ways that we’re approaching the Republicans in Congress isn’t working, you know, I’m going to try different things, whether it’s having a drink with Mitch McConnell or letting John Boehner beat me again at golf,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the House speaker.

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on November 6, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Election, President Vows to Work With, and Without, Congress.

    After Election, President Vows to Work With, and Without, Congress,
    NYT, 5.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/us/politics/
    midterm-democratic-losses-grow.html

Negativity Wins the Senate

NOV. 5, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Republicans would like the country to believe that they took control of the Senate on Tuesday by advocating a strong, appealing agenda of job creation, tax reform and spending cuts. But, in reality, they did nothing of the sort.

Even the voters who supported Republican candidates would have a hard time explaining what their choices are going to do. That’s because virtually every Republican candidate campaigned on only one thing: what they called the failure of President Obama. In speech after speech, ad after ad, they relentlessly linked their Democratic opponent to the president and vowed that they would put an end to everything they say the public hates about his administration. On Tuesday morning, the Republican National Committee released a series of get-out-the-vote images showing Mr. Obama and Democratic Senate candidates next to this message: “If you’re not a voter, you can’t stop Obama.”

The most important promises that winning Republicans made were negative in nature. They will repeal health care reform. They will roll back new regulations on banks and Wall Street. They will stop the Obama administration’s plans to curb coal emissions and reform immigration and invest in education.

Campaigning on pure negativity isn’t surprising for a party that has governed that way since Mr. Obama was first sworn in. By creating an environment where every initiative is opposed and nothing gets done, Republicans helped engineer the president’s image as weak and ineffectual. Mitch McConnell, who will be the Senate’s new majority leader, vowed in 2009 to create “an inventory of losses” to damage Mr. Obama for precisely the results achieved on Tuesday.

Mr. McConnell was assisted in this goal by the president’s own second-term stumbles — most notably the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act last year, an indecisive foreign policy, and revelations of domestic surveillance and improper veterans care. Republicans were also able to exploit nativist fears about immigrant children crossing at the southern border and some initial troubles in responding to the first domestic cases of Ebola.

In some races, missteps by the Democrats helped Republicans. In Iowa, Representative Bruce Braley may have cost himself the race by making a belittling comment about farmers. In Kentucky, Alison Lundergan Grimes didn’t establish a reputation for candor when she refused to discuss her previous votes for president.

Virtually all Democratic candidates distanced themselves from Mr. Obama and refused to make the case that there has been substantial progress on jobs and economic growth under this administration.

But Republicans also had little to say about reviving the economy, and their idea of creating jobs seems to be limited to building the Keystone XL oil pipeline, cutting taxes further and crying “repeal Obamacare” at every opportunity.

In theory, full control of Congress might give Republicans an incentive to reach compromise with Mr. Obama because they will need to show that they can govern rather than obstruct. They might, for example, be able to find agreement on a free-trade agreement with Pacific nations.

But their caucuses in the Senate and the House will be more conservative than before, and many winning candidates will feel obliged to live up to their promises of obstruction. Mr. McConnell has already committed himself to opposing a minimum-wage increase, fighting regulations on carbon emissions and repealing the health law.

“Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict,” Mr. McConnell said in his victory speech. As the new Senate leader, he must now prove those are not empty words.

A version of this editorial appears in print on November 5, 2014, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Negativity Wins the Senate.

    Negativity Wins the Senate, NYT, 5.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/opinion/negativity-wins-the-senate.html

Riding Wave of Discontent,

G.O.P. Takes Senate

Election Results:

Republicans Win Senate Control

With at Least 7 New Seats

 

NOV. 4, 2014

The New York Times

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

and ASHLEY PARKER

Resurgent Republicans took control of the Senate on Tuesday night, expanded their hold on the House, and defended some of the most closely contested governors’ races, in a repudiation of President Obama that will reorder the political map in his final years in office.

Propelled by economic dissatisfaction and anger toward the president, Republicans grabbed Democratic Senate seats in North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa, West Virginia, Arkansas, Montana and South Dakota to gain their first Senate majority since 2006. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a shrewd Republican tactician, cruised to re-election and stood poised to achieve a goal he has pursued for years — Senate majority leader.

An election that started as trench warfare, state by state and district by district, crested into a sweeping Republican victory. Contests that were expected to be close were not, and races expected to go Democratic broke narrowly for the Republicans. The uneven character of the economic recovery added to a sense of anxiety, leaving voters in a punishing mood, particularly for Democrats in Southern states and the Mountain West, where political polarization deepened.

The biggest surprises of the night came in North Carolina, where the Republican, Thom Tillis, came from behind to beat Senator Kay Hagan, and in Virginia. There, Senator Mark Warner, a former Democratic governor of the state, was thought to be one of the safest incumbents in his party, and instead found himself clinging to the narrowest of leads against a former Republican Party chairman, Ed Gillespie.

Those contests were measures of how difficult the terrain was for Democrats in an election where Republicans put together their strategy as a referendum on the competence of government, embodied by Mr. Obama.

House seats where Democrats had fought off Republican encroachment for years were finally toppled. Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, was easily re-elected in Wisconsin, a state that voted twice for Mr. Obama. In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott, once considered endangered, finished the night on top. And states that had seemingly been trending Democratic, like Colorado and Iowa, fell into Republican hands.

With at least a nine-seat gain and most likely more, House Republicans will have close to 245 seats, the largest Republican majority since the Truman administration.

“Barack Obama has our country in a ditch, and many of his lieutenants running for the Senate were right there with him,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “The punishment is going to be broad, and it’s going to be pretty serious.”

The breadth of the Republican victories also reset the political landscape ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign. And it left Mr. Obama with a decision to make: Will he move toward Republicans in his final years in areas of common interest, such as tax reform and trade, or will he dig in and hope Republican overreach will give his party a lane for a comeback?

“Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict,” vowed Mr. McConnell, in a victory speech.

White House officials accepted the overture and said Mr. Obama had invited the bipartisan leadership of Congress to the White House on Friday.

For Republicans, the victories piled up, winning not only Senate Democratic seats they were expected to take — Montana, West Virginia, South Dakota and Arkansas — but also in states that were supposed to be close. Representative Cory Gardner, a Republican, crushed Senator Mark Udall in Colorado. In Georgia, the Democrat Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Senator Sam Nunn, was widely expected to force David Perdue, a Republican businessman, into a runoff for the Senate seat of Saxby Chambliss, a retiring Republican. Instead, Mr. Perdue won more than half the vote to take the race outright.

Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, also fended off the independent challenger Greg Orman, who just weeks ago appeared headed to victory.

And for Democrats, it could get worse. Votes were still being tallied in Alaska, where Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat, was trying to hold back the wave. Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana was able to force her strongest Republican foe, Representative Bill Cassidy, into a Dec. 6 runoff. But the combined vote of the top two Republicans in the race easily eclipsed hers.

“I think it’s a message from the American people about their concern about the direction of the country, and the competency of the current administration,” said Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Most people have voted to end the dysfunction and to get back to legislating on issues that will help them and their families, and I think that’s something that both parties need to listen to.”

And in the panhandle of Florida, Gwen Graham, daughter of a former Democratic senator and governor, defeated Representative Steve Southerland, a Tea Party favorite.

But those high notes were swamped by the lows for the president’s party. In Arkansas, Representative Tom Cotton, a freshman Republican and an Iraq War veteran, defeated Senator Mark Pryor, despite the efforts of former President Bill Clinton.

In Colorado, Mr. Udall tried to replicate the storied ground game that helped propel his Democratic colleague, Senator Michael Bennet, to an unexpected victory in 2010. He was not even close, and drew further criticism for running a campaign that some felt was too focused on abortion rights and contraception.

And in West Virginia, Representative Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, won the Senate seat long held by Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, to become that state’s first female senator and the first Republican elected to the Senate from West Virginia since 1956. In Iowa, Joni Ernst also made history by becoming the first woman to be elected in that state’s congressional delegation.

Two years after handing Democrats broad victories, voters again seemed to be reaching for a way to end Washington inertia. Yet the results on Tuesday may serve only to reinforce it. Voters appeared unsure of just what they wanted, according to surveys. Among those who voted for a Democrat, only one out of eight expressed an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party. Republican voters were more conflicted; among those who voted Republican, one of four viewed the party unfavorably.

Mr. Obama is left with the prospect of finding a new path to work with Republicans, something for which he has shown little inclination, and Republicans must find a way to demonstrate they are more than the party of “no.”

Even though a record $4 billion poured into the election — from the campaigns, parties and outside groups for advertising and other candidate support — the money did little to stir enthusiasm as the campaign set a more dubious mark for its low levels of voter interest.

Even the president conceded the steep climb his allies faced.

“This is possibly the worst possible group of states for Democrats since Dwight Eisenhower,” Mr. Obama told a Connecticut public radio station on Tuesday. “There are a lot of states that are being contested where they just tend to tilt Republican.”

Democratic midterm losses during the Obama presidency now rival those of both Richard M. Nixon in 1974 and Bill Clinton in 1994 as the most destructive to his party’s political standing in Congress in the post-World War II era. It was a stunning reversal for the president, who was the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win a majority of the national vote.

“The top issue is not jobs and the economy; it’s ending gridlock in Washington,” said Mr. Portman. “Second, there is a desire to hold the administration accountable for incompetence on issues like ISIS and Ebola. I don’t think those goals are inconsistent.”

With the political climate and the electoral map playing to their decided advantage, Republicans were determined not to relive the elections of 2010 and 2012, when infighting between establishment Republicans and Tea Party insurgents damaged the party’s brand and elevated candidates who could not win.

From the beginning, party officials decided to take sides when fierce primary challenges emerged. The party establishment crushed challengers to Mr. McConnell in Kentucky, and to Senators Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee.

The establishment also sent reinforcements to help Senator Thad Cochran eke out a runoff victory against a Tea Party firebrand in Mississippi; cleared the Republican field for Mr. Gardner in Colorado; and backed winning primary candidates in Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Alaska.

Democrats tried to distance themselves from the president’s health care law and economic policies, despite signs that both may be working. In Colorado, Mr. Udall relied on the playbook that propelled his Colorado colleague and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman, Senator Michael Bennet, to victory in 2010, speaking almost exclusively about abortion rights and contraception. That cost him the endorsement of The Denver Post, which castigated him for an “obnoxious, one-issue campaign.”

Lost was Mr. Udall’s work in the Senate opposing Mr. Obama’s policies on security surveillance and privacy.

In Kentucky, Alison Lundergan Grimes, considered a strong challenger to Mr. McConnell, lost some support when she refused to say whether she voted for Mr. Obama, and ran a risk-averse campaign.

But mainly, Democrats were working off a map heavily tilted toward Republicans in states like West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, Arkansas and Alaska, in a year when disengaged, frustrated voters and Mr. Obama’s low approval ratings were inevitably going to be a millstone.

Correction: November 4, 2014

An earlier version of a slide show that appeared with this article on the home page and politics section of NYTimes.com misstated the office of Jeanne Shaheen. She is in the Senate, not the House. An earlier version of this article also misstated the location of a town where one woman voted. It was Salem, N.H., not Salem, Mass.

A version of this article appears in print on November 5, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: G.O.P. Takes Senate, Riding Voter Anger.

    Riding Wave of Discontent, G.O.P. Takes Senate, NYT, 4.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/us/politics/midterm-elections.html

In U.N. Speech,

Obama Vows to Fight ISIS

‘Network of Death’

 

SEPT. 24, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

UNITED NATIONS — President Obama on Wednesday charted a muscular new course for the United States in a turbulent world, telling the United Nations General Assembly in a bluntly worded speech that the American military would work with allies to dismantle the Islamic State’s “network of death” and warning Russia that it would pay for its bullying of Ukraine.

Two days after ordering airstrikes on dozens of militant targets in Syria, Mr. Obama issued a fervent call to arms against the Islamic State — the once-reluctant warrior now apparently resolved to waging a twilight struggle against Islamic extremism for the remainder of his presidency.

“Today, I ask the world to join in this effort,” Mr. Obama said, seeking to buttress a global coalition that he said would train and equip troops to fight the group, also known ISIL, starve it of financial resources, and halt the flow of foreign recruits to its ranks.

“Those who have joined ISIL should leave the battlefield while they can,” Mr. Obama said, foreshadowing the blows to come. “For we will not succumb to threats, and we will demonstrate that the future belongs to those who build, not those who destroy.” The brutality of the militants, he said, “forces us to look into the heart of darkness.”

Even so, Mr. Obama said, the threat from the Islamic State was only the most urgent of an onslaught of global challenges that have given the United States no choice but to take the lead: from resisting Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to coordinating a response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa; from brokering a new unity government in Afghanistan to organizing a new campaign to confront climate change.

It was a starkly different president from the one who addressed skeptical world leaders at the General Assembly last year, two weeks after calling off a missile strike on Syria over its use of chemical weapons. In that speech, Mr. Obama offered a shrunken list of American priorities in the Middle East and showed little appetite for the charged rhetoric or interventionist policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama on Wednesday spoke more like a wartime leader, reaffirming his determination to work with other countries but leaving little doubt that the United States would act as the ultimate guarantor of an international order that he said was under acute stress.

As if to underscore his new role, Mr. Obama headed a rare leaders session of the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously passed a resolution requiring countries to pass laws against traveling abroad to join terrorist groups or financing those efforts.

“If there was ever a challenge in our interconnected world that cannot be met by one nation alone, it is this,” he said, “terrorists crossing borders and threatening to unleash unspeakable violence.”

For all the hardening of Mr. Obama’s tone, though, it remained unclear whether the speech represented a fundamental rethinking of his policy or a reluctant response to the threat posed by the Islamic State, brought home for many Americans after the militants posted Internet videos of American hostages who were beheaded.

The strategy he outlined would protect the United States from terrorist threats by crippling the Islamic State and other militants like the Khorasan Group, which was also targeted this week by American airstrikes, and not by trying to transform the societies in which they took root, as did the architects of the Iraq war.

Still, his remarks clearly seemed intended to get past months in which the president appeared visibly conflicted about the proper use of American military force in the Middle East — an ambivalence that opened him to criticism that he was feckless and irresolute.

In addressing the Ukraine crisis, Mr. Obama used his strongest language yet, portraying Russia’s incursions as an affront to the principles of the United Nations and promising to levy a cost on President Vladimir V. Putin. He accused Russia of conspiring with Ukrainian separatists to obstruct an investigation into a downed Malaysian jetliner.

“This is a vision of the world in which might makes right,” Mr. Obama said, “a world in which one nation’s borders can be redrawn by another, and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed.”

The 39-minute speech was also notable for what he did not say. Last year, he singled out nuclear negotiations with Iran and Syria’s civil war as two of his top priorities in the Middle East. On Wednesday, he mentioned them in only a cursory manner.

Iran, he said, should not let the chance for a nuclear agreement slip by. But he made no reference to Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, who has made clear he does not want to shake hands with Mr. Obama this week, a gesture long-awaited as a symbol of thawed relations between Iran and the United States. Privately, American officials have expressed deep skepticism about the status of the negotiations with Tehran, and Mr. Obama’s subdued remarks suggested he shares that pessimism.

The president also did not single out President Bashar al-Assad of Syria for criticism, as he did last year, over the use of chemical weapons, though he spoke of the brutality of the Assad regime. Mr. Assad has voiced support for the American-led strikes in Syria, and his air force has not interfered with American warplanes entering Syrian airspace.

In a sign of how the fight against the Islamic State has reordered priorities, Mr. Obama pledged to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria — something he long resisted and labeled a fantasy. He repeated calls for a political settlement to end the civil war there, acknowledging that “cynics may argue that such an outcome can never come to pass.”

Mr. Obama only fleetingly addressed another of last year’s priorities, the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, delivering a mild rebuke to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace,” he said. “That’s something worthy of reflection within Israel,” he added, in a line that was not in his prepared text.

With much of the day’s focus on the threat from foreign fighters, Mr. Obama took pains to address it. In an echo of the 2009 speech in Cairo that was aimed at the Islamic world, he issued a direct appeal to young Muslims, urging them to resist the blandishments of violent jihadism.

“You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder,” Mr. Obama said. “Those who call you away from this path are betraying this tradition, not defending it.”

Also in keeping with past practice, he acknowledged that the United States is wrestling its own demons. “In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe,” he said, “I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Mo., where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”

The speech was the centerpiece of a hectic three days of diplomacy for Mr. Obama, and he appeared to make strides in broadening the coalition against the Islamic State. On Wednesday, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain recalled Parliament to meet Friday to vote on joining American-led airstrikes in Iraq.

Mr. Cameron lost a vote in Parliament last year when he sought approval for bombing Syria, alongside the United States, after Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons. But he told the BBC that these airstrikes were the right thing to do, and he was confident Parliament would support them. “As ever with our country,” he said, “when we are threatened in this way, we should not turn away from what needs to be done.”

Mr. Obama also met with Iraq’s new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi. He praised Mr. Abadi as the right person to heal Iraq’s sectarian rifts, and said he “recognizes this is not something that is going to be easy, and it is not going to happen overnight.”

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from London.

A version of this article appears in print on September 25, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: PRESIDENT, AT U.N., VOWS TO COUNTER EXTREMIST THREAT.

    In U.N. Speech, Obama Vows to Fight ISIS ‘Network of Death’,
    NYT, 24.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/world/
    middleeast/obama-syria-un-isis.html

Extending a Legacy of War

SEPT. 10, 2014

The New York Times

Middle East | News Analysis

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — In ordering a sustained military campaign against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq, President Obama on Wednesday night effectively set a new course for the remainder of his presidency and may have ensured that he would pass his successor a volatile and incomplete war, much as his predecessor left one for him.

It will be a significantly different kind of war — not like Iraq or Afghanistan, where many tens of thousands of American troops were still deployed when Mr. Obama took the oath nearly six years ago. And even though Mr. Obama compared it to the small-scale, sporadic strikes against isolated terrorists in places like Yemen and Somalia, it will not be exactly like those either.

Instead, the widening battle with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria will be the next chapter in a grueling, generational struggle that has kept the United States at war in one form or another since that day 13 years ago on Thursday when hijacked airplanes shattered America’s sense of its own security. Waged by a president with faded public standing, the new phase will not involve many American troops on the ground, but seems certain to require a far more intense American bombing blitz than in Somalia or Yemen.

The battleground for that new phase will now extend beyond the well-known sands of Iraq into the new theater of Syria, a nation racked by more than three years of brutal civil war. After years of trying to avoid entangling the United States in another “dumb war,” as he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr. Obama is now plunging the United States into the middle of one of the world’s bloodiest, most vicious and fratricidal conflicts.

Whether he can wage this war in a more effective way, crushing a jihadist group while minimizing American casualties, could be the central national security test of his final two years in office — and the first one confronting his successor. Mr. Obama acknowledged that “it will take time to eradicate a cancer” like ISIS, but gave no estimates.

“This is going to be more than three years,” said former Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, a Republican who was once the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Confronting ISIS, we may get done with the biggest part of this in three years, but that’s not going to take care of the threat from radical Islam.”

Mr. Obama’s move into Syria reinforces the need for an approach that draws lessons from the mistakes of both President George W. Bush and his own administration, Mr. Hoekstra said. “What we need is a consistent doctrine that Republicans and Democrats from one administration to another can embrace,” he said.

Leading such a campaign will present a challenge to Mr. Obama perhaps unlike that confronted by any of his predecessors. While other commanders in chief enjoyed a surge in public support when they took the nation to war, the nation is not exactly rallying behind Mr. Obama this time around. A fresh battery of polls this week indicated that most Americans do want him to go after ISIS yet disapprove of his leadership. In other words, they support the policy but not the president.

Peter D. Feaver, a former national security aide to Mr. Bush and President Bill Clinton, said the public unease was due, in part, to Mr. Obama’s own shifting descriptions of the threat and his acknowledgment two weeks ago that he had no strategy yet. “Until tonight, the Obama administration has done a textbook job of following the script on how to undermine public confidence,” he said.

But he added that Mr. Obama had a chance to change that and called his nationally televised speech from the White House “a strong step in the right direction” that may have “set the predicate for a rally.”

In the speech, Mr. Obama tried to strike a balance, again presenting himself as the anti-Bush while embracing a military action he had long sought to avoid. He talked almost as much about what he would not do — “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq” — as what he would do to counter ISIS.

But he also advanced an argument that in some ways mirrored Mr. Bush’s much-debated strategy of pre-emption — that is, acting to forestall a potential threat rather than waiting for it to gather. Mr. Obama acknowledged that ISIS did not currently pose a direct threat to the United States, but he contended that “if left unchecked” it could.

That left many divided about his approach. Barry Pavel, a former Obama national security aide now at the Atlantic Council, said the president might be acting too tentatively.

“I’m not sure half-steps into Syria are ultimately going to achieve the president’s goals,” he said. “It’s a fine strategy for contain and disrupt. It’s not a strategy for defeat by any means. If you want to defeat ISIS, you have to go all-in to Syria, which the president isn’t prepared to do.”

But others warned against that sort of thinking, viewing it as Mr. Bush’s approach all over again. Such advocates expressed concern that Mr. Obama would be too precipitous in hunting down ISIS, when in fact it could be successfully contained by a regional coalition working together without the risks of a deeper military engagement.

“I do hope that he’s going to resist a rush to outcome” said Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, a retired Army officer at the National Security Network, “and that the president will move in a deliberate, methodical fashion with a coalition willing to engage on the ground to resolve the problem over a period of months and years, as opposed to days and weeks.”

In his speech, Mr. Obama tried to equate the emerging strategy to the way he has pursued terrorist cells in Yemen and Somalia. Aides said that by working with local forces on the ground and targeting leaders from the air, the United States had been able to damage extremist groups without occupying territory or engaging in costly nation building, although some former officials like Mr. Pavel noted that terrorist groups remained in both countries.

But what Mr. Obama has in mind for Iraq and Syria goes beyond that approach. By some counts, the United States under Mr. Obama has conducted a dozen or so lethal strikes in Somalia in recent years and about 100 in Yemen. Even at the height of the drone war in Pakistan, Americans conducted fewer than 120 strikes in a single year, 2010, and were down to seven so far this year, according to the Long War Journal.

By contrast, the air campaign against ISIS that Mr. Obama ordered in Iraq has involved 154 strikes in the course of a month — far fewer than necessary in the view of some hawks, but far more than the occasional attacks on satellite terror groups in Africa and Arabia. And that was before Mr. Obama officially expanded the mission to destroying ISIS and effectively erased the border with Syria to send warplanes there as well.

In addition, this war involves a more sprawling and complicated geopolitical landscape than that of Somalia and Yemen, encompassing a broad array of groups, multiple countries, and the broken relationship between the United States and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom Mr. Obama has called on to give up power.

For all that, the campaign Mr. Obama outlined Wednesday night is likely to continue past his departure from office. Much as he was inaugurated with the challenge of finishing Mr. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the next president will be heir to Mr. Obama’s war in Syria and Iraq.

Mr. Obama’s aides said they hoped to use the next two years to reduce the threat of ISIS enough so that the president’s successor would have an easier time — much as Mr. Bush’s aides strived to get Iraq under control with a troop surge and strategy change before turning it over to Mr. Obama.

“We will do as much of that work as we can with the time that is available to the president,” said a senior administration official who briefed reporters under ground rules that did not allow him to be identified.

And then it will be someone else’s turn.

A version of this news analysis appears in print
on September 11, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Extending a Legacy of War.

    Extending a Legacy of War, NYT, 10.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/
    middleeast/extending-a-legacy-of-war.html

Obama, in Speech on ISIS,

Promises Sustained Effort

to Rout Militants

 

SEPT. 10, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday authorized a major expansion of the military campaign against rampaging Sunni militants in the Middle East, including American airstrikes in Syria and the deployment of 475 more military advisers to Iraq. But he sought to dispel fears that the United States was embarking on a repeat of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a speech to the nation from the State Floor of the White House, Mr. Obama said the United States was recruiting a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants, known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He warned that “eradicating a cancer” like ISIS was a long-term challenge that would put some American troops at risk.

“We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” Mr. Obama declared in a 14-minute address. “That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq,” he added, using an alternative name for ISIS. “This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”

The president drew a distinction between the military action he was ordering and the two wars begun by his predecessor, George W. Bush. He likened this campaign to the selective airstrikes that the United States has carried out for years against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, few of which have been made public.

After enduring harsh criticism for saying two weeks ago that he did not have a strategy for dealing with ISIS in Syria, Mr. Obama outlined a plan that will bolster American training and arming of moderate Syrian rebels to fight the militants. Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide a base for the training of those forces.

Mr. Obama called on Congress to authorize the plan to train and equip the rebels — something the Central Intelligence Agency has been doing covertly and on a much smaller scale — but he asserted his authority as commander in chief to expand the overall campaign, which will bring the number of American troops in Iraq to 1,600.

“These American forces will not have a combat mission; we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” Mr. Obama pledged, adding that the mission “will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”

President Obama said that military strategy against ISIS will resemble U.S. efforts in Somalia and Yemen, where airstrikes and other operations have been reported since 2002. The scale of U.S. airstrike operations in Pakistan was much larger, though it has tapered in recent years.

For all of Mr. Obama’s efforts to reassure the public, his remarks were a stark acknowledgment of the threat posed by the militants, whose lightning advance through Iraq and Syria and videotaped beheading of two American journalists have reignited fears of radical Islamic terrorism.

There is no evidence that ISIS is plotting an attack on the United States, Mr. Obama said. But he added, “If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat” to Americans because of foreign fighters, including some from the United States, who have traveled to Syria and Iraq and who could return home to carry out attacks.

Standing just outside the Blue Room, steps from where he announced the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Mr. Obama delivered a message that seemed worlds away from his confident assertions that the United States had decimated Al Qaeda. The United States, he said, was locked in a long battle with a successor to Al Qaeda, “unique in their brutality.”

The president’s remarks, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, will thrust the United States into a civil war in Syria that he had long sought to avoid, and will return a significant American military presence to Iraq, not quite three years after the last American troops withdrew.

Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners. Earlier on Wednesday, he called King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to enlist his support for the plan to step up training of the Syrian rebels.

Mr. Obama is acting as polls show rapidly shifting public opinion, with a large majority of Americans now favoring military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, even as they express deep misgivings about the president’s leadership,

Mr. Obama is also facing difficult crosscurrents on Capitol Hill, where Republican lawmakers, initially reluctant to demand congressional authorization of military action, have begun agitating for a vote, even as some Democrats warn of a stampede to war.

On Wednesday, Senate Democratic leaders prepared legislation on the narrow issue of authorizing the American military to train the Syrian rebels. House Republicans appeared ready to follow their lead.

The surge of activity means Congress is likely to weigh in on the military action before the midterm elections in eight weeks. Former Vice President Dick Cheney further roiled the political atmosphere on Capitol Hill when he gave a speech on Wednesday blaming Mr. Obama’s “arbitrary and hasty” withdrawal of troops in 2011 for the chaos in Iraq.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and a political ally of Mr. Obama, rejected Mr. Cheney’s critique, saying, “We want to be careful that we don’t engage ourselves for a long period of time in a long-term war involving the vulnerability of our troops.”

Mr. Obama’s speech amounted to a strategy for a problem he has long said would defy an American remedy: sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in countries with deeply disaffected minorities and no history of democratic government.

Among the questions that Mr. Obama did not answer: How will the United States and its allies reinvigorate a moderate Syrian opposition that has been marginalized by more extremist forces? And how can the United States act against ISIS in Syria without benefiting President Bashar al-Assad?

While Mr. Obama said that Mr. Assad had lost his legitimacy to govern Syria, he did not call again for his ouster. Instead, he spoke of strengthening the moderate rebels to give them a seat at the table in a political settlement with the Assad government.

Administration officials indicated that airstrikes in Syria could still be weeks away, while American surveillance planes continue to gather intelligence on the location of ISIS targets.

They also tried to manage expectations about whether the United States could truly destroy ISIS. Wiping out a group whose roots go back to the start of the Iraq war is a formidable challenge, a senior official said in a briefing for reporters, speaking on the condition of anonymity under White House ground rules.

“What we can do is systematically roll back the organization, shrink the territory where they’re operating, decimate its ranks, cut off its sources of support in terms of funding and equipment, and have the threat methodically and relentlessly reduced,” he said.
 

Reporting was contributed by Jonathan Weisman, Eric Schmitt, Michael D. Shear and Helene Cooper.

A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: OBAMA PROMISES SUSTAINED EFFORT TO ROUT MILITANTS.

    Obama, in Speech on ISIS, Promises Sustained Effort to Rout Militants,       
    NYT,10.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/obama-speech-isis.html

Transcript of Obama’s Remarks

on the Fight Against ISIS

SEPT. 10, 2014

The New York Times

My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.

As commander in chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people. Over the last several years, we have consistently taken the fight to terrorists who threaten our country. We took out Osama bin Laden and much of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’ve targeted Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and recently eliminated the top commander of its affiliate in Somalia. We’ve done so while bringing more than 140,000 American troops home from Iraq and drawing down our forces in Afghanistan, where our combat mission will end later this year. Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.

Still, we continue to face a terrorist threat. We can’t erase every trace of evil from the world and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm. That was the case before 9/11, and that remains true today. And that’s why we must remain vigilant as threats emerge. At this moment the greatest threats come from the Middle East and North Africa, where radical groups exploit grievances for their own gain. And one of those groups is ISIL — which calls itself the Islamic State.

Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state. It was formerly Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq and has taken advantage of sectarian strife and Syria’s civil war to gain territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syrian border. It is recognized by no government nor by the people it subjugates. ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.

In a region that has known so much bloodshed, these terrorists are unique in their brutality. They execute captured prisoners. They kill children. They enslave, rape and force women into marriage. They threatened a religious minority with genocide. And in acts of barbarism, they took the lives of two American journalists — Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff.

So ISIL poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria and the broader Middle East, including American citizens, personnel and facilities. If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States. While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies. Our intelligence community believes that thousands of foreigners, including Europeans and some Americans, have joined them in Syria and Iraq. Trained and battle-hardened, these fighters could try to return to their home countries and carry out deadly attacks.

I know many Americans are concerned about these threats. Tonight I want you to know that the United States of America is meeting them with strength and resolve. Last month I ordered our military to take targeted action against ISIL to stop its advances. Since then we’ve conducted more than 150 successful airstrikes in Iraq. These strikes have protected American personnel and facilities, killed ISIL fighters, destroyed weapons and given space for Iraqi and Kurdish forces to reclaim key territory. These strikes have also helped save the lives of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

But this is not our fight alone. American power can make a decisive difference, but we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves. Nor can we take the place of Arab partners in securing their region. That’s why I’ve insisted that additional U.S. action depended upon Iraqis forming an inclusive government, which they have now done in recent days.

So tonight, with a new Iraqi government in place, and following consultations with allies abroad and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. Our objective is clear: We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

First, we will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists. Working with the Iraqi government, we will expand our efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions so that we’re hitting ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense. Moreover, I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

Second, we will increase our support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground. In June, I deployed several hundred American service members to Iraq to assess how we can best support Iraqi security forces. Now that those teams have completed their work and Iraq has formed a government, we will send an additional 475 service members to Iraq. As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission. We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment. We’ll also support Iraq’s efforts to stand up national guard units to help Sunni communities secure their own freedom from ISIL control.

Across the border in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I again call on Congress, again, to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters. In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorizes its own people — a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost. Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.

Third, we will continue to draw on our substantial counterterrorism capabilities to prevent ISIL attacks. Working with our partners, we will redouble our efforts to cut off its funding, improve our intelligence, strengthen our defenses, counter its warped ideology, and stem the flow of foreign fighters into and out of the Middle East. And in two weeks, I will chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to further mobilize the international community around this effort.

Fourth, we will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who’ve been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.

So this is our strategy. And in each of these four parts of our strategy, America will be joined by a broad coalition of partners. Already, allies are flying planes with us over Iraq, sending arms and assistance to Iraqi security forces and the Syrian opposition, sharing intelligence and providing billions of dollars in humanitarian aid. Secretary Kerry was in Iraq today meeting with the new government and supporting their efforts to promote unity, and in the coming days he will travel across the Middle East and Europe to enlist more partners in this fight, especially Arab nations who can help mobilize Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria to drive these terrorists from their lands. This is American leadership at its best: We stand with people who fight for their own freedom, and we rally other nations on behalf of our common security and common humanity.

My administration has also secured bipartisan support for this approach here at home. I have the authority to address the threat from ISIL. But I believe we are strongest as a nation when the president and Congress work together. So I welcome congressional support for this effort in order to show the world that Americans are united in confronting this danger.

Now, it will take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL. And any time we take military action, there are risks involved, especially to the servicemen and women who carry out these missions. But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partners’ forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us while supporting partners on the front lines is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years, and it is consistent with the approach I outlined earlier this year: to use force against anyone who threatens America’s core interests, but to mobilize partners wherever possible to address broader challenges to international order.

My fellow Americans, we live in a time of great change. Tomorrow marks 13 years since our country was attacked. Next week marks six years since our economy suffered its worst setback since the Great Depression. Yet despite these shocks, through the pain we felt and the grueling work required to bounce back, America is better positioned today to seize the future than any other nation on Earth.

Our technology companies and universities are unmatched. Our manufacturing and auto industries are thriving. Energy independence is closer than it’s been in decades. For all the work that remains, our businesses are in the longest uninterrupted stretch of job creation in our history. Despite all the divisions and discord within our democracy, I see the grit and determination and common goodness of the American people every single day, and that makes me more confident than ever about our country’s future.

Abroad, American leadership is the one constant in an uncertain world. It is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorists. It is America that has rallied the world against Russian aggression and in support of the Ukrainian people’s right to determine their own destiny. It is America — our scientists, our doctors, our know-how — that can help contain and cure the outbreak of Ebola. It is America that helped remove and destroy Syria’s declared chemical weapons so that they can’t pose a threat to the Syrian people or the world again. And it is America that is helping Muslim communities around the world not just in the fight against terrorism, but in the fight for opportunity and tolerance and a more hopeful future.

America, our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden. But as Americans, we welcome our responsibility to lead. From Europe to Asia, from the far reaches of Africa to war-torn capitals of the Middle East, we stand for freedom, for justice, for dignity. These are values that have guided our nation since its founding. Tonight, I ask for your support in carrying that leadership forward. I do so as a commander in chief who could not be prouder of our men and women in uniform — pilots who bravely fly in the face of danger above the Middle East and service members who support our partners on the ground.

When we helped prevent the massacre of civilians trapped on a distant mountain, here’s what one of them said: “We owe our American friends our lives. Our children will always remember that there was someone who felt our struggle and made a long journey to protect innocent people.”

That is the difference we make in the world. And our own safety, our own security depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for — timeless ideals that will endure long after those who offer only hate and destruction have been vanquished from the Earth.

May God bless our troops and may God bless the United States of America.

    Transcript of Obama’s Remarks on the Fight Against ISIS,
    NYT, 10.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/
    obamas-remarks-on-the-fight-against-isis.html

Commitments on Three Fronts

Test Obama’s Foreign Policy

 

SEPT. 3, 2014

The New York Times

News Analysis

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — In vowing in Estonia on Wednesday to defend vulnerable NATO nations from Russia “for as long as necessary,” President Obama has now committed the United States to three major projections of its power: a “pivot” to Asia, a more muscular presence in Europe and a new battle against Islamic extremists that seems very likely to accelerate.

American officials acknowledge that these three commitments are bound to upend Mr. Obama’s plans for shrinking the Pentagon’s budget before he leaves office in 2017. They also challenge a crucial doctrine of his first term: that a reliance on high technology and minimal use of a “light footprint” of military forces can deter ambitious powers and counter terrorists. And the commitments may well reverse one of the critical tenets of his two presidential campaigns, that the money once spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would be turned to “nation-building at home.”

But the accumulation of new defensive initiatives leaves open the question of how forcefully Mr. Obama is committed to reversing the suspicion, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, that the United States is in an era of retrenchment. In his travels in Europe this week and a lengthy tour of Asia planned this fall, the president faces a dual challenge: convincing American allies and partners that he has no intention to leave power vacuums around the globe for adversaries to fill, while convincing Americans that he can face each of these brewing conflicts without plunging them back into another decade of large military commitments and heavy casualties.

“There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior national security official as the war with Iraq loomed a dozen years ago. “If you add up the resources needed to implement the Asian pivot, recommit to the Middle East and increase our presence in Europe, you can’t do it without additional money and capacity. The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago.”

It is not a world that requires, at least for now, the kind of deployments that marked the Cold War, when the United States kept roughly 100,000 troops in Europe and only slightly fewer in Asia. But the prospect of drastically shrinking the military after the post-9/11 era, in which total national security spending more than doubled, now seems highly unlikely. And at a moment when Mr. Obama is still answering critics for saying last week that, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he now needs to articulate several strategies, each tailored to problems that in the last year have taken on surprising complexities.

In facing the more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, he must find a way to confront a different kind of terrorist group, one determined to use the most brutal techniques to take territory that the backwash from the Arab Spring has now put up for grabs. The American bombing campaign against ISIS targets in Iraq does not approach the costs of invading and occupying that country, but Pentagon officials say the weapons, fuel and other expenses of taking on the Islamic extremists are running up bills of about $225 million a month, a figure that will rise if Mr. Obama has to take that fight into Syria.

ISIS “is not invincible,” Matthew G. Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a talk at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, and ISIS does not yet pose the kind of direct threat to the United States that Al Qaeda did before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is “brutal and lethal,” he said, and defeating it will require a long-term commitment of a kind Mr. Obama clearly did not anticipate earlier this year.

In the Russia of President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Obama faces a declining power, afflicted by a shrinking population, a strident nationalism and an economy vulnerable because of its extraordinary dependency on oil exports. Washington is betting that while sanctions are having little effect now, over time they will hollow out Mr. Putin’s poll ratings. But the short term is more complex. For months now, arguments inside the administration have been over how directly and where to draw the line. In Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, on Wednesday Mr. Obama drew it at NATO’s own boundaries. The question is whether Mr. Putin believes him.

In China, the president faces the opposite challenge: a rising power with growing resources and a sense that this is China’s moment to reassert influence in Asia in a way it has not in hundreds of years. Here, the surprise to Mr. Obama has been the aggressiveness shown by Xi Jinping, China’s president, in embracing efforts to press territorial claims against Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, rather than focusing on the domestic economy.

“We didn’t see this coming,” one former member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said this summer, “and there’s a lot of debate about how to counter it.”

The statement could be true for each of the challenges confronting Mr. Obama. It explains why the administration is having difficulty explaining how this combination will affect its future plans.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was put in his job in part to find ways to shrink the military, on the assumption that America’s Iraq commitments were over and as the official combat mission in Afghanistan ends this year. But Mr. Hagel has been either unable or unwilling to articulate the long-term implications of the new commitments.

“There is a chronic disconnect, not just in this administration, between the policy, the budget guidance, and the classified strategies,” said Shawn Brimley, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, who served as the director of strategic planning at the National Security Council during Mr. Obama’s first term. That is what Mr. Obama needs to do for a “lasting legacy” of rethinking America’s defenses, Mr. Brimley said, but “if you don’t do it in the next six months, it’s too late.”

So far, the administration has twice delayed the publication of its second term report, “National Security Strategy of the United States” — events have overwhelmed it. There are still plans afoot to shift the American presence to the Pacific over the next six years, aiming toward the moment when 60 percent of America’s forces abroad are in the region. But many Asian leaders question whether Mr. Obama and his successor will carry through. Many Europeans and Middle Eastern leaders see those efforts and shudder.

Mr. Obama floated several American-led efforts to deter Russia in his speech in Tallinn, from NATO’s impending “rapid response” forces, to increased training missions, to “investing in capabilities like intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance and missile defense.” The last was an interesting allusion, because in the past he was always careful to say that missile defense was aimed at deterring outlier states — clearly meaning Iran — rather than nuclear powers like Russia. This time, he made no such disclaimer.
 

A version of this news analysis appears in print on September 4, 2014, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Three-Headed Monster Challenging the President’s Foreign Policy.

    Commitments on Three Fronts Test Obama’s Foreign Policy,
    NYT, 3.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/world/europe/
    commitments-on-3-fronts-test-obamas-foreign-policy-doctrine.html

Obama and the Warmongers

The Politics of the ISIS Threat

AUG. 31, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

We seem to be drifting inexorably toward escalating our fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as the Obama administration mulls whether to extend its “limited” bombing campaign into Syria.

Part of the reasoning is alarm at the speed and efficiency with which ISIS — a militant group President Obama described as “barbaric” — has made gains in northern Iraq and has been able to wash back and forth across the Syrian border. Part is because of the group’s ghastly beheading of the American journalist James Foley — which Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., called “ISIS’s first terrorist attack against the United States” — and threats to behead another.

But another part of the equation is the tremendous political pressure coming from the screeching of war hawks and an anxious and frightened public, weighted most heavily among Republicans and exacerbated by the right-wing media machine.

In fact, when the president tried to tamp down some of the momentum around more swift and expansive military action by indicating that he had not decided how best to move forward militarily in Syria, if at all, what Politico called an “inartful phrase” caught fire in conservative circles. When responding to questions, the president said, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

His aide insisted that the phrase was only about how to move forward in Syria, not against ISIS as a whole, but the latter was exactly the impression conservatives moved quickly to portray.

It was a way of continuing to yoke Obama with the ill effects of a war started by his predecessor and the chaos it created in that region of the world.

In fact, if you listen to Fox News you might even believe that Obama is responsible for the creation of ISIS.

A few months ago, the Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro told her viewers that “you need to be afraid” because of Obama’s fecklessness in dealing with ISIS, adding this nugget:

“And the head of this band of savages is a man named Abu al-Baghdadi — the new Osama bin Laden — a man released by Obama in 2009 who started ISIS a year later.”

That would be extremely troubling, if true. But the fact-checking operation PolitiFact rated it “false,” saying:

“The Defense Department said that the man now known as Baghdadi was released in 2004. The evidence that Baghdadi was still in custody in 2009 appears to be the recollection of an Army colonel who said Baghdadi’s ‘face is very familiar.’

“Even if the colonel is right, Baghdadi was not set free; he was handed over to the Iraqis who released him some time later. But, more important, the legal contract between the United States and Iraq that guaranteed that the United States would give up custody of virtually every detainee was signed during the Bush administration.”

Fox, facts; oil, water.

But the disturbing reality is that the scare tactics are working. In July, a Pew Research Center report found that most Americans thought the United States didn’t have a responsibility to respond to the violence in Iraq.

According to a Pew Research Center report issued last week, however: “Following the beheading of American journalist James Foley, two-thirds of the public (67 percent) cite ISIS as a major threat to the United States.”

The report said that 91 percent of Tea Party Republicans described ISIS as a “major threat” as opposed to 65 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents.

The report also said:

“Half of the sample was asked about ISIS and the other half was asked about the broader threat of ‘Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda,’ which registered similar concern (71 percent major threat, 19 percent minor threat, 6 percent not a threat). Democrats were more likely to see global climate change than ISIS as a major threat.

Americans were thrilled by our decision to exit Iraq when we did, but support for that decision is dropping. In October 2011, Gallup asked poll respondents if they approved or disapproved of Obama’s decision that year to “withdraw nearly all United States troops from Iraq.” Seventy-five percent said they approved. In June of this year, the approval rate had fallen to 61 percent.

Yet 57 percent still believe that it was a mistake to send troops to fight in Iraq in the first place.

Now, Republicans are beginning to pull out the big gun — 9/11 — to further scare the public into supporting more action. Senator Lindsey Graham has said on Fox News that we must act to “stop another 9/11,” possibly a larger one, and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has warned, “Sadly, we’re getting back to a pre-9/11 mentality, and that’s very dangerous.”

Fear is in the air. The president is trying to take a deliberative approach, but he may be drowned out by the drums of war and the chants for blood.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 1, 2014, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline:
Obama and the Warmongers.

    Obama and the Warmongers, NYT, 31.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/opinion/
    charles-blow-the-politics-of-the-isis-threat.html

Obama, ‘Appalled’ by Beheading,

Will Continue Airstrikes

AUG. 20, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

EDGARTOWN, Mass. — President Obama declared on Wednesday that the entire world was “appalled” by the videotaped beheading of an American journalist by Islamic militants, speaking as American warplanes conducted 14 airstrikes in Iraq and the State Department asked the Pentagon to send as many as 300 more American troops to Iraq for security.

“The United States of America will continue to do what we must do to protect our people,” the president said from Martha’s Vineyard, where he was vacationing. “We will be vigilant, and we will be relentless.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks came hours before administration officials said that the president had authorized a secret mission in July to rescue the American, James Foley, and other American hostages in a remote area of Syria. But when commandos arrived, the hostages were not there, American officials said.

Mr. Obama’s harsh remarks, the failed rescue mission and Wednesday’s military action reflected new pressure on the administration not to step back from the assault on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as a recognition of the grim reality that other American hostages held by ISIS face a similar threat.

The events were also a shift in the complexion of the American confrontation with the terrorist group — until now an abstraction to most Americans — after its release of a gruesome video depicting the beheading of Mr. Foley, which ISIS militants said was in retaliation for the American airstrikes in Iraq. ISIS threatened to kill another American journalist held hostage, Steven J. Sotloff, if the airstrikes continued.

Within an hour after Mr. Obama’s remarks, in which he pronounced ISIS a “cancer” that had to be expelled from the Middle East, the United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, announced it had carried out 14 more airstrikes around the Mosul Dam and destroyed more ISIS military vehicles and equipment. There have been 84 American airstrikes so far since Mr. Obama first announced the offensive against the militants on Aug. 7.

Secretary of State John Kerry stepped up the administration’s tough tone. “Make no mistake: We will continue to confront ISIL wherever it tries to spread its despicable hatred,” he said in a statement, using an alternative acronym for ISIS. “The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.”

The graphic video of Mr. Foley’s beheading — released Tuesday night and verified by intelligence officials on Wednesday as authentic — spurred renewed debate about American objectives in Iraq, where the Pentagon’s warplanes unleashed a barrage of bombs this week in an expansion of the limited goals of protecting Americans and providing humanitarian aid initially set forth by Mr. Obama. Despite the attacks, ISIS continued its sweep across Iraq and laid siege to Amerli, a small town in the nation’s center, where residents and an Iraqi Army unit stuck inside are running low on food, medicine and water. Aid dropped by Iraqi army helicopters has failed to meet the town’s needs.

“The situation here is going from bad to worse because we are running out of all things needed for life,” said Adel al-Bayati, a local official reached by phone in the town on Wednesday.

The plight of Amerli — home to members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority, who are Shiite Muslims considered infidels by ISIS — has raised alarm in Iraq and abroad because it bears similarities to other areas where the Sunni militant group has committed mass killings as they have seized territory across northern and western Iraq.

Saying that the United States would be vigilant and relentless in protecting its people, the president called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria a “cancer” that must be extracted.

On Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Obama said he had spoken by phone to Mr. Foley’s parents, telling them that Americans “are all heartbroken at their loss.” He described Mr. Foley as a journalist, a son, a brother and a friend who was “taken from us in an act of violence that shocked the conscience of the entire world.”

He made no mention of Mr. Sotloff, whose life, according to the masked executioner standing by his side in the video, hinges on Mr. Obama’s “next move.”

At the State Department, Marie Harf, a spokeswoman, said American plans for additional airstrikes would not change even though other American hostages were being held by the militants. “We don’t make concessions to terrorists,” she said.

The president gave a statement on the beheading of an American journalist by militants in Syria in which he denounced the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and vowed to stay on course in Iraq.

Mr. Obama’s fear that ISIS militants would massacre Yazidis, another religious minority, as they fled across the rugged Sinjar mountains was one of his stated reasons for authorizing American airstrikes on Aug. 7.

“Let’s be clear about” the Islamic State, Mr. Obama said in his remarks Wednesday. “They have rampaged across cities and villages killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children and subject them to torture and rape and slavery.”

Republican lawmakers who have been pressing for a more aggressive strategy against ISIS seized on the beheading as evidence that Mr. Obama had not done enough to confront the Sunni militants and acknowledge them as a direct threat to Americans.

“Just as Al Qaeda’s initial killings of Americans abroad foretold the carnage they would unleash within our borders,” Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said in a statement after the video’s release, “this barbaric beheading of a defenseless hostage is the clearest indication to date that ISIL has declared war on the United States, on the American people, and on freedom-loving people everywhere.”

Reporting was contributed by Ben Hubbard, Tim Arango and Omar al-Jawoshy from Baghdad, and Azam Ahmed from Khanke, Iraq.

A version of this article appears in print on August 21, 2014,
on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline:
The World Is Appalled by the Killing, Obama Says.

    Obama, ‘Appalled’ by Beheading, Will Continue Airstrikes, NYT, 20.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/us/politics/
    james-foley-beheading-isis-video-authentic-obama.html

Calling for Calm in Ferguson,

Obama Cites Need

for Improved Race Relations

 

AUG. 18, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama called for calm and healing in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday even as he acknowledged the deep racial divisions that continue to plague not only that St. Louis suburb but cities across the United States.

“In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement,” Mr. Obama said at the White House. “In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear.”

“We’ve made extraordinary progress” in race relations, he said, “but we have not made enough progress.”

Mr. Obama’s comments were a notable moment for the first African-American president during the most racially fraught crisis of his time in office, set off by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by the police. Mr. Obama and his administration are working to restore peace in Ferguson and ensure an evenhanded investigation into the shooting all while responding to anger — in Missouri and elsewhere — among blacks about what they say is systemic discrimination by law enforcement officials.

“To a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other,” the president said in his first extended comments on the chaos there.

Mr. Obama took pains to make clear that he was not issuing a blanket indictment of either the protesting crowds or the law enforcement officers responding to the demonstrations. He criticized both the “small minority” of protesters who he said were exploiting the anger over Mr. Brown’s death to loot Ferguson stores as well as the police who used violence of their own against demonstrators.

“While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving in to that anger by looting or carrying guns and even attacking the police only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos,” Mr. Obama said during questioning by reporters.

Still, he emphasized, “there’s no excuse for excessive force by police or any action that denies people the right to protest peacefully.”

Mr. Obama has mostly avoided speaking about himself or his agenda in explicitly racial terms, but he has increasingly been less reticent to do so.

“I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality,” Mr. Obama said, making explicit reference to the $200 million, five-year initiative known as “My Brother’s Keeper” that he started in February to address the plight of black youth.

It was inspired in part by the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, another unarmed black teenager, in 2012 in Florida and the acquittal of the man who killed him, George Zimmerman.

“If I had a son,” Mr. Obama said after Mr. Martin’s death, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

The president’s aides have said the situation in Ferguson has affected him in similar ways.

“You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college,” Mr. Obama said on Monday. He said part of his job was to “to get at those root causes.”

The president spoke after receiving a formal briefing from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on the situation in Ferguson.

Mr. Holder announced Sunday that a federal medical examiner would conduct an independent autopsy of Mr. Brown.

The Police Department in Ferguson has been harshly criticized for refusing to clarify the circumstances of the shooting and then escalating tensions by responding to protests using military weapons and gear.

The president announced that Mr. Holder, who has made civil rights a cornerstone of his tenure, will travel to Ferguson on Wednesday to monitor the situation.

Mr. Obama, when asked, did not say whether he would make a personal visit.

A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
Calling for Calm in Ferguson, Obama Cites Need for Improved Race Relations.

    Calling for Calm in Ferguson, Obama Cites Need for Improved Race Relations,
    NYT, 18.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/
    calling-for-calm-in-ferguson-obama-cites-need-for-improved-race-relations.html

Obama Says Iraq Airstrike Effort

Could Be ‘Long-Term’

 

AUG. 9, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama sought to prepare Americans for an extended presence in the skies over Iraq, telling reporters on Saturday that the airstrikes he ordered this week could go on for months as Iraqis try to build a new government.

“I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” Mr. Obama said before leaving for a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. “This is going to be a long-term project.”

The president repeated his insistence that the United States would not send ground combat troops back to Iraq. But he pledged that it and other countries would stand with the Iraqi leaders against militants if they built an inclusive government in the months ahead.

Mr. Obama said that the “initial goal” of the military intervention was to protect Americans in the country and to help the Iraqi minorities stranded on Sinjar Mountain. “We’re not moving our embassy anytime soon,” he said. “We are going to maintain vigilance and ensure that our people are safe.”

But he said the broader effort was intended to help Iraqis meet the threat from the militants over the long term. “The most important time table that I’m focused on right now is the Iraqi government getting formed and finalized,” the president said before boarding Marine One.

Mr. Obama described for the first time a more complicated effort to rescue Iraqis stranded on Sinjar Mountain, saying that the American military and others might have to create a safe corridor down the mountain. “The next step, which is going to be complicated logistically, is how can we give people safe passage,” Mr. Obama said.

He suggested that helping those people make it to safety would take time. He also said that getting an inclusive Iraqi government formed, and giving all Iraqis a reason to believe that they are represented by that government, would help give Iraqi military forces a reason to fight back against the militants.

“There has to be a rebuilding and an understanding of who it is the Iraqi security forces are reporting to, what they are fighting for,” he added.

Once that happens, Mr. Obama suggested, the American military, working with the Iraqi and Kurdish fighters, can “engage in some offense.”

The president said the military did not immediately required additional funding from Congress to conduct the airstrikes and humanitarian assistance that he had ordered. But he said that could change.

“If and when we need additional dollars,” he said, “then we will certainly make that request.”

    Obama Says Iraq Airstrike Effort Could Be ‘Long-Term’, NYT, 9.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/middleeast/
    us-airstrikes-on-militants-in-iraq.html

Obama on the World

President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman
About Iraq, Putin and Israel

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
 

President Obama’s hair is definitely grayer these days, and no doubt trying to manage foreign policy in a world of increasing disorder accounts for at least half of those gray hairs. (The Tea Party can claim the other half.) But having had a chance to spend an hour touring the horizon with him in the White House Map Room late Friday afternoon, it’s clear that the president has a take on the world, born of many lessons over the last six years, and he has feisty answers for all his foreign policy critics.

Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished. The United States is not going to be the air force of Iraqi Shiites or any other faction. Despite Western sanctions, he cautioned, President Vladimir Putin of Russia “could invade” Ukraine at any time, and, if he does, “trying to find our way back to a cooperative functioning relationship with Russia during the remainder of my term will be much more difficult.” Intervening in Libya to prevent a massacre was the right thing to do, Obama argued, but doing it without sufficient follow-up on the ground to manage Libya’s transition to more democratic politics is probably his biggest foreign policy regret.

At the end of the day, the president mused, the biggest threat to America — the only force that can really weaken us — is us. We have so many things going for us right now as a country — from new energy resources to innovation to a growing economy — but, he said, we will never realize our full potential unless our two parties adopt the same outlook that we’re asking of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds or Israelis and Palestinians: No victor, no vanquished and work together.

“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.”

While he blamed the rise of the Republican far right for extinguishing so many potential compromises, Obama also acknowledged that gerrymandering, the Balkanization of the news media and uncontrolled money in politics — the guts of our political system today — are sapping our ability to face big challenges together, more than any foreign enemy. “Increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme maximalist positions,” he said, “and sooner or later, that catches up with you.”

I began by asking whether if former Secretary of State Dean Acheson was “present at the creation” of the post-World War II order, as he once wrote, did Obama feel present at the “disintegration?”

“First of all, I think you can’t generalize across the globe because there are a bunch of places where good news keeps coming.” Look at Asia, he said, countries like Indonesia, and many countries in Latin America, like Chile. “But I do believe,” he added, “that what we’re seeing in the Middle East and parts of North Africa is an order that dates back to World War I starting to buckle.”

But wouldn’t things be better had we armed the secular Syrian rebels early or kept U.S. troops in Iraq? The fact is, said the president, in Iraq a residual U.S. troop presence would never have been needed had the Shiite majority there not “squandered an opportunity” to share power with Sunnis and Kurds. “Had the Shia majority seized the opportunity to reach out to the Sunnis and the Kurds in a more effective way, [and not] passed legislation like de-Baathification,” no outside troops would have been necessary. Absent their will to do that, our troops sooner or later would have been caught in the crossfire, he argued.

With “respect to Syria,” said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”

Even now, the president said, the administration has difficulty finding, training and arming a sufficient cadre of secular Syrian rebels: “There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”

The “broader point we need to stay focused on,” he added, “is what we have is a disaffected Sunni minority in the case of Iraq, a majority in the case of Syria, stretching from essentially Baghdad to Damascus. ... Unless we can give them a formula that speaks to the aspirations of that population, we are inevitably going to have problems. ... Unfortunately, there was a period of time where the Shia majority in Iraq didn’t fully understand that. They’re starting to understand it now. Unfortunately, we still have ISIL [the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant], which has, I think, very little appeal to ordinary Sunnis.” But “they’re filling a vacuum, and the question for us has to be not simply how we counteract them militarily but how are we going to speak to a Sunni majority in that area ... that, right now, is detached from the global economy.”

Is Iran being helpful? “I think what the Iranians have done,” said the president, “is to finally realize that a maximalist position by the Shias inside of Iraq is, over the long term, going to fail. And that’s, by the way, a broader lesson for every country: You want 100 percent, and the notion that the winner really does take all, all the spoils. Sooner or later that government’s going to break down.”

The only states doing well, like Tunisia, I’ve argued, have done so because their factions adopted the principle of no victor, no vanquished. Once they did, they didn’t need outside help.

“We cannot do for them what they are unwilling to do for themselves,” said the president of the factions in Iraq. “Our military is so capable, that if we put everything we have into it, we can keep a lid on a problem for a time. But for a society to function long term, the people themselves have to make decisions about how they are going to live together, how they are going to accommodate each other’s interests, how they are going to compromise. When it comes to things like corruption, the people and their leaders have to hold themselves accountable for changing those cultures.... ... We can help them and partner with them every step of the way. But we can’t do it for them.”

So, I asked, explain your decision to use military force to protect the refugees from ISIL (which is also known as ISIS) and Kurdistan, which is an island of real decency in Iraq?

“When you have a unique circumstance in which genocide is threatened, and a country is willing to have us in there, you have a strong international consensus that these people need to be protected and we have a capacity to do so, then we have an obligation to do so,” said the president. But given the island of decency the Kurds have built, we also have to ask, he added, not just “how do we push back on ISIL, but also how do we preserve the space for the best impulses inside of Iraq, that very much is on my mind, that has been on my mind throughout.

“I do think the Kurds used that time that was given by our troop sacrifices in Iraq,” Obama added. “They used that time well, and the Kurdish region is functional the way we would like to see. It is tolerant of other sects and other religions in a way that we would like to see elsewhere. So we do think it’s important to make sure that that space is protected, but, more broadly, what I’ve indicated is that I don’t want to be in the business of being the Iraqi air force. I don’t want to get in the business for that matter of being the Kurdish air force, in the absence of a commitment of the people on the ground to get their act together and do what’s necessary politically to start protecting themselves and to push back against ISIL.”

The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.” That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: " ‘We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past. All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again. And we can go about business as usual.’ ”

The president said that what he is telling every faction in Iraq is: “We will be your partners, but we are not going to do it for you. We’re not sending a bunch of U.S. troops back on the ground to keep a lid on things. You’re going to have to show us that you are willing and ready to try and maintain a unified Iraqi government that is based on compromise. That you are willing to continue to build a nonsectarian, functional security force that is answerable to a civilian government. ... We do have a strategic interest in pushing back ISIL. We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq, but we can only do that if we know that we’ve got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void. So if we’re going to reach out to Sunni tribes, if we’re going to reach out to local governors and leaders, they’ve got to have some sense that they’re fighting for something.” Otherwise, Obama said, “We can run [ISIL] off for a certain period of time, but as soon as our planes are gone, they’re coming right back in.”

“It is amazing to see what Israel has become over the last several decades,” he answered. “To have scratched out of rock this incredibly vibrant, incredibly successful, wealthy and powerful country is a testament to the ingenuity, energy and vision of the Jewish people. And because Israel is so capable militarily, I don’t worry about Israel’s survival. ... I think the question really is how does Israel survive. And how can you create a State of Israel that maintains its democratic and civic traditions. How can you preserve a Jewish state that is also reflective of the best values of those who founded Israel. And, in order to do that, it has consistently been my belief that you have to find a way to live side by side in peace with Palestinians. ... You have to recognize that they have legitimate claims, and this is their land and neighborhood as well.”

Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace deal, the president said, it has to start with them. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “poll numbers are a lot higher than mine” and “were greatly boosted by the war in Gaza,” Obama said. “And so if he doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard to see him being able to make some very difficult compromises, including taking on the settler movement. That’s a tough thing to do. With respect to Abu Mazen, it’s a slightly different problem. In some ways, Bibi is too strong [and] in some ways Abu Mazen is too weak to bring them together and make the kinds of bold decisions that Sadat or Begin or Rabin were willing to make. It’s going to require leadership among both the Palestinians and the Israelis to look beyond tomorrow. ... And that’s the hardest thing for politicians to do is to take the long view on things.”

Clearly, a lot of the president’s attitudes on Iraq grow out the turmoil unleashed in Libya by NATO’s decision to topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but not organize any sufficient international follow-on assistance on the ground to help them build institutions. Whether it is getting back into Iraq or newly into Syria, the question that Obama keeps coming back to is: Do I have the partners — local and/or international — to make any improvements we engineer self-sustaining?

“I’ll give you an example of a lesson I had to learn that still has ramifications to this day,” said Obama. “And that is our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi in Libya. I absolutely believed that it was the right thing to do. ... Had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. ... And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction. But what is also true is that I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this. Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. ... So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?’ ”


A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline:
Obama on the World.

    Obama on the World, NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/
    opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html

While Offering Support,

Obama Warns That U.S.

Won’t Be ‘Iraqi Air Force’

 

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Friday that he was open to supporting a sustained effort to drive Sunni militants out of Iraq if Iraqi leaders form a more inclusive government, even as he vowed that the United States had no intention of “being the Iraqi air force.”

Mr. Obama spoke as he ordered American fighter pilots back into the skies over Iraq, a decision that he said he reached after concluding that the United States needed to protect the Kurdish regions in the north and “bolster” an Iraqi leadership that was panicked in the face of advances by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The president said he was confident that the Iraqi leaders understand that “the cavalry is not coming to the rescue” with ground forces. But he insisted that the United States has a “strategic interest in pushing back” ISIS, suggesting a potentially broader mission than the one he described in Thursday’s White House address: to protect American personnel and prevent mass killings of religious minorities.

“We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq,” the president said in an hourlong interview with Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times columnist, as American planes and drones began dropping bombs in Iraq. “But we can only do that if we know that we have got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void.”

Lawmakers offered tempered support for the president’s actions in Iraq, but he also drew criticism from Republicans and Democrats for a mission that some called too limited and others worried would draw the United States more deeply back into Iraq.

Mr. Obama offered his justifications for his latest use of military force in Iraq while lamenting the outcome of a similar decision he made to intervene militarily in Libya in 2011. He defended the desire to help oust the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, with American air power, but he acknowledged that he had “underestimated” the chaos that would follow after American forces left.

“So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene militarily?’ ” Mr. Obama said. “Do we have an answer the day after?”

In the case of the current fighting in Iraq, he suggested that the outcome would be different than chaos in Libya because efforts to form a government that could help rebuild Iraqi society are moving forward, albeit haltingly.

“They’ve now elected a president, they’ve elected a speaker of the house,” Mr. Obama said. “The final step is to elect a prime minister and to allow that prime minister to form a government.” He added that Iraqis are “recognizing that they have to make accommodations in order to hold the country together.”

A day before leaving for a two-week vacation with his family on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Obama discussed many of the most vexing problems that his administration is confronting on the world stage.

In the Middle East, where fighting began Friday morning as a 72-hour cease-fire between Israel and Hamas expired, Mr. Obama said that neither Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, known as Bibi, nor the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, have the political will to come to terms on a lasting peace agreement.

“In some ways Bibi’s too strong, in some ways Abbas is too weak to bring them together and make the kind of bold decisions that a Sadat or a Begin or a Rabin were willing to make,” Mr. Obama said, referring to Anwar el-Sadat, the former president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, two previous Israeli prime ministers.

The president said his own ability to broker a peace deal was limited by the lack of desire on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. “You can lead folks to water, they’ve got to drink,” Mr. Obama said. “And so far at least, they haven’t been willing.”

The president rejected criticism that the military advances by ISIS in Iraq could have been prevented if he had been willing months ago to provide heavy armaments to the Syrian rebels who were fighting against ISIS and the forces of President Bashar al-Assad in that country.

“It’s always been a fantasy,” he said, “this idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.”

Mr. Obama, hinting at some strain from the summer’s international crises, said the prospects for a diplomatic agreement that would prevent President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from invading Ukraine were real, but dimming.

“A deal should be possible,” Mr. Obama said. However, he added, “we are at a dangerous time, in part because the position of the separatists has weakened. I think Putin does not want to lose face, and so the window for arriving at that compromise continues to narrow.”

On Iran, the president said the chance that American efforts to strike a deal on nuclear weapons is “a little less than 50-50,” in part because some Islamic leaders may fear such a pact would loosen their grip on power.

“That may prevent us from getting a deal done,” Mr. Obama said. “It is there to be had. Whether ultimately Iran can seize that opportunity — we will have to wait and see, but it is not for lack of trying on our part.”

Some of the criticism of Mr. Obama’s Iraq announcement came from his own party. Democrats and the antiwar groups that make up a crucial part of their political base said they were concerned about “mission creep,” cautioning that their opposition to committing ground forces in Iraq was resolute.

“I hope and I have to believe the president when he said that it is limited and strictly for the purpose of protecting U.S. personnel and a humanitarian mission to prevent genocide,” Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat who is one of the party’s leading antiwar voices on Capitol Hill, said in an interview. “My concern is for mission creep and escalation into a larger military conflict. The American people don’t have the appetite for sending combat troops and engaging in another war in Iraq.”

At the same time, some Republicans suggested that the president had acted too slowly and timidly to confront ISIS, and now was moving too cautiously against the group.

“If this is the beginning of a real effort to push back ISIS and destroy them, then I definitely support that,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, an Air Force veteran and Air National Guardsman who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee. “Unfortunately, he did not have the intensity to come out and say that we have to destroy them. I think the president is frightened of re-engaging in Iraq, and I don’t think he really knows how to sell the reality of re-engaging to the American people.”

Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said he told Mr. Obama last week that he did not believe he was acting aggressively enough to counter the threat from ISIS.

“It’s important that we do carry out some strong military missions inside of Iraq,” he said. He added that it was important to let ISIS “know we’re here in support of our people, and we are not Maliki’s air force, but we are going to protect the Iraqi people,” referring to Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq. “His advisers were glad to know that there are some of us out there who are willing to stand behind the president.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline:
While Offering Support, Obama Warns That U.S. Won’t Be ‘Iraqi Air Force’.

    While Offering Support, Obama Warns That U.S. Won’t Be ‘Iraqi Air Force’,
    NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/world/middleeast/
    while-offering-support-obama-warns-that-us-wont-be-iraqi-air-force.html

Fear of ‘Another Benghazi’

Drove White House to Airstrikes in Iraq

By MARK LANDLER,

ALISSA J. RUBIN,

MARK MAZZETTI

and HELENE COOPER

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday evening, moments after finishing a summit meeting with African leaders at the State Department, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered a stark message to President Obama as they rode back to the White House in Mr. Obama’s limousine.

The Kurdish capital, Erbil, once an island of pro-American tranquillity, was in the path of rampaging Sunni militants, the chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, told the president. And to the west, the militants had trapped thousands of members of Iraqi minority groups on a barren mountaintop, with dwindling supplies, raising concerns about a potential genocide.

With American diplomats and business people in Erbil suddenly at risk, at the American Consulate and elsewhere, Mr. Obama began a series of intensive deliberations that resulted, only a day later, in his authorizing airstrikes on the militants, as well as humanitarian airdrops of food and water to the besieged Iraqis.

Looming over that discussion, and the decision to return the United States to a war Mr. Obama had built his political career disparaging, was the specter of an earlier tragedy: the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and has become a potent symbol of weakness for critics of the president.

President Obama spoke about actions taken by his administration in Iraq, including airdrops of humanitarian supplies and the authorization of airstrikes against ISIS forces.
Video Credit By whitehouse.gov on Publish Date August 7, 2014. Image CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

As the tension mounted in Washington, a parallel drama was playing out in Erbil. Kurdish forces who had been fighting the militants in three nearby Christian villages abruptly fell back toward the gates of the city, fanning fears that the city might soon fall. By Thursday morning, people were thronging the airport, desperate for flights out of town.

“The situation near Erbil was becoming more dire than anyone expected,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the White House’s internal deliberations. “We didn’t want another Benghazi.”

For weeks, intelligence officials had been watching the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, gain in strength, replenishing its arsenals with weapons captured both in Syria and in Iraq. But interviews with multiple officials at the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies paint a portrait of a president forced by the unexpectedly rapid deterioration of security in Iraq to abandon his longstanding reluctance to use military force.

Mr. Obama, in a speech late Thursday announcing his decision, insisted this was not a return to war — that Iraq’s fate still ultimately rested in the hands of its three main groups, the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But he made clear that he would take action to protect Americans in Erbil and Baghdad.

“We have an embassy in Baghdad, we have a consulate in Erbil, and we have to make sure that they are not threatened,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on Friday with Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times. “Part of the rationale for the announcement yesterday was an encroachment close enough to Erbil that it would justify us taking shots.”

Still, his decision to order F-18 fighter jets from the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush to carry out bombing raids on militants dramatically raises the risks for Mr. Obama. Unlike other times when he has made the decision to commit American forces — the 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan, for example — Mr. Obama acted within hours.

With nearly 50 African leaders converging on Washington, the president was fully occupied with a week of diplomacy and salesmanship on behalf of American companies — not to mention a White House dinner featuring entertainment by Lionel Richie. On Saturday, he and his wife, Michelle, were to leave town for two weeks of vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

While Mr. Obama discussed security and governance with the leaders, his national security aides were huddling in the Situation Room, getting increasingly dire briefings from embassy officials in Baghdad and the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees Iraq.

“Things reached a tipping point on Wednesday,” said a senior official. “We saw that on the mountain, the Iraqis were not able to resupply and provide food and water.”

Back at the White House that evening, Mr. Obama and General Dempsey continued talking in the Oval Office, joined by the chief of staff, Denis McDonough; the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice; and other officials. The discussion moved toward military action, one official said, though Mr. Obama had not yet decided on anything, beyond airdrops.

About 8 p.m., the meeting broke up and Mr. Obama again left the White House, an hour late, for a dinner date with his wife and a close confidante, Valerie Jarrett, at an Italian restaurant in Georgetown.

Six thousand miles away, in Erbil, Thursday morning broke with news that two towns just 27 miles west of the Kurdish capital, Mahmour and Gwer, had fallen to the militants, and that Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga, had withdrawn. “That was a real problem,” said a former Kurdish official who closely tracks security issues.

In villages and small towns outside the city, even places well north of Erbil and farther from the militant forces, people were frantically piling into cars to flee. The pesh merga were helping to evacuate hundreds of people in large flatbed trucks. When people heard a gunshot, rumors would spread of an ISIS advance.

Americans officials on the ground said they feared that if Erbil emptied, the city would be vulnerable to a militant attack. And if it fell, they feared, not only would Americans be at risk, but it would be a second seismic event for the region — after the June 10 fall of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city — with dangerous consequences for Turkey and a potential for enormous loss of life in Kurdistan.

A look at who the pesh merga are, their history as Iraq’s most formidable force, and why President Obama has now authorized airstrikes against ISIS to support them.
Video Credit By Quynhanh Do and Emily B. Hager on Publish Date August 8, 2014. Image CreditSafin Hamed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As if that were not enough, the militants had seized a critical dam in Mosul, which controls water levels on the Tigris River as far south as Baghdad. The capture of the dam shook Kurdish officials and fueled the sense of crisis during Thursday’s meetings, with officials worried that the militants could either blow it up or use it to cut off water supplies or as a bargaining chip in negotiating anything they wanted.
Continue reading the main story

“That was one of the trip wires we looked at,” said another senior official. “We look at that dam as a potential threat to our embassy in Baghdad.”

At a 90-minute meeting in the Situation Room on Thursday morning, Mr. Obama was briefed again about the plight of the Iraqis stranded on Mount Sinjar. Members of an ancient religious sect known as Yazidi, they were branded as devil worshipers by the militants. The women were to be enslaved; the men were to be slaughtered.

Officials told Mr. Obama there was a real danger of genocide, under the legal definition of the term. “While we have faced difficult humanitarian challenges, this was in a different category,” said an official. “That kind of shakes you up, gets your attention.”

At 11:20 a.m., Mr. Obama left the meeting to travel to Fort Belvoir, Va., where he signed a bill expanding health care for veterans. He had all but made up his mind to authorize airstrikes, officials said, and while he was away, his team drafted specific military options.

When the president returned to the White House barely an hour later, he went back into meetings with his staff. By then, there were news reports of airdrops and possible strikes. But the White House “hunkered down,” an official said, refusing to comment on the reports for fear of endangering a nighttime airdrop over Mount Sinjar.

Mr. Obama did not announce the operations until dawn had broken in Iraq, a delay of several hours that added to the panic in Erbil. Reports of explosions near the city at dusk on Thursday night sowed confusion after Kurdish officials said the United States had begun airstrikes on the militants. The Pentagon flatly denied the reports.

American officials said the United States was closely coordinating with the Iraqi Air Force, which has been carrying out its own strikes on the militants, though officials did not confirm that the explosions reported on Thursday evening were from Iraqi raids. On Friday, an administration official said there had been no airstrikes the previous evening.

Struggling to stanch the fear, keep the fighters at their posts and slow the exodus out of the city, Kurdish officials put out a series of brave-sounding but misleading statements.

The Kurdish prime minister, Necherven Barrzani, sent a letter to Kurdish citizens, posted on a government website, saying: “The pesh merga are going ahead and terrorists are being beaten. Don’t be skeptical.”

Also writing a letter to the Kurdish people was Kosrat Rassoul, deputy to President Massoud Barzani, who said: “There are rumors among the people, which make citizens feel skeptical. Here I want to reassure everyone we in Erbil are ready in the best way to defend the Kurdish territory.”

What they did not say was that the pesh merga were demoralized, uncertain, underequipped and facing a formidable foe along several hundred miles of border between the Kurdistan region and Iraq’s Nineveh and Kirkuk Provinces, where the militants are now the dominant force.

Several fighters who had fought ISIS said they were daunted when they discovered the militants were traveling in bulletproof vehicles that left the pesh merga’s bullets doing little more than pockmarking the metal.

“It’s our business to see the faces of the soldiers and know how they feel,” said Halgurd Hekmat, the head of media for the pesh merga fighters. “I wouldn’t say they were afraid, but they were a bit nervous,” he admitted. Since the fall of Mosul, the pesh merga leadership had warned the Americans and the Iraqi government that they were ill equipped to hold the militants at the border separating Nineveh Province from Kurdistan.

“We told them: ‘We cannot hold it for very long. We are not a country; we don’t have an army; we don’t have aircraft,’ ” said Lt. Gen. Jaber Yawer Manda, the secretary general of the pesh merga ministry. “I said: ‘We are fighting in the front lines now. You have to help us.’ ”
 

On Thursday evening, after a long day in the West Wing, Mr. Obama had a message for Iraqis: “Today, America is coming to help.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: White House Saw ‘Another Benghazi’ Looming.

    Fear of ‘Another Benghazi’ Drove White House to Airstrikes in Iraq,
    NYT,  8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/world/middleeast/
    fear-of-another-benghazi-drove-white-house-to-airstrikes-in-iraq.html

Obama Allows Limited Airstrikes on ISIS

AUG. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER,

MARK LANDLER

and ALISSA J. RUBIN

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday announced he had authorized limited airstrikes against Islamic militants in Iraq, scrambling to avert the fall of the Kurdish capital, Erbil, and returning the United States to a significant battlefield role in Iraq for the first time since the last American soldier left the country at the end of 2011.

Speaking at the White House on Thursday night, Mr. Obama also said that American military aircraft had dropped food and water to tens of thousands of Iraqis trapped on a barren mountain range in northwestern Iraq, having fled the militants, from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, who threaten them with what Mr. Obama called “genocide.”

“Earlier this week, one Iraqi cried that there is no one coming to help,” Mr. Obama said in a somber statement delivered from the State Dining Room. “Well, today America is coming to help.”

The president insisted that these military operations did not amount to a full-scale re-engagement in Iraq. But the relentless advance of the militants, whom he described as “barbaric,” has put them within a 30-minute drive of Erbil, raising an immediate danger for the American diplomats, military advisers and other citizens who are based there.

“As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” said Mr. Obama, who built his run for the White House in part around his opposition to the war in Iraq.

While Mr. Obama has authorized airstrikes, American officials said there had not yet been any as of late Thursday. In addition to protecting Americans in Erbil and Baghdad, the president said he had authorized airstrikes, if necessary, to break the siege on Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands of Yazidis, a religious minority group closely allied with the Kurds, have sought refuge.

The aircraft assigned to dropping food and water over the mountainside were a single C-17 and two C-130 aircraft. They were escorted by a pair of F-18 jet fighters, the administration official said. The planes were over the drop zone for about 15 minutes, and flew at a relatively low altitude. They flew over the Mount Sinjar area for less than 15 minutes, Pentagon officials said, and dropped a total of 5,300 gallons of fresh drinking water and 8,000 meals ready to eat. Mr. Obama, officials said, delayed announcing the steps he intended to take in Iraq until the planes had safely cleared the area.

A senior administration official said that the humanitarian effort would continue as needed, and that he expected further airdrops. “We expect that need to continue,” he said.

The official said that as conditions in Iraq deteriorated in recent days, the United States had worked with Iraqi security forces and Kurdish fighters to coordinate the response to militant advances. The official said the cooperation had included airstrikes by Iraqi forces against militant targets in the north.

Kurdish and Iraqi officials said that airstrikes were carried out Thursday night on two towns in northern Iraq seized by ISIS — Gwer and Mahmour, near Erbil. Earlier on Thursday, The New York Times quoted Kurdish and Iraqi officials as saying that the strikes were carried out by American planes.

While the militants are not believed to have surface-to-air missiles, they do have machine guns that could hit planes flying at a low altitude, said James M. Dubik, a retired Army lieutenant general who oversaw the training of the Iraqi Army in 2007 and 2008.

“These are low and slow aircraft,” General Dubik said. At a minimum, he said, the United States must be prepared for “some defensive use of air power to prevent” the militants from attacking American planes, or going after the humanitarian supplies.

For Mr. Obama, who has steadfastly avoided being drawn into the sectarian furies of the Middle East, the decision raises a host of difficult questions, injecting the American military into Iraq’s broader political struggle — something Mr. Obama said he would not agree to unless Iraq’s three main ethnic groups agreed on a national unity government.

The decision could also open Mr. Obama to charges that he is willing to use American military might to protect Iraqi Christians and other religious minorities but not to prevent the slaughter of Muslims by other Muslims, either in Iraq or neighboring Syria.

Will Parks, the United Nations Children’s Fund chief field officer in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq, discussed the crisis in Sinjar, where 40,000 people are still stuck in the mountains.

But the president said the imminent threat to Erbil and the dire situation unfolding on Mount Sinjar met both his criteria for deploying American force: protecting American lives and assets, and averting a humanitarian disaster.

“When we have the unique capacity to avert a massacre, the United States cannot turn a blind eye,” he said.

Mr. Obama has been reluctant to order direct military action in Iraq while Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki remains in office, but in recent weeks there have been repeated pleas from the Kurdish officials for weapons and assistance as ISIS militants have swept across northwestern Iraq. The militants, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, view Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Christians and Yazidis as infidels.

Deliberations at the White House went on all day Thursday as reports surfaced that administration officials were considering either humanitarian flights, airstrikes or both.

Shortly after 6 p.m., the White House posted a photo of Mr. Obama consulting his national security team in the Situation Room. To his right was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey. Watching from across the table were Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and her principal deputy, Antony J. Blinken. On the wall behind them, the clock recorded the time: 10:37 a.m.

Mr. Obama made only one public appearance, a rushed visit to Fort Belvoir, Va., where he signed into law a bill expanding access to health care for veterans. But aides suggested he might make a statement Thursday night. Before getting into his limousine, Mr. Obama was observed holding an intense conversation with his chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, stabbing his finger several times for emphasis.

Later, Mr. McDonough telephoned the House speaker, John A. Boehner, to inform him of the president’s plans, and other White House officials spoke with lawmakers — all in an effort to avoid bruised feelings like those that followed the prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Administration officials said on Thursday that the crisis on Mount Sinjar in northwestern Iraq had forced their hand. Some 40 children have already died from the heat and dehydration, according to Unicef, while as many as 40,000 people have been sheltering in the bare mountains without food, water or access to supplies.

Still, offensive strikes on militant targets around Erbil and Baghdad would take American involvement in the conflict to a new level — in effect, turning the American Air Force into the Iraqi Air Force.

“The White House is going to recognize that the need to commit air power to Iraq, even for a purely humanitarian mission, is going to open them up to greater criticism for their disengagement from Iraq,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “So they will do their damnedest not to get further involved in Iraq because that would just further validate those criticisms.”

Ever since Sunni militants with ISIS took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, on June 10, Iraqis have feared that Baghdad, to the south, was the insurgents’ ultimate goal. But in recent weeks, the militant group has concentrated on trying to push the Kurds back from areas where Sunnis also live along the border between Kurdistan and Nineveh Province.

It has taken on the powerful Kurdish militias, which were thought to be a bulwark against the advance, and which control huge oil reserves in Kurdistan and broader parts of northern Iraq. An administration official said the United States would expedite the delivery of weapons to the Kurds.

For Mr. Obama, the suffering of the refugees on the mountainside appeared to be a tipping point. He spoke in harrowing terms about their dire circumstances, saying thousands of people were “hiding high up on the mountain, with little but the clothes on their backs.”

“They’re without food, they’re without water,” he said. “People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. These innocent families are faced with a horrible choice: descend the mountain and be slaughtered, or stay and slowly die of thirst and hunger.”
 

Helene Cooper and Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Dohuk, Iraq. Thom Shanker, Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 8, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Obama Allows Airstrikes Against Iraq Rebels.

    Obama Allows Limited Airstrikes on ISIS, 7.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/world/middleeast/
    obama-weighs-military-strikes-to-aid-trapped-iraqis-officials-say.html

Obama Weighs Airstrikes or Aid

to Help Trapped Iraqis, Officials Say

 

AUG. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama is considering airstrikes or airdrops of food and medicine to address a humanitarian crisis among as many as 40,000 religious minorities in Iraq who have been dying of heat and thirst on a mountaintop after death threats from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, administration officials said on Thursday.

The president, in meetings with his national security team at the White House on Thursday morning, has been weighing a series of options ranging from dropping humanitarian supplies on Mount Sinjar to military strikes on the fighters from ISIS now at the base of the mountain, a senior administration official said.

“There could be a humanitarian catastrophe there,” a second administration official said, adding that a decision from Mr. Obama was expected “imminently — this could be a fast-moving train.”

The White House declined to say whether Mr. Obama was weighing airstrikes or airdrops in Iraq, but the press secretary, Josh Earnest, said the United States was disturbed by what he described as “cold and calculated” attacks by ISIS on religious minorities in Iraq.

“These actions have exacerbated an already dire crisis, and the situation is nearing a humanitarian catastrophe,” Mr. Earnest told reporters. The campaign of attacks by ISIS, he said, “demonstrates a callous disregard for human rights and is deeply disturbing.”

Asked specifically about military options, Mr. Earnest said, “I’m not in a position to rule things on the table or off the table.” But he reiterated that there would be no American combat troops in Iraq and that any military action would be extremely limited.

“There are many problems in Iraq,” he said. “This one is a particularly acute one, because we’re seeing people persecuted because of their ethnic or religious identities.”

Mr. Earnest added: “There are no American military solutions to the problems in Iraq. These problems can only be solved with Iraqi political solutions.”

Mr. Obama made no mention of imminent military action as he traveled to Fort Belvoir in the Virginia suburbs on Thursday to sign legislation to overhaul the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs. Top officials were in the meantime gathering at the White House to discuss the possible Iraq action.

The administration had been delaying taking any military action against ISIS until there is a new Iraqi government. Both White House and Pentagon officials have said privately that the United States would not intervene militarily until Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki stepped down.

But administration officials said on Thursday that the crisis on Mount Sinjar may be forcing their hand. About 40 children have already died from the heat and dehydration, according to Unicef, while as many as 40,000 people have been sheltering in the bare mountains without food, water or access to supplies.

The administration officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. One official said that any military action would be “limited, specific and achievable,” noting that Mr. Maliki’s political party was supposed to announce a new candidate for prime minister on Thursday, but had not yet.

Mark Landler and Peter Baker contributed reporting.

    Obama Weighs Airstrikes or Aid to Help Trapped Iraqis, Officials Say,
    NYT, 7.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/world/middleeast/
    obama-weighs-military-strikes-to-aid-trapped-iraqis-officials-say.html

Obama Weighs Steps

to Cover Contraception

JULY 4, 2014

The New York Times

By ROBERT PEAR and ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, reeling from back-to-back blows from the Supreme Court this week, is weighing options that would provide contraceptive coverage to thousands of women who are about to lose it or never had it because of their employers’ religious objections.

The administration must move fast. Legal and health care experts expect a rush to court involving scores of employers seeking to take advantage of the two decisions, one involving Hobby Lobby Stores, which affects for-profit businesses, and the other on Wheaton College that concerns religiously affiliated nonprofit groups. About 100 cases are pending.

One proposal the White House is studying would put companies’ insurers or health plan administrators on the spot for contraceptive coverage, with details of reimbursement to be worked out later.

Another would give the administration itself a larger role in offering cost-free coverage to women who cannot get it through their employers, although the option for a new government entitlement appears unrealistic for financial and political reasons.

The White House is under such pressure that no one has been able to work out details of how the alternatives would be financed or administered.

Administration officials said they were determined to ensure the broadest possible coverage of contraceptives for the largest number of women without requiring employers to violate their religious beliefs.

Mark L. Rienzi, a lawyer who represented both Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College, said the administration had the tools to make an alternative solution work. “The government can find other ways to deliver contraceptives to people without forcing nuns and religious colleges to participate,” he said.

That is not the way Justice Sonia Sotomayor looks at it. In her dissent in the Wheaton College case on Thursday, she said the challenge facing the government was “daunting — if not impossible.”

Still, the administration has another motivation to act as quickly as possible: It is eager to court the votes of women dismayed by the rulings. The Democratic National Committee is already urging voters to fight back against the Hobby Lobby decision and to “stand up for Obamacare” in the November elections. The Supreme Court said that family-owned for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby were not required to provide coverage of contraceptives if they objected on religious grounds.

Whatever the choice, no plan can be turned around in two weeks, or two months. It took more than two years for the administration to figure out how to provide contraceptive coverage for women at nonprofit groups that have religious objections. That arrangement allowed religious organizations to fill out a form that would transfer the delivery of free coverage under the Affordable Care Act to others.

But many of the nonprofit groups say that even notifying an insurer of their objections through the opt-out form would make them complicit in a moral wrong. Some consider all contraception to be wrong; others object only to devices and drugs like the so-called morning-after pill that they believe may cause abortions. One such objector was Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school in Illinois, and the Supreme Court granted it a temporary exemption in the ruling on Thursday.

That move divided the court along gender lines, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joining Justice Sotomayor’s unsparing dissent. They said the court majority had endorsed the opt-out form just three days earlier in the Hobby Lobby case, in which Justice Stephen G. Breyer joined the three female justices in dissent in the 5-to-4 ruling.

The court’s conservative majority — all men — was sanguine about the availability of other ways for the administration to deliver coverage for every form of birth control approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Yet officials are struggling to make sense of a sunny sentence in the court’s order on Thursday exempting Wheaton from the opt-out form. “Nothing in this interim order affects the ability of the applicant’s employees and students to obtain, without cost, the full range of F.D.A.-approved contraceptives,” the majority said in the unsigned opinion.

It said Wheaton could merely notify the government of its religious objections in writing rather than send the opt-out form to its coverage providers.

The difference sounds trivial. But it could create quite a roadblock for the Department of Health and Human Services, Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “Does the court intend for H.H.S. to rely on the filing of lawsuits by every entity claiming an exemption?” she asked. She questioned whether the government was supposed to create “a database that tracks every employer’s insurer or third-party administrator nationwide.”

Wheaton said it would have no difficulty sending a notice to the secretary of Health and Human Services.

The contraceptive coverage requirement is just one of many provisions in rules adopted under the Affordable Care Act, but it has become one of the most significant, both politically and symbolically, overshadowing many other important provisions.

In early 2011, Obama administration officials said they wanted to require insurers to offer contraceptives to women free of charge.

The administration has made progress toward its goal, as millions of women have gained access to birth control without co-payments or other charges. But in the process, the administration has become entangled in scores of court cases, fighting with priests and nuns and other religious believers over details of the health insurance coverage they provide and receive.

The battles are sure to continue for a year or more, with religious objectors emboldened by victories this week. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in writing the majority opinion in the Hobby Lobby case, said it seemed likely that the cost of providing the four drugs and devices that many religious groups object to “would be minor when compared with the overall cost” of the health care law.

Justice Alito wrote approvingly of the idea of shifting contraceptive costs to insurance companies, calling it “an approach that is less restrictive than requiring employers to fund contraceptive methods that violate their religious beliefs.”

But on Thursday the majority made the cost-shifting much harder to accomplish. The general idea is to require insurance companies and plan administrators to deliver coverage when they are told about an employer’s religious objections. They would bear the costs or receive reimbursement from the government.

The situation is more complicated when employers self-insure. There, the administration says, outside plan administrators may obtain a “compensating reduction” in the fees paid by insurers to participate in the insurance exchanges established by the health care law. Those adjustments, the administration has said, will not cost much.

Some religious organizations are using that arrangement. But employee benefits experts said it was not working well, in part because insurers and third-party administrators have had to foot the bill for contraceptive coverage without any immediate offset or reimbursement.

“They are not being paid, and they have no prospect of being reimbursed,” said Christopher E. Condeluci, a lawyer for the Self-Insurance Institute of America.

The Obama administration says the cost of providing contraceptives will be offset by savings that result from greater use of birth control, “fewer unplanned pregnancies” and improvement in women’s health. But, Mr. Condeluci said, “It may be years before the savings are realized.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Weighs Steps to Cover Contraception.

    Obama Weighs Steps to Cover Contraception, NYT, 4.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/us/politics/
    obama-weighs-steps-to-cover-contraception.html

Amid Influx of Migrants,

Obama to Skip Border Visit

on Texas Trip

 

JULY 3, 2014

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and JULIA PRESTON

WASHINGTON — When President Obama travels to Texas next week, he will come as close as he has been in weeks to the rapidly escalating border crisis that has left thousands of unaccompanied children in shelters and spurred angry protests throughout the country.

But despite being battered on all sides on the issue, a White House spokesman said Thursday that the president had no intention of visiting the border for a firsthand look at the scene of what he has called a humanitarian crisis.

“The reason that some people are suggesting the president should go to border when he’s in Texas is because they’d rather play politics than actually trying to address some of these challenges,” Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said Thursday.

In politics, pictures are among the most powerful tools to dramatize policy problems or drive a point home. But a border visit for Mr. Obama raises difficult political questions when he is struggling to balance his message on immigration. Mr. Obama is simultaneously trying to beat back the illegal influx of Central American migrants and vowing to take unilateral action to move his stalled immigration agenda, which includes allowing millions of people in the country illegally to stay in the United States.

“The administration can look too nice or too mean, and finding the middle ground is going to be very, very difficult,” said Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum.

A picture of the president surveying a fortified border could inflame the passions of his allies pressing for an immigration overhaul, who have criticized him for stepping up deportations and enforcement without doing enough to address the plight of those in the country illegally.

But Mr. Obama and his team are determined to maintain a hard-line message — first delivered by the president in a television interview last week — that migrant children who cross the border illegally will not be able to stay in the United States, so their parents should not send them.

“He doesn’t want to go and sort of stand there with his hands on his hips saying, ‘Don’t come in,’ ” said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorksUSA, an employer group advocating an immigration overhaul. “At the same time, most of the public thinks that we should have a reasonable immigration policy, but it can’t be everybody who shows up gets to come in.”

Mr. Obama’s trip to Texas, she added, is “a little snapshot of the corner he’s in” on the issue.

On Thursday, more than 200 immigrant advocacy groups urged Mr. Obama to reconsider any proposal to limit existing special protections for unaccompanied minors apprehended at the border. “The administration’s recent statements have placed far greater emphasis on deterrence of migration than on the importance of protection of children seeking safety,” the organizations wrote in a letter to Mr. Obama.

But House Republican leaders who participated in a tour of the South Texas border by members of the House Judiciary Committee said the president was not doing nearly enough to deter families and children from risking the dangers of the journey across Mexico. “Clearly there is little if any consequence right now for illegal immigration and that needs to change,” said Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republican chairman of the committee, speaking by telephone from Harlingen, Tex., at the end of the tour. He said the president should apply fast-track deportations to many more people crossing the border illegally and step up deportations from inside the country.

Another Republican on the tour, Representative Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the president should cancel a two-year-old program that gives protection from deportation to young immigrants living illegally in this country since childhood. He and 29 other House lawmakers sent a letter to Mr. Obama on Wednesday demanding an end to the program.

But in an unusual glimmer of possible accord between the White House and Republican lawmakers, Mr. Goodlatte said the House would be willing to “take a very close look” if Mr. Obama sent over narrowly tailored proposals to toughen enforcement and “make it easier for the Border Patrol to do their jobs.”

Policy makers on all sides were focusing increasingly on a mesh of laws mandating special treatment of unaccompanied migrant children, most of which were passed under President George W. Bush.

Under an anti-trafficking statute adopted — with bipartisan support — in 2008, minors caught traveling without their parents, if they are not from Mexico, cannot be rapidly deported. Youths from Central America must be transferred within 72 hours from the Border Patrol to the Department of Health and Human Services, which detains them in shelters and works to release them to parents or other responsible adults in the United States.

The president will seek a legal change that would allow the border authorities to treat minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the home countries of most recent migrants — the way they now treat unaccompanied minors from Mexico, a country that has a different procedure because it shares a border with the United States. Under the 2008 law, youths from contiguous countries are questioned by border agents immediately after they are caught. If they do not express fear of returning home or say they have been victims of trafficking, agents can secure their consent to be deported and they are rapidly returned home.

“It’s a fair way to deal with people in the immigration system,” Mr. Earnest said of the expedited procedures. In addition, he said, “It sends a clear and unmistakable signal to parents who might be considering putting their children in the hands of a stranger, in some cases a criminal, to transport them to the southwest border, with the expectation that if they get to the border that they’ll be allowed to remain in the country: That is simply not the case.”

Mr. Goodlatte said he might support the White House proposal, but he would also seek measures to detain and deport more parents in the United States illegally who encourage children to make the dangerous journey.

Federal officials in South Texas have told lawmakers that more than 85 percent of the unaccompanied minors from Central America have been released to close relatives living in this country, including about half released to at least one parent. Many youths reported they were fleeing criminal violence by increasingly aggressive street gangs in their home countries.

Next week Mr. Obama is expected to formally send a request for funds and legal changes allowing him to expand detention and to deport more migrants, including children, more quickly, part of a broad effort to dissuade others from coming. Mr. Obama announced this week that he would seek the funding, expected to top $2 billion.
 

Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported from Washington,
and Julia Preston from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
Amid Influx of Migrants, Obama to Skip Border Visit
on Texas Trip.

    Amid Influx of Migrants, Obama to Skip Border Visit on Texas Trip,
    NYT, 3.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/us/
    amid-influx-of-migrants-obama-to-skip-border-visit-on-texas-trip.html