Analysis: Islamic State brings shift in America: People want to see action

Six years ago, when Barack Obama won the presidency, Americans were weary of overseas problems; today, they’re scared.

An unusually large and sudden shift in public attitudes about the threat the nation faces from extremist Islamic militants in the Middle East has given Obama a much freer hand to order American military forces back into warfare in and around Iraq.

But the same polls that show a clamor for action also offer proof of public doubt about the president’s skill and toughness in dealing with foreign crises.

When Obama delivered a nationally televised address Wednesday night to explain his new counter-terrorism strategy, part of his task was persuading Americans to trust him as a wartime leader, a job description considerably different from the one he campaigned for in 2008 and 2012.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech differed markedly in both language and tone from most of Obama’s major national security addresses. At 15 minutes, it measured less than a third their typical length. It eschewed his hallmark style of carefully balanced paragraphs describing complex ideas in tension with each other, a technique that Obama’s supporters hail as a sign of thoughtfulness and opponents deride as an indicator of indecision.

Instead, Obama began with a straightforward declaration of U.S. intent to “degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.” He used the word “threat” or variations 14 times in the brief speech.

The White House almost seemed to have heeded the advice delivered Tuesday by one of Obama’s arch-foes: “Americans don’t want a lecture. They want a plan,” Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky had said in a Senate speech.

In previous speeches about national security, Obama has often spoken of what he would not do, and he frequently has talked about his tenure in the White House as the end of a war-filled chapter in the nation’s history and the start of a new, more peaceful one. In several speeches, he has talked about how he had “resisted calls for military action.”

Speaking to cadets at West Point a year after his election, Obama declared that “we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people.”

“The nation I’m most interested in building is our own,” he said.

A year and a half ago, in a major address at the National Defense University in Washington, Obama sought to declare an end to the Bush administration’s global war against terrorism. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. The U.S. could redefine its efforts away from “a boundless ‘global war on terror,’” he said, because the threat to the nation from terrorism had “shifted and evolved.”

Shift and evolve it did, but not in the way Obama had hoped.

The rapid rise this summer of the militant Sunni Muslim group that calls itself Islamic State, and its capture of large swaths of territory in northern and western Iraq, surprised both the White House and the American public. As recently as May, the group, also known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL, rated only a short, oblique sentence in a 45-minute speech in which Obama discussed half a dozen other major national security threats.

Not until two weeks later, when the militants routed heavily armed Iraqi forces and captured Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, did administration officials focus on a suddenly perilous situation in Iraq, discovering to their chagrin that the U.S. had little reliable intelligence on the group, or its leaders, and few allies in position to help combat it.

In the three months since then, Obama and the U.S. national security apparatus largely had to play catch-up as the public grew more worried. Those concerns mounted late last month when Obama, in a news conference, said “we don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with the Islamic State fighters on the Syrian side of the border with Iraq.

By Wednesday, the administration had solved at least some of the problems that had stymied it during the summer. A new Iraqi government was in place in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab countries had promised cooperation. And Iran, the leading Shiite Muslim nation, had at least tacitly promised not to disrupt the effort.

With those preliminaries out of the way, Obama was in position to lay out a strategy in which he emphasized that the U.S. would attack militants from the air on either side of the border. He offered limited specifics about how the plan would be carried out, but in terms of rallying public support, that may be of little concern.

Americans in recent weeks have displayed an urgent desire for action against Islamic State, and, at least for a while, will be inclined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, said Neil Newhouse, who served as the chief pollster for Obama’s 2012 Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

“Americans are hungry for leadership and a plan of action,” Newhouse said. “They may not totally have confidence in [Obama], but they’re willing to follow him. They want to see the United States take action.”

In convincing the public, Obama benefits greatly from the nature of the adversary, something he and his advisors are well aware of. The brutality of the militants, particularly their beheadings on video of two American journalists, has shocked the public and suddenly revived fear of international terrorism and radical Islam that were deeply implanted in the national psyche by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, polls and focus groups around the country show.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans said in a recent poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center that they thought the world had now become a “more dangerous place.” The percentage supporting a more active U.S. role overseas has nearly doubled since last fall.

A Washington Post/ABC survey released Tuesday found that support for airstrikes against Sunni insurgents in Iraq had jumped from 45% in June to 54% in August to 71% currently.

“It’s a big change in several attitudes in a very short time,” said Carroll Doherty, Pew’s director of political research.

The public still remains wary of some types of military involvement, Doherty noted. By contrast with the mood immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, when large majorities supported virtually any military response, Americans continue to oppose the use of ground troops in combat, the one tactic Obama specifically ruled out.

But unlike last year, when Obama unsuccessfully tried to rally public support for airstrikes to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government for using chemical weapons against its own citizens, the public “sees U.S. interests at stake” and is willing to go along with military actions, he said.

That changed mood was on display the night before Obama’s speech in focus groups that Newhouse and a Democratic colleague, Margie Omero, conducted in Little Rock, Ark., and Des Moines among female swing voters, part of a public opinion project sponsored by Wal-Mart to examine the views of the giant retailer’s customers.

When moderators asked the 20 women at the two sessions to write down a word that reflected their views of the state of the country, the responses were nearly unanimous: “unstable,” “not safe,” “scary,” “unrest,” “unsettled.” In subsequent questions, the participants made it clear that international problems were driving their concerns.

“It’s every time you turn on the TV,” said one participant, a middle-aged account clerk in Des Moines.

The responses differed strikingly from those offered by participants in similar groups over the last few years, which have focused heavily on economic anxiety and almost never on concern about personal safety or foreign events.

“It’s something I don’t think I’ve ever heard, with those concerns being so salient among swing voters,” said Omero. “People want to see action.”