Obama Hosts Foreign Policy Experts, Laying Groundwork for Speech on ISIS

WASHINGTON - In an effort to win over elite opinion before a speech to the nation this week on Iraq and Syria, President Obama played host at a White House dinner on Monday evening for a bipartisan group of prominent foreign policy experts.

Mr. Obama, who was joined by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Secretary of State John Kerry, and other senior officials, looked 'forward to engaging with this group and hearing their views on a range of national security and foreign policy issues,' the White House said in a statement.

But the purpose of the gathering seemed more for Mr. Obama to give his guests, several of whom are fixtures on television talk shows and op-ed pages, a preview of the plan for confronting the threat from the Sunni militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a plan he has promised to reveal on Wednesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, the president will meet at the White House with Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, hoping to build congressional support for what administration officials warn could be a prolonged military campaign against ISIS.

The White House has said little about the details of Mr. Obama's speech, which officials said was still being written Monday. But the carefully orchestrated buildup underscored the stakes for a president who was harshly criticized for confessing two weeks ago that he did not have a strategy for dealing with the militants in Syria.

With a guest list that included national security advisers to three former presidents from both parties, the guest list represented a full range of views about the risks of returning to Iraq.

Two of the guests - Stephen J. Hadley and Richard N. Haass - worked for the George W. Bush administration and have direct experience with the Iraq war and its chaotic aftermath. Mr. Hadley was national security adviser to Mr. Bush in 2007, when his administration undertook the troop surge in Iraq. Mr. Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department during preparations for the war in 2003.

Now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, he recently criticized what he views as Mr. Obama's overstretched foreign policy. 'There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy,' he said. 'The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago.'

Two of the other guests, Samuel R. Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised Democratic presidents during foreign crises: Mr. Berger, while Bill Clinton was weighing airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo; Mr. Brzezinski, while Jimmy Carter was dealing with the Iran hostage crisis.

Mr. Obama also invited three veterans of his administration who were involved in counterterrorism policy: Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser; Michele Flournoy, the former No. 2 official at the Pentagon; and Michael J. Morell, a former deputy C.I.A. director.

Rounding out the table were Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution, who served in Mr. Clinton's State Department, and Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman from California who now runs the Woodrow Wilson Center. Ms. Harman criticized Mr. Obama last week for not making a public statement immediately after the beheading of the second American journalist, Steven J. Sotloff, by an ISIS militant. 'I think it's time for him to say more and do more,' she said on CNN.

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