A monumentally important moment in the Obama presidency

Of course, if you’re President and Commander in Chief, you can’t announce to your enemy that you are about to begin bombing his or her safe haven.

So timing is all for the Presidential address to the nation tonight.

Barack Obama is meeting, we’re told, in his situation room with military advisers this afternoon.

Are they discussing the strikes they may launch inside Syria after the President has laid out his strategy to the nation?

Or are they moving faster, to the point where the President will say this evening, “that is why, this afternoon, I authorised air strikes against Islamic State targets inside Syria”?

It would be a massive reversal from the go-slow position adopted by the President barely two weeks ago.  The notorious “we have no strategy yet” moment, for which he’s been roundly criticised.

Mind you, a lot has changed in a few weeks.

Public consciousness grew of the threat posed by the Islamic State as a result of the murders of James Foley and Steven Sotloff.  Nato leaders meeting in Wales resolved together to combat the Islamic State.

One by one, hands went up to indicate a potential alliance against the jihadists.

All that no doubt contributed to polling last night by the Wall  Street Journal and NBC which indicated that 61 per cent of the American public now see action against the Islamic State as in the national interest.

And so it is with the national interest in mind, the President will speak, we’re promised by his Secretary of State, with great specificity about his plans to degrade and destroy the Islamic State. Of, it is assumed, air strikes against safe havens in Syria, the importance of arming moderate rebels inside Syria, the need to underpin and support the new Iraqi government, its armed forces, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga.

Of the pressure that must be brought to bear on those supplying the Islamic State with fighters and funds.

Of the need for not only international allies, like Britain and Australia, but for a regional alliance, beginning with the Iraqi government, but including Qatar, Jordan, and the Iranians, if not by name.

Oh, and I forgot the Saudis, a telephone call to whom has already given us the most intriguing insight into the White House’s approach to this monumentally important moment in the Obama presidency, and the United States’ posture on foreign policy (beyond not doing stupid stuff).

Barack Obama was on the phone, we are told, to the Saudi King this morning, when his White House media minders granted rare and careful access to the President.

Well, at least to the Oval Office.. or would you believe the windows of the Oval office.

The cameras glimpsed the President at his desk as they peeked through the external glass doors to the office, the photographers huddled at the windows like parents outside a classroom on the first day of term.

In that “unguarded moment”, pictured above, the President’s lips never moved.  Not once.

He’ll need to find his voice tonight if he’s to persuade his country of the justness of a war which he would most certainly prefer to avoid, but one that has ensnared him, nevertheless.

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