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John Allen Is Not Getting Good Reviews

John Allen with the Egyptian Foreign Minister / AP
October 31, 2014

Retired Marine General John Allen is hard at work coordinating the Obama administration’s response to the Islamic State, and the early reviews are in. They are not positive.

According to an article in Foreign Policy, Central Command, and its commander, General Austin, don't like Allen.

Among the dissenters was the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Lloyd Austin, who took a dim view of Allen's role. Austin complained to aides that Allen would report directly to the president -- bypassing both himself and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Austin believed that Allen's appointment would lead to confusion about who was really leading the effort, a senior U.S. officer who serves with Austin told me several days after the appointment. "Why the hell do we need a special envoy -- isn't that what [Secretary of State] John Kerry's for?" this senior officer asked.

Austin's private doubts echoed the deep skepticism among a host of serving and retired officers who served in the region, this same senior officer said. Included in this group was former U.S. Central Command (Centcom) chief Anthony Zinni, who issued a harsh public condemnation of the appointment on the day that it was made public. "John Allen is a great guy," Zinni told a reporter on Sept. 12, "but does it take a retired general to coordinate a coalition? What is Centcom, chopped liver?... Who is really leading here -- that is my question."

Marines who served in Iraq during the Anbar Awakening don’t like Allen—at least when they are speaking on background.

The Allen appointment also sparked grumbling among a cadre of Marine Corps officers who had served in Iraq's restive western province of Anbar during the Sunni Awakening of 2006 and 2007. In that period, the Marines serving under Gen. James Conway and Gen. James Mattis successfully kick-started the Anbar Awakening during a series of meetings with Sunni tribal heads in Amman, Jordan. While Allen served as deputy commanding general of the international forces in Anbar from 2006 to 2008, several senior officers and Defense Department officials involved in the Awakening say that Allen did not play a lead role in their effort and did not leave much of an impression.

"John Allen is taking a lot of credit for the work done by others," said one of the officers who served in a senior position under Conway. "I was in those meetings, and I don't remember seeing him."

Currently serving officers say Allen is "gullible."

Allen also brought to his job a reputation among his fellow military officers for being "a boy scout," according to a currently serving officer who knows him well. "Allen is a rah-rah guy, and that's fine, but he's a little gullible," this officer said. The problem, this officer went on to say, is that while Allen "looks great in uniform," he's now filling the role usually reserved for diplomats. "I don't know how that's going to work," the officer said, "since he's never been one." Another senior civilian official who worked under former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and saw Allen up close during the Anbar Awakening was even more dismissive: "He's a parade-ground general," the official said.

His Iraqi contacts from the Anbar days are non-plussed.

Allen's first meeting with Anbari tribal leaders in Amman in early October only increased the doubts of some in the U.S. military that he was "in over his head." Supporting Anbar's anti-Islamic State Sunni tribes in the fight is seen as key to coalition efforts to "degrade and destroy" the terrorist organization, so this first meeting was crucial for Allen. But the meeting was a failure, according to a senior Anbari leader who was in attendance and who communicated his worries to a former U.S. military officer with whom he'd worked during the Anbar Awakening.

The first problem, this leader said, was that Allen was accompanied to the meeting by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk, who also serves as his deputy envoy. McGurk is widely respected in the State Department, where he has served as a top advisor to three U.S. ambassadors to Iraq. But Anbar's leaders view McGurk as a defender of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who marginalized Iraq's Sunni community, purged the Iraqi military of Sunni leadership, and then declared martial law in Anbar when the tribes launched a protest movement.

 The article, by Mark Perry, quotes exactly one source in Allen’s defense, a retired senior Army officer who argues on background, "It's a little much to be blaming John Allen for not resolving a crisis that the Obama White House didn't even notice until August."

Allen, who served a tour as commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan before his retirement from active duty, has already supervised one losing war for this White House. Why did he agree to "coordinate" a second one?