The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  AS THE PRESIDENT’S HUMAN RIGHTS AND UN ADVISER, I suddenly found myself closer to the center of the action at the White House than I had been before. I avidly embraced the responsibility this carried, although it coincided with a very difficult period in my personal life.

  The previous year, Cass and I had started trying to have a second child. We were fortunate to get pregnant quickly, but I miscarried several weeks later. This proved to be a pattern: we experienced three further miscarriages in succession.

  One occurred when I was two months pregnant with a baby we had already decided to name “Jack” if it was a boy. At the time it happened, I was in Sri Lanka attempting to raise with the country’s president the need for accountability for war crimes committed in the last stages of his government’s war against the Tamil Tigers. I began to bleed just as I boarded the plane home.

  After landing in Washington, I met Cass and we went straight to the emergency room at Sibley Hospital. An ultrasound technician examined me, moving the probe back and forth against my lower belly. His rhythmic pressure made it appear as though the baby were moving on the screen, and my spirits soared.

  “There’s your baby,” the technician said.

  “And his heartbeat?” I asked expectantly, craving confirmation of what I thought I had just seen.

  “No, that’s me making the movement,” he replied with little affect. “Your baby has no heartbeat.”

  I dug my face into Cass’s chest and cried, as he did the same.

  Cass was immensely supportive during these heartbreaking times, but I also came to count on the Wednesday Group—my female colleagues on the NSC. As I tried to bounce back from my multiple failed attempts to have a child while managing the intensifying demands of my job, our six p.m. Wednesday meetings became a sacred refuge. The mothers in the group lifted me up, particularly when Cass and I began in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.

  On a few occasions during 2011, I ended up having to slip out of high-level meetings to make it to the IVF clinic in time for a scheduled egg retrieval, or to have the doctors implant the embryos Cass and I had spent the previous weeks making together. I often felt self-conscious making my exit, but when I caught the eye of a Wednesday Group member across the room, she would wink or give me a thumbs-up, and my guilt at leaving would give way to a burst of excitement. Without this support, the combination of the pregnancy disappointments and the juggling might have led me to give up on what at times felt like a futile pursuit.

  Friends who tried IVF had often complained about feeling fatigued by the stress of being poked by so many needles or by the battery of foreign drugs in their bloodstreams. While I certainly didn’t enjoy the daily drug injections, I relished the opportunity to have agency over at least one aspect of our effort to have a child. I finally felt as though I was doing something concrete to contribute to our quest.

  As a former reporter, I retained the habit of carefully detailing in my government notebooks what was discussed and decided in meetings in the Situation Room. During this period, however, my scribbles jumped from detailing Libyan military movements to recording specific telephone instructions from a nurse about how to adjust my IVF drug regimen. It dawned on me that future researchers of the Arab Spring who dug through the White House archives would have a hard time making sense of this juxtaposition.

  I WAS BETWEEN ROUNDS of IVF when I received an invitation to accompany Secretary Clinton to Geneva, where she would be speaking at an important UN Human Rights Council meeting on Libya. I had long hoped to work closely with Clinton. Even though she made a point of asking about Declan when I saw her at the White House, I continued to feel awkward in her presence.

  Jake Sullivan, her longtime senior aide, had orchestrated the invitation. Just thirty-four years old and even younger-looking, Jake was a force of nature. I had never seen anybody so quickly and wisely synthesize information and transform it into strategic counsel. I felt I learned from him almost every time he opened his mouth. I relished the chance to discuss fast-moving events with him during the trip, and happily said yes.

  Flying to Europe on the plane her staff had christened “HillForce1,” I handed Clinton a printout of the recent findings from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay:

  Libyan forces are firing at protesters and bystanders, sealing off neighborhoods and shooting from rooftops. They also block ambulances so that the injured and dead are left on the streets. Reports from hospitals indicate that most of the victims have been shot in the head, chest, or neck, suggesting arbitrary and summary executions. Doctors relate that they are struggling to cope and are running out of blood supplies and medicines to treat the wounded. Images of unverifiable origin appear to portray the digging of mass graves in Tripoli.

  I found the last sentence particularly chilling, as it brought me back to Srebrenica and the mass graves that had been dug for thousands of bodies.

  On my laptop, I pulled up a photo of a large protest in Benghazi.

  “They’ve lost their fear,” I said, showing Clinton the image.

  She nodded, adding, “Not a woman among them.”

  Even though she believed Qaddafi’s attacks on his people disqualified him from leading Libya, she was rightly worried about what would come next.

  When we arrived at the Human Rights Council meeting, ambassadors and their aides chatted with each other and typed on their BlackBerries, barely listening as speaker after speaker read monotone statements condemning Qaddafi. But when Clinton began to speak, the crowd hushed.

  Clinton reinforced President Obama’s demand that Qaddafi step down, and, knowing she was speaking to ambassadors from other repressive countries, pointedly warned, “The power of human dignity is always underestimated until the day it finally prevails.”

  I had a mix of feelings as we flew back to the United States. On the one hand, I knew that President Obama had summoned virtually every American nonmilitary tool to influence Qaddafi, while convincing the world to do the same. On the other hand, I saw that something had been unleashed in Libya that was beyond Qaddafi’s power to control—and ours as well.

  For all of our hopes that the Libyan leader would step down or at least cease attacks on civilians, he repeatedly made clear that he planned to stay in power—and that he viewed those who opposed him as an existential threat to be eliminated. In a fist-pounding, seventy-five-minute speech on Libyan television, he had ranted against the opposition, calling them rats and threatening to slaughter them if they did not surrender. At one point he claimed, “I and the millions will march in order to cleanse Libya inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alley by alley, person by person, until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum.”

  The question of what these threats would mean for Libyan civilians took on profound urgency as Qaddafi began to seize momentum on the battlefield. By the beginning of March, his forces had recovered from early losses and were marching toward Benghazi, the home of the revolution and main opposition stronghold, and recapturing cities and towns along the way.

  The director of the Benghazi Medical Center told one wire reporter that people were showing up at his hospital with “mainly gunshot wounds to the head, chest, abdomen—mostly young people under 25.” He said, “The size and type of these injuries were horrific. Some were cut in half.” Elsewhere, a British journalist witnessed people arming themselves with household items like hammers and axes to defend against Qaddafi’s advancing forces.14

  By this point, columnists and NGOs had begun urging Obama to use military force to prevent a wholesale massacre. On March 1st, the US Senate passed a resolution by unanimous consent urging the UN Security Council “to take such further action to protect civilians in Libya from attack, including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan territory.” Congress didn’t specify what “such further action” beyond a no-fly zone might include, but even establishing one would likely require the United States to bomb Qaddafi’s air defenses—something the Senate resoluti
on failed to mention. As often happens in a crisis, members of Congress and editorial writers wanted to be seen calling for decisive measures (“Obama must act!”), but they used vague language to duck responsibility for the ensuing costs.

  On the afternoon of March 15th, Obama convened his cabinet secretaries in a National Security Council meeting to discuss whether anything could be done to prevent the fall of Benghazi and other towns. In the hours before the meeting, as I digested that day’s ghastly stream of reporting and intelligence, I felt like time was slowing down and speeding up at once. Every red light on my BlackBerry seemed to bring a new SOS from a Libyan saying, “Please help! They are launching an all-out offensive! They are crushing us . . .”

  I had not originally been included on the list of people authorized to attend the President’s meeting, but, mindful of our earlier exchange about Haiti, I wrote to Donilon, urging that he allow me to come.

  An hour before the NSC cabinet meeting, I received word that I had been approved.

  This was the meeting.

  — 25 —

  All Necessary Measures

  President Obama was irritable as he opened the NSC meeting on the worsening crisis in Libya. “I know you have an agenda and a menu of options for us to consider,” he told Donilon. “But we need to start with a baseline question: Is there going to be a Libyan opposition by the weekend?”

  Qaddafi’s forces were on the verge of taking back the town that provided water and fuel to Benghazi. The President was briefed that a military assault on the city of 700,000 people could begin within forty-eight hours, and would be followed by an extended siege.

  Britain and France had brought a draft resolution to the Security Council to authorize the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya, and the main decision before Obama was whether the United States should join our allies in calling for this action. I had been incredulous when I learned of the European proposal. The Libyan military was retaking towns with its tanks and paramilitaries, not its air force.

  Obama was equally mystified by the no-fly zone idea.

  “What percentage of attacks are Qaddafi’s forces carrying out by air?” he asked.

  “Negligible, sir,” replied the representative from the intelligence community.

  Obama shook his head, frustrated that our allies would be presenting the United States with what he later called a “turd sandwich.” They were pushing us to embrace an option that seemed to offer hope to desperate Libyans but would not save them. For that to happen, more than a no-fly zone would be required.

  In some government meetings I saw open minds at work—men and women who came into the Situation Room willing to revise their positions if they heard a compelling argument or were presented with fresh facts. I had also seen officials who sounded entrenched in their views, but who knew (and knew that everybody else knew) that they would compromise in the end. They believed that by initially seeming inflexible, “the room” would land closer to where they started than if they “caved” early.

  However, in this meeting, most participants came in with a fixed position about what to do or not do in Libya. Only the President seemed to be trying to objectively process the facts being presented and the arguments being made.

  Susan, joining by video from New York, argued that we should seek a UN Security Council resolution to do what was actually required to save Benghazi and other opposition-held areas. This option would mean going beyond a no-fly zone and striking Qaddafi’s forces and the land-based weapons they were using to attack civilians. Secretary Clinton joined by telephone from Paris, where she had just met with Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril. She threw her considerable influence behind Susan’s recommendation.

  Vice President Biden and Defense Secretary Gates both voiced opposition to any plan that would involve the US military. Biden, who had advocated bombing Bosnian Serb Army heavy weapons back in the 1990s, had grown dubious about using US military force. He regretted having supported the invasion of Iraq and consistently advocated for winding down the war in Afghanistan. His skepticism of a new military engagement also likely stemmed from the experience of having been the father of a soldier at war. Speaking to veterans and military families, Biden often mentioned that when his son Beau had served in Iraq, he came to understand what the poet John Milton meant when he wrote, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” As for Gates, he did not believe that the United States had a vital national interest in preventing mass atrocities in Libya. The specter of becoming militarily involved in a third Muslim country hung over the discussion.

  Obama seemed restless and unsatisfied as he heard from his key advisers. But he also gave little hint of the course of action he favored. If he laid out his thinking, those who disagreed might silence themselves, or what he said could land in the press.

  When all of the cabinet officials had weighed in, showing a fairly evenly divided room on the question of whether to undertake military action, Obama sought out the opinions of those not sitting at the table. Recounting his mind-set at the time, the President later explained to the writer Michael Lewis that he was “trying to get an argument that [was] not being made.”

  Bringing the backbenchers into the conversation, he heard the powerful argument that US military action might ultimately hurt the cause of nuclear nonproliferation. Qaddafi had previously dismantled his nuclear program at the behest of Washington, so other governments—like that in Iran—might see what happened to Libya and decide to accelerate their pursuit of nuclear weapons as a deterrent against attacks.* However, several officials who favored Susan’s proposal stressed that, if Qaddafi were to succeed in his crackdown, this could encourage excessive brutality by other leaders in the Arab world, setting back the peaceful, democratic gains recently made in Tunisia and Egypt.

  From the start of the meeting, Obama had asked us to gauge the likelihood of mass killings. He demanded that we not use vague phrases like “the town will fall” without specifying what such a development would mean for Libyans.

  “In the towns that the regime is recapturing, what do we know about what is being done to civilians?” he asked.

  The details we had been able to ascertain as Qaddafi’s forces and pro-government militias moved across the country were deeply worrying. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had relayed reports of Qaddafi supporters making house-to-house arrests and executing wounded opposition fighters in hospitals. The UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya had visited the city of Zawiya the previous day, after it had fallen back under Qaddafi’s control and found a partially destroyed ghost town. The regime loyalists in charge refused his request to visit the local hospital, where executions had been rumored. But journalists who had snuck into the town during the fighting reported horrific scenes. A British reporter with The Times spoke to a doctor who had seen civilians attacked with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The doctor said government snipers had targeted him and other medics as they tried to help the wounded. A Sky News journalist described witnessing the “wholesale killing of civilians” after Qaddafi’s forces arrived in a column of tanks, saying, “Doctor after doctor, nurse after nurse told us, and we could see it for ourselves, people, university professors, students, engineers, all being attacked. And there was nothing that they could fight back with.”15

  About ninety minutes into the Situation Room discussion, the President made his way around to me.

  “Sam?” he asked.

  I began by making clear just how little we could verify about what Qaddafi’s forces were actually doing to civilians when they reclaimed territory. But I underscored that we had reason to be concerned about two kinds of atrocities.

  First, Qaddafi’s siege of Benghazi was sure to be savage, as his forces seemed likely to lay waste to the city in order to capture it. The regime’s heavy weapons were already beginning to decimate opposition-controlled Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city. A siege of Benghazi seemed sure to entail shelling and sniping, as well as the denial of food,
water, and electricity.

  Second, after Qaddafi’s troops eventually took control of Benghazi and other towns, they could carry out fierce reprisals against those who had rebelled against the government. The extent of the carnage that would follow was difficult to predict. However, on the basis of Qaddafi’s past treatment of his opposition, the conduct of his forces since the start of the protests, his threats, and the isolated reports we were getting about atrocities, it seemed likely that his security forces would jail, torture, or murder many of their perceived opponents.

  These two questions—the length and ruthlessness of the siege of Benghazi, and the relative cruelty and breadth of attacks afterward—were interwoven. Even if Qaddafi did not stage mass executions of the kind he had threatened, people connected to the opposition believed that they would be slaughtered if the city fell.16 Fearing this, they were extremely unlikely to surrender, prolonging the siege and threatening more lives.

  Speaking as Obama’s adviser on multilateral affairs, I stressed the unusual international agreement up to that point. The Arab League’s demand for military action, for instance, was a surprising development given the widespread distrust of the US government that existed among Arab countries. I read passages from the recent communiqué issued by these Arab governments, in which they called for the UN Security Council “to bear its responsibilities” and “to establish safe areas in places exposed to shelling . . . [to allow] the protection of the Libyan people.”

  I closed by arguing that we should cite this appeal as we pursued a civilian protection mission along the lines of what Susan had proposed.

  The President nodded and moved on to hear other views. After nearly three hours, he ended the meeting without rendering a final decision.

  He was at a crossroads. The pressures that the United States and other countries were imposing on Qaddafi’s regime would take months to reach their full effect, and we had run out of further nonmilitary steps to take to try to affect the Libyan leader’s near-term calculus.