by Susan Rice
After over a year of intense internal debate, President Obama decided in 2013 to join our Sunni Arab and Turkish partners in arming and later training vetted Syrian rebels who were fighting Assad. The challenge we continually faced, however, was that some of the rebels were genuine political opponents of the regime while others were members of lethal terrorist groups. Still others were in between. The terrorist groups, like the Al Qaeda–linked al-Nusra Front, were the best anti-Assad fighters, but we would never assist them. The difficulty was how to help the good guys, and those in the gray area, without inadvertently providing sophisticated weapons and training to terrorists.
We tried to walk that fine line but could never do so perfectly. The rebels were fractured and lacked a coherent, achievable political agenda. The assistance we provided was significant but not as much as the rebels wanted and arguably needed. We did not do the maximum, because we assessed that the long-term risks of passing the most dangerous weapons to rebels in a murky war zone outweighed the benefits. While the U.S.-supported rebels fought as best they could and at times did increase military pressure on Assad, they were unlikely ever truly to threaten the regime’s survival without direct U.S. military intervention.
The Principals fought over Syria longer and harder than on any issue during my tenure. John Kerry, John Brennan, and Samantha Power argued for the U.S. to do more—provide more lethal weapons to the rebels, take targeted strikes against Assad or his air force, and, perhaps, establish safe zones for civilians. Others, including me and Denis McDonough, Secretary Ash Carter, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey and later Joe Dunford, were equally tortured by the suffering in Syria but opposed deeper U.S. military involvement.
I didn’t see a feasible middle ground. If we took action that directly targeted Assad or his military, we were at war with him, Iran, and ultimately Russia. If we set up a no-fly zone or safe zones on the ground, we were buying a costly, dangerous, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment on top of Afghanistan and Iraq that put significant numbers of U.S. forces in harm’s way. Could we have protected civilians in safe zones? Yes, had we deployed thousands of U.S. troops to take and hold the ground and committed roughly a hundred planes to provide an air-cap. Would that have toppled Assad in addition to saving lives? Unlikely, before Russia intervened in September 2015, and certainly not thereafter.
I believed, and continue to believe that, as pained as we felt, as much as our values were offended, and as amoral the decision not to intervene directly in Syria’s civil war seemed, it was the right choice for the totality of U.S. interests. President Obama agonized over Syria constantly, but repeatedly reached the same conclusion. Many people I respect disagree strongly with that judgment, but in retrospect I cannot say that I would have done much differently—except perhaps to have avoided declaratory statements such as “Assad must go” or red lines as on chemical weapons that raised expectations for actions that may not have served U.S. interests. In the same vein, I question the wisdom of arming and training the Syrian rebels since the level of our support was not sufficient to create more than a temporary stalemate, before Russian intervention tilted the conflict in Assad’s favor.
My heart and my conscience will forever ache over Syria. Since Rwanda, my bias has been in favor of action in the face of mass atrocities—when the risks to U.S. interests are not excessive. In contrast to Libya, in my view there was no version of U.S. intervention in Syria that we should have conducted except very limited strikes to respond to chemical weapons use. For instance, strikes against Assad’s air force, as some advocated, would not have been one-off endeavors. To sustainably degrade his military capacity, given Assad’s external backing and robust air defenses, would have required a long-term air campaign against a far-better-equipped and more sophisticated army than Qaddafi’s. But even still, only U.S. ground forces deployed before Russia intervened could have reliably stopped Assad’s deadly ground war against the rebels. This likely would have amounted to another Iraq-scale invasion. Although I acknowledge the very high costs of limiting our actions and am neither content nor proud to admit it, I believe we were correct not to become more deeply involved militarily in Syria.
Most days, the job of national security advisor seems infinite. Its weight feels like a huge slab of concrete constantly resting on one’s torso. Fortunately, I could still breathe and function under that pressure, even as more and more bricks were piled on top of the original slab. In fact, in some strange way, the crush was both daunting and energizing. If one is doing the job of NSA thoroughly and conscientiously, there are more challenges to monitor and address, more opportunities to be pursued, than any one human being can manage, much less master. To survive and indeed thrive, I needed a first-class team alongside me: strong, capable deputies to divide and conquer the incoming challenges, plus highly motivated, exceedingly competent senior directors to seize strategic opportunities (such as pushing progress on global health security, climate policy, and cyber security) without needing my constant oversight and direction.
In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco. Avril replaced the wonderful Tony Blinken, who became deputy secretary of state in December 2014. A physicist, pilot, bookstore owner, lawyer, and former deputy White House counsel for national security and deputy director of the CIA, with years of additional work in the Senate and at the State Department, Avril is brilliant and brought deep knowledge and broad experience back to the NSC. Already well-known to the president and NSC staff, she adapted easily to her new role. Patient, wise, and calm, Avril helped soothe my sharper impulses with her uniquely disarming combination of love and reason.
Another accomplished lawyer, Lisa had served as a federal prosecutor, chief of staff to FBI director Robert Mueller, and most recently as assistant attorney general for national security when President Obama appointed her his homeland security and counterterrorism advisor in March 2013. Tough, plainspoken, with an acerbic wit and a well-buried soft streak, Lisa took no prisoners in all she did—from killing terrorists to punishing cyber criminals.
In the privacy of the Oval, President Obama dubbed his all-female senior national security team “The Furies.” Avril, Lisa, and I—though all petite in stature—commanded significant power behind the scenes and were the three women President Obama most loved to tease. Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Together, we led and managed the predominantly white male national security cabinet and deputies.
Lisa, Avril, and I laughed at being called “The Furies,” but also feared that the Boss’s nickname for us would leak. The Furies were known as “monstrous, foul-smelling hags,” we would protest. “It’s sexist,” I insisted. “They were goddesses of vengeance and retribution who preyed on men. That is not us. We like men!”
President Obama countered that, “The Furies were not evil. They delivered justice and defended the moral and legal order, mainly by driving their victims mad. The moral and just had nothing to fear from The Furies, only the guilty and evil.” And, his Furies were charming (some of us more than others), tough, smart, and fair. “It’s perfect!” he declared. The president loved each of us individually, but especially the team.
One Saturday, we found ourselves in the Oval Office standing near the Resolute Desk. The Boss was looking at a New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast that was entitled Furies 2.0. Lisa had found the cartoon and, to underscore our private joke, edited it—to depict “Ironia” as Avril, “Sarcasta” as Lisa, and “PassivAggressa” as me, except that Lisa had aptly crossed out “Passiv.” As the three of us cracked up, our friend White House photographer Pete Souza, who was in on the secret, captured the moment in a well-known photo captioned: “A rare moment of weekend laughter with the President’s key national security aides, from left, National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco, and Deputy National Security Advisor Avril H
aines as they joke about a cartoon in The New Yorker that resembled the three women.” It didn’t resemble us physically, of course, but we thought the personality labels were pretty spot-on.
The three of us were quite conscious of the rare gift we enjoyed of having two other strong, supportive women as our closest colleagues (plus Ben Rhodes, whom we also teased about being one of the girls, given his sensitive side). Between the three of us, there was always candor and trust. We always played straight with each other, even when we differed, as Lisa and I sometimes did over personnel and policy. Avril, ever the smooth and deft fixer, would help us forge common ground. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.
Often, Lisa, Avril, and I had to combine our collective efforts to tame a balky bureaucracy and deliver to the president the policy outcomes he sought. That variously entailed massaging, cajoling, pressing, and, if necessary, rolling certain agencies to achieve presidential objectives, which they initially resisted. These ranged from safely and responsibly but substantially increasing refugee admissions numbers and reducing the prison population at Guantánamo, to requiring public reporting by DOD and CIA of the number of civilians accidentally killed in counterterrorism operations, and to ensuring that as we reconfigured our military presence in Afghanistan, we did not fall back into the trap of having Americans directly fighting the Taliban, except in clear cases of self-defense.
On other occasions, the three of us ran interference to ensure that the president did not receive inadequately vetted proposals that we knew he would question and likely reject. On more occasions than I care to recall, like clockwork on a Friday evening, DOD would send over (with no prior notice) a time-sensitive proposal for a high-risk military operation, known as a “con-op” (concept of operations), and demand near immediate presidential approval. After cursing DOD—because we knew that any such proposal had taken at least a week to make its way up the DOD chain of command to the secretary of defense for his approval, yet now DOD was asking the president to bless it instantly—we got to work.
President Obama appropriately expected his NSC staff to employ the established national security decision-making process to give him well-considered recommendations as to whether to approve or reject a con-op. That meant we had to convene the Deputies and Principals on short notice to review the intelligence, operational plan, diplomatic implications, and risks/rewards of the proposal—all over a weekend—and preferably get a decision memo to the president within twenty-four hours. Remarkably, we repeatedly managed these fire drills swiftly and effectively, sometimes surfacing flaws in the proposal and prompting refinements to lower the risks and increase the odds of success. As fast as we obtained a decision, it often was not before someone at DOD had leaked to the press that the anal and micromanaging NSC was slow-rolling their urgent operational plan.
We didn’t let those kinds of ploys knock us off our game or cause us to cut corners in giving the president the kind of analytical rigor and carefully considered recommendations he deserved. Together, Lisa, Avril, and I displayed fierce, loyal, and effective female leadership that was appreciated by the president and many on the NSC staff, if not all the agencies all the time. We cherished the fact that our collaborative women’s leadership style was distinctive and rare, especially in our field.
When we left the White House in 2017, Lisa, Avril, and I gave a signed copy of the Roz Chast Furies 2.0 cartoon to the Boss as a farewell gift. President Obama keeps it in his office at his foundation.
Given that we had to spend ridiculous hours together, I felt grateful to be part of a close-knit NSC leadership team that genuinely loved one another and also knew how to have fun. For starters, we decided to revolutionize the NSC Holiday Party. I led the dancing, which got funky and sweaty fast.
Ben Rhodes was a demon on the dance floor, flipping partners over his back and shoulders. Ben and I had worked closely together from the campaign through every foreign trip of my tenure, every tough press story, and every twist and turn in the Cuba and Iran negotiations. We also shared the experience of being vilified as scapegoats of the right wing, targeted by Fox, and blamed for Benghazi. Ben is funny, super-smart, and kind. Like another brother, Ben always had my back, and I will always have his.
Suzy George, the NSC chief of staff, tended to hang back and watch over the parties, making sure everyone else was having sufficient fun. I first met Suzy over twenty years before, back when she worked for Madeleine Albright at USUN and as deputy chief of staff at the State Department. Tough but sweet, funny but quietly ruthless, Suzy had been a partner at Albright Stonebridge, the highly successful firm Madeleine built after leaving government. With Madeleine’s reluctant but generous blessing, Suzy came to help me whip the NSC into fighting shape—releasing weak players, hiring the best in class, guiding the “right-sizing” effort, and driving improved processes. Suzy had the extraordinary gift of firing somebody and making that person almost think the departure was his idea. I relied on her, like Salman Ahmed, to give me the hard advice straight, correct me when I was off-course, and tell me how to do it right—always with a disarming smile and deadly efficacy. I had learned from Howard Wolpe, when I was assistant secretary, the value of surrounding yourself with colleagues who have the courage and commitment to give you tough love.
Too late in my tenure, we added Wally Adeyemo to our team, a young lawyer of Nigerian descent whom National Economic Council director Jeff Zients and I brought over from Treasury to be our deputy for international economic affairs. Brilliant, polished, smooth, and effective, Wally helped us energize and empower the international economic team, which was responsible for everything from sanctions to trade policy, climate, energy, and preparations for the G7 and G20. Miraculously, he also made the economic aspects of my job far more enjoyable for me.
There is no team I’d rather be with in the trenches or on the dance floor than the extraordinary senior staff of Obama’s second-term NSC.
“What’s the sleep strategy?”
This was a standard Obama question predictably posed as we would fly past the Washington Monument on Marine One, the presidential helicopter, for the fifteen-minute ride to Joint Base Andrews at the start of an overseas trip. It was an especially pertinent question for long trips to Asia or Africa and the Middle East. The answer depended on the number of legs to the journey, time zones, and the schedule we faced when we arrived. Weighing the best approach to ensuring adequate sleep, work time, and readiness for the day ahead, we could usually reach a consensus view.
When the helicopter landed at Andrews, President Obama would bolt off and up the steps to Air Force One, with the press corps capturing his farewell wave. The small team aboard Marine One, who followed him up the front steps to the plane after he was out of sight, usually consisted of me, another senior staffer or two, the White House doctor Ronny Jackson, the president’s lead Secret Service agent, his military aide, and the president’s personal aide Joe Paulsen or Marvin Nicholson.
Once on board, we were wheels-up within a very few minutes, since the presidential aircraft takes priority and clears the airspace around D.C. I always sat in the four-person senior staff cabin where I had a pull-down desk table by the window, an ample leather chair that swiveled but did not recline much, a pillow, and a blanket. Soon after takeoff, I hustled into one of the two forward bathrooms and changed into my comfy travel garb for the long journey ahead.
Air Force One has many cool features—a full office and comfortable bedroom with shower for the president, a conference room big enough to seat ten or more, secure airborne communications, a staff office, the ability to send and receive classified documents, a full kitchen, a doctor’s cabin that can be converted into an emergency operating room, screens with live television and movies galore, and infinite quantities of food and drink.
But the two 747s that take turns flying
the president of the United States and his staff are over thirty years old. They have prehistoric, if amply sized seats, but nothing approaching a lie-flat bed for anyone other than the leader of the free world. The bathrooms are cramped with no facilities for staff or press to wash up. It’s always an honor and still a bit of an adrenaline rush to fly on Air Force One, but the glory is decidedly not in the aircraft itself.
Early in the flight, President Obama would usually saunter back from his cabin at the front of the plane on his way to the conference room, having changed into jeans or khakis, an open-collar shirt, and sometimes a cashmere sweater. He often poked his head into our cabin before walking farther back to greet the rest of the travelers, including the scheduling and advance team, NSC staff, stenographers, and any accompanying VIPs or members of Congress. Obama would then settle in at the far corner of the conference table where he spent the bulk of every trip reading briefing materials and memos, playing spades, eating his meals, and making phone calls, often to foreign leaders.
For me, the outbound journey on every trip was consumed by the need to review the briefing materials my team and I had provided to the president, prepare for every meeting he would conduct, review and edit speeches, press remarks, and talking points, and deal with whatever crisis du jour by fielding calls from the White House or cabinet colleagues. Sometimes I needed to support our frantic advance teams who were already on the ground struggling to resolve some last-minute hitch with the host government—like the Russians refusing to let Secret Service sweep the president’s villa for listening devices, or Japanese officials making some entirely unreasonable demand about the president’s schedule.