Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  The president was pissed off, or, as he often said when he was most annoyed, “I’m aggravated.”

  How come we have ISIS in Mosul practically overnight and virtually no warning that the Iraqi security forces would fold like a cheap tent? In the midst of (rather gently) chewing out Jim Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Obama pressed Jim to explain why the Intelligence Community had failed to warn him and senior policymakers that the terrorist group known by various names, but most simply the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was about to conquer a large swath of northern Iraq.

  It was a fair question. Prior to June 2014, we had not been warned of the likelihood that ISIS, a reincarnation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which had gained strength in Syria and seized the Iraqi city of Fallujah, would move across the Syrian border and swiftly take Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. More significantly, it had not been predicted that ISIS’s roughly one thousand fighters would easily overrun thirty thousand Iraqi security forces (ISF) soldiers who abandoned their positions, dropped their weapons, and fled. As director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper readily acknowledged the Intelligence Community was surprised by the Iraqis’ lack of will to fight.

  As policymakers, we too failed to anticipate and react swiftly enough to ISIS’s march and the Iraqis’ ineptitude. We knew Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was a venal Shia sectarian whom we did not trust to govern in the interests of all Iraqis. But we did not fully appreciate the extent to which he had allowed the Iraqi army to atrophy in both will and capacity. Before 2014, we had viewed ISIS as more of a concern in Syria than Iraq and as a lure for foreign fighters who might return home to conduct attacks. Most of my colleagues and I underestimated ISIS as an occupying army that would seize and hold territory, much less try to establish a caliphate. Until Mosul.

  As soon as Mosul fell, and ISIS elements started heading south toward Baghdad, we knew we were living in a different world. ISIS and its so-called “caliphate,” at this point spanning large portions of both Syria and Iraq, could not be allowed to stand. Prime Minister Maliki wanted American air combat support against ISIS, but his corrupt, anti-Sunni tyranny had facilitated ISIS’s advance. President Obama rightly determined that we weren’t going to be Maliki’s air force against the Sunni. For the Iraqis themselves to defeat ISIS, as they had to do, they needed to be unified in their cause—Sunni, Shia, Kurd. Maliki was a force for division and defeat; he needed to resign and, until he did, the United States would not intervene militarily to help the Iraqi army.

  As Maliki clung to power, ISIS advanced on the predominantly Kurdish city of Erbil, seized the Mosul Dam, and threatened Baghdad. Erbil was an important city that housed a U.S. consulate and U.N. agencies. To protect Americans in Erbil and regain control of the Mosul Dam, President Obama authorized limited air strikes in early July to support mainly Kurdish forces who were fighting ISIS in the north.

  In early August, confronted with a major humanitarian crisis, Obama ordered the U.S. military to strike ISIS targets and air-drop critical relief supplies to assist thousands of displaced people from the Yazidi sect who were stranded on Sinjar Mountain and facing potential genocide. The president, nonetheless, rightly continued to resist directly aiding the Iraqi government until Maliki resigned. By mid-August, Maliki relented and relinquished power to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a rational, responsible Shia leader who sought to unite the country. This transition enabled the U.S. to deploy military trainers and combat aircraft to fully join the Iraqi-led campaign against ISIS.

  Over months of meetings in the Situation Room, we crafted, refined, and implemented an integrated campaign plan designed to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. We deployed over 5,200 U.S. forces to train, advise, and equip the Iraqi security forces so that, once sufficiently regenerated, they could take the ground fight to ISIS. The U.S. also employed extensive air strikes against ISIS command facilities, forces, bases, banks, oil infrastructure, and leaders. In Syria, we trained, advised, and equipped Kurdish and Arab opposition elements, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to fight ISIS and provided air support for their battles to retake strategic territory in the far south as well as in the north—from Kobane to Manbij and, eventually, Raqqa.

  Led by Special Envoys General John Allen and Brett McGurk, the Obama administration assembled a coalition of over sixty-five partner countries from NATO, the Gulf, and Asia to wage war against ISIS. Through intensified, targeted strikes, the U.S. military hit both ISIS and Al Qaeda (Khorasan Group) targets across Syria. The strategy also entailed cutting off financial pipelines to ISIS, restricting the flow of foreign fighters into Syria, assisting the Iraqi government to stabilize its finances and to govern more inclusively, and countering the ISIS propaganda machine, which recruits soldiers and spreads venomous propaganda through the internet and social media.

  We faced many gut-wrenching and white-knuckle moments over the course of the counter-ISIS campaign, particularly the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, the subsequent brutal bombings on the subway and airport in Brussels, and the ISIS-inspired massacre in San Bernardino, California. Most personally painful was the killing of Kayla Mueller, an American human rights activist and humanitarian, and the brutal beheadings by ISIS of American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, and humanitarian aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig. At the White House and throughout the U.S. government, led by Lisa Monaco, our colleagues and I worked tirelessly to win the freedom of Americans held hostage abroad, especially in Syria. I got to know James Foley’s mother, Diane, who visited me at USUN and later the White House as she pursued every avenue to bring her son home safely. As a mother, my heart broke for the Foley family, and I grew emotionally invested in James’s fate.

  In the summer of 2014, we received information about the location where we believed Foley and other captives were being held. President Obama swiftly ordered Special Forces to conduct a high-risk nighttime rescue operation. Anxiously, I waited late in my office for the results of the raid, praying that I would have the opportunity finally to give Diane Foley good news. I was crushed when word came back that the compound where the hostages had been held was empty. There was nobody left to rescue.

  In the U.S., fear of ISIS reached irrational, near fever levels by the fall of 2015. When I visited senior executives at NBC headquarters in New York, I was shocked to be asked by a smart and very well-informed executive whether she should still allow her children to walk to school in New York City, given the risk that ISIS might behead them. As a parent, I could relate to her concern, but as national security advisor, I found such outsize fear to be baffling. So too did President Obama, whose ever-rational, calm cool threatened to lead him to downplay the degree of public fear.

  At a November 2015 press conference in Turkey shortly after the Paris attacks, President Obama was peppered with questions on ISIS, including by CNN’s Jim Acosta, who asked breathlessly, “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” By this point, the president had reached his limit. This last question was so over the top that an exasperated Obama dismissed it, saying he “just spent the last three questions answering that very question, so I don’t know what more you want me to add.”

  I shared President Obama’s frustration with those journalists and political opponents who were irresponsibly hyping the ISIS threat, but I worried that he risked sounding out of touch with the popular mood. Before each press availability over the duration of that trip, the traveling senior staff and I joined forces to remind the president that, when it comes to ISIS, like Ebola, he needed to “meet the public where they are,” however out of proportion their alarm may seem. Grudgingly and gradually, the president calibrated his public comments to acknowledge popular concerns without stoking panic. Our focus, however, remained on steadily executing our strategy to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS, while preventing terrorist attacks on Americans and our allies. Meanwhile, as the 2016 election approached, others cravenly used ISIS as a cudgel to demonize
refugees, immigrants, and Muslim Americans for political benefit.

  On a separate issue related to ISIS, our fears were in no way overblown. The Mosul Dam in northern Iraq was, and is, a disaster of biblical proportions waiting to happen, causing the president, me, and our team significant stress. The foundation of the dam is profoundly damaged and precarious. For years, the dam was expertly grouted to mitigate its degradation, but war and ISIS’s proximity to the dam resulted in long periods without maintenance so that the dam’s deterioration accelerated.

  If and when the Mosul Dam breaks, the mighty Tigris River will nearly instantly destroy hundreds of thousands of lives, countless acres of critical agricultural land, and spread death and disease from Mosul to Baghdad. Experts predict the city of Baghdad, including the U.S. embassy compound, will be inundated within three to four days. Iraq as we know it will be gone. Our Intelligence Community prepared a video simulation of the destruction that the dam’s collapse would wreak. When it was shown to the Principals in the Situation Room, there was utter silence. The U.S. government repeatedly sounded the alarm, struggling to animate the Iraqi authorities with the necessary urgency, and pressed them to fund and deploy security personnel for an international grouting operation that would work to stave off the dam’s potential collapse. Of all the terrifying scenarios I lost sleep over—pandemic flu, a terrorist attack employing weapons of mass destruction, a North Korean nuclear strike—the collapse of the Mosul Dam remained in the top five of my recurring nightmares.

  Throughout the duration of the administration, the intensity of our efforts to defeat ISIS never waned. The president convened his NSC on ISIS over and over again. I chaired countless Principals Committee meetings, and Avril held scores of Deputies sessions, to sustain the interagency focus that the president demanded. Obama tasked my NSC colleague Rob Malley with coordinating the counter-ISIS campaign day-to-day from the White House and directed that we provide weekly updates and assessments of the campaign’s progress. In December 2015, Obama internally mandated that his administration “put ISIS in a box” by the end of his term.

  Defense Secretary Ash Carter, a cerebral, self-assured academic with long and deep policy experience, worked with Joint Chiefs chairman Martin Dempsey and later Joseph Dunford, alongside Central Command Generals Lloyd Austin and, subsequently, Joe Votel, to devise and continuously improve an intensified military campaign to fulfill the president’s directive. Their plan entailed retaking Raqqa and Mosul and then cleaning up remaining pockets of ISIS in Syria’s south and east as well as the seam between Iraq and Syria.

  Throughout, we wrestled with persistent challenges, including de-conflicting our operations with those of the Russians deployed inside Syria, and balancing Turkey’s contributions to the counter-ISIS campaign with the imperative of supporting the Kurds. The Turks viewed the Kurds as terrorists, but the Kurds formed the backbone of our Syrian force fighting ISIS. This tension was extremely difficult to manage, but President Obama was able to massage Turkish president Erdog˘an enough to keep the campaign on track. By the time President Obama left office, the coalition had retaken over 60 percent of territory controlled by ISIS in Iraq and almost 30 percent in Syria. Raqqa was under mounting pressure, and preparations for the campaign to retake Mosul were well-advanced.

  Through intensive, coordinated interagency effort, we did indeed manage to “put ISIS in a box” by the end of the administration, placing it securely on the path to defeat and neatly packaged for Obama’s successor to finish off. We knew from the outset that the fight against ISIS would take time and entail setbacks as well as successes. To its credit, for two years the Trump administration pursued our very war plan to continued positive effect, retaking Raqqa and Mosul, eliminating the so-called “caliphate” and, eventually, ISIS’s sole remaining stronghold along the Iraq-Syria border.

  Then, in December 2018, President Trump shocked his closest advisors, Congress, and the world by declaring that he would rapidly withdraw all two thousand U.S. forces from Syria, putting in jeopardy the painstaking gains made against ISIS and abandoning meaningful efforts to assist battle-damaged, liberated portions of Syria. Trump later decided to leave only four hundred U.S. military personnel—fewer than needed to keep ISIS and the Syrian regime in check, much less Iran and Russia, or to protect the Kurd and Arab forces who bore the brunt of the fighting against ISIS. Thus, the risk that ISIS will revive and reinvent itself remains.

  Over a year after I left the White House, with the stresses of being national security advisor behind me, my cell phone rang. Answering, I was surprised to hear a familiar voice start without even a hello, “Boy, do I miss that micromanaging bitch!”

  I laughed uproariously, delighted to hear from a still serving senior general with whom I worked closely in the Obama administration, calling to say “Hi” and commiserate. The general was jokingly referring to the public rap on the Obama White House and his NSC that we, and especially I, micromanaged the agencies and the policy process. The bill of indictment included such dings as: 1) The Principals Committee met too frequently; 2) Meetings went too long; papers were late; and discussion went too much in the weeds; 3) We got too deeply into the agencies’ knickers; and 4) We were overly directive.

  There is some validity to these criticisms. Several of these shortcomings we could and did address, making improvements at least on the margins, if not always to the satisfaction of every principal. After establishing a system to track weekly the number and topics of PCs, we worked to reduce their frequency to the extent events permitted as well as to start and end them more promptly. We increased the timeliness of preparatory paper for PCs, but not uniformly, and tried to focus Principals meetings on the most consequential decisions.

  Almost all of my predecessors, most experts, and I laud the “Scowcroft model” of running the NSC—that of the legendary Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft when he served his second tour as NSA under President George H. W. Bush. In his day, the NSC was viewed as lean and efficient—far smaller, more nimble, and playing a simple coordinating role while generally refraining from involvement in the operational work of the State Department and other agencies. However, the advent of email, the 24/7 cable news cycle, and social media have fundamentally changed the pace and the pressures of national security decision making. The enormous range of national and homeland security issues weighing on any modern president in the post–Cold War world, the incessant demands for immediate response, the intractable reality that the toughest problems, by definition, have no satisfactory solutions, combined with the politicization of foreign policy have largely rendered the Scowcroft gold standard of NSC management obsolete.

  In any event, President Obama’s own approach to governing was not well-suited to a hands-off NSC. He delved deeply into issues, demanded stringent analysis and options, confronted the hardest problems squarely, and to the greatest extent possible made tough decisions on the merits rather than based on political considerations. With his formidable intellect and vast ability to absorb information, Obama was a detail-oriented commander-in-chief who expected that the national security process match his standards of rigor and comprehensiveness. Equally, he required me and his national security team to mirror and support his style of governing. Any less would have been wholly unsatisfactory to him.

  I and my deputies, therefore, worked to the best of our abilities to serve a hands-on president with an ambitious agenda, who took decision making very seriously. President Obama did not want to own responsibility for what he called “stupid shit,” or dangerous choices that he didn’t make, even as he would readily take the blame for those he did. Whether regarding drone policy, if and when to execute a risky hostage rescue operation, or how many troops to deploy and with what mission to Iraq or Afghanistan, President Obama was determined to make, rather than delegate, those most consequential decisions. His was a management style that matched my own temperament and instincts, and I was comfortable driving a policy process that best suited him. That engen
dered some frustration, particularly at DOD and to some extent at State, and surely inspired some sniping in the press about how we did our jobs.

  Neither at the time, nor in retrospect, however, do I regret the president’s hands-on approach and the assiduous work we did to support it. I will gladly take criticism for micromanaging, since the alternative (as we have seen of late) too often is chaos. When the nation’s security is at stake and the costs of failure are so high, I would always rather err on the side of thorough analysis and careful consideration of the risks and benefits—even when we must run the policy process at warp speed.

  By contrast, I do not think it wise to grant unlimited discretion to theater commanders to prosecute military campaigns without any high-level civilian oversight, which enables senior leaders to weigh the consequences of discrete operations for our broader national security. Equally, I strongly prefer that the U.S. president govern with intellectual rigor, clear accountability, and a disciplined policy process rather than with loose, uncoordinated pronouncements based on ideology, whim, or political expediency, which often fail to align with U.S. interests. But I may be old-fashioned.