We did manage to persuade the Egyptian authorities to let us visit el-Shater at Tora, along with two visiting Gulf Arab foreign ministers, Abdullah bin Zayed of the UAE and Khalid Attiyah of Qatar. The improbable idea was to try to get el-Shater’s support for deescalation.
After a long wait in the lobby of our hotel, surrounded by muscular Egyptian security personnel in suits talking nervously into their headsets, we set off for Tora late one night. It took about forty minutes for our convoy of cars to reach the forbidding century-old prison complex on the southern edge of the city. We arrived well after midnight.
El-Shater was being held in the maximum security, or “Scorpion,” block in Tora. Scorpion had about a thousand political prisoners, many of them hardcore MB members, held in about three hundred cold stone cells. Stories of torture and mistreatment were legendary here, and you could feel the grimness of the place as we walked down several dimly lit and foul-smelling corridors toward the warden’s office.
The four of us arranged ourselves in front of a desk, behind which sat the unsmiling warden. He offered us tea, and a few minutes later el-Shater was escorted in by two prison guards. Clad in prison pajamas and wearing cheap plastic sandals, he was still an imposing figure—six foot four, solidly built and bearded. He was pale and had a hacking prison cough, but appeared unbowed by his confinement. He shook hands with each of us, sat down, and engaged us for the next two hours, unintimidated by the company, unapologetic about anything the Brotherhood had done, and definitely unhurried—since he clearly had no place else to go.
El-Shater’s tone was polite, but there was no mistaking his bitterness as he denounced the UAE for complicity in the coup and the United States for its acquiescence. His gestures grew animated. At one point he accidentally bumped my shoulder. One of the prison guards sprang into action, but backed off quickly when el-Shater smiled broadly and said he was just punctuating his comments, not intending to threaten anyone. Bernardino and I outlined the deescalatory steps we had been discussing with the two MB ex-ministers, and the two Gulf Arab ministers asserted their interest in a nonviolent resolution.
El-Shater listened carefully. He said it was hard for him to comment on the particulars in confinement, cut off from his colleagues and the situation at Raba’a. But he asked practical questions about our proposal, and emphasized his commitment to nonviolence and a serious political dialogue. It just couldn’t be a dialogue between “prisoners and jailers.” He closed on a hard note, reminding us that neither he nor the Brotherhood were strangers to privation, and would be unyielding in the face of pressure. “I’m sixty-three years old,” he said. “I’ve spent many years in Egyptian jails, and I am ready to spend many more.”
As we drove back to the hotel, I told Bernardino that our effort had been worthwhile, but I doubted we’d get any more traction. We briefed our MB interlocutors the next day on the conversation with el-Shater, but they were immobilized by the mounting tensions and the difficulty of getting clear signals from their leadership. Sisi was hardening his stance too, sensing that this was the time to bludgeon the Brotherhood into submission and reassert order for Egyptians tired of more than two years of unrest.
In the end, we only postponed the moment of reckoning. Convinced we had reached a diplomatic dead end, I flew home on August 8. A few days later Egyptian security forces swept into Raba’a Square and the nearby al-Nahda Square, killing nearly one thousand Brotherhood supporters. It was a brutal move, as bloody as it was unnecessary. Sisi had cemented his authority at Egypt’s expense, sowing the seeds of an even more violent Islamist movement in the future.
Undoubtedly, we had made our share of tactical mistakes in handling Egypt’s transition. We should have pressed harder for a more deliberate transition timetable right after the revolution, giving secular parties more time to organize. We should have pushed more vigorously against Morsi’s power grab in late 2012; instead, we misread the depths of the popular groundswell that Sisi seized so quickly and effectively, and were inhibited by fears that we would be accused once again of cutting legitimate Islamist politics off at the knees. A more direct declaration that July 3 was a coup might have sobered the Egyptian military and given us more leverage with other political players.
Even with the passage of time, however, I still suspect that American influence was incapable of fundamentally altering the course of events. Mubarak waited too long to act, and it was beyond our power to save him. Of course, we bore some of the responsibility for his autocratic rule, given the significance of our support over three decades. Of course, we could have done more to encourage him to undertake serious reforms. We never, however, had the capacity to transform him into a modernizer, no matter how hard we might have tried.
Egypt’s Arab Spring—like some of the other uprisings in the region—was more of a decapitation than a revolution. It failed to redefine the military’s grip on the country, and as a result, it was inevitable that the generals would reassert their authority as soon as their interests were threatened. There was little we could have done to alter the military’s calculus or stage-manage the collision between Sisi and the Brotherhood. Nor could we have easily erased the deep sense of betrayal and grievance felt by some of our Gulf Arab partners, as well as the Israelis, all of whom saw our handling of Mubarak’s demise and Egypt’s transition as further evidence of our “withdrawal” from the region and lack of resolve. Those perceptions, however unfair, still linger and corrode.
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ARAB AUTOCRACIES HAD seemed alike in their surface stability, but in 2011 each revolt was unstable in its own way. They erupted in parallel, each casting its own shadow onto the others. We struggled to draw meaning from one experience that might help decipher and manage the next. It was hard to find consistency amid the jumble of societies and idiosyncratic personalities and frantic—frequently violent—changes.
Most idiosyncratic of all was Qaddafi. He had stuck to his part of our deal on terrorism and the nuclear issue. But he continued to rule with weirdness and repression, convinced that a strong and sometimes brutal hand was essential to hold together a country that a colonizing Italy had invented from a mishmash of loosely connected regions and tribes. He had atomized the Libyan armed forces and security services to protect against coups, and for similar reasons deliberately prevented the emergence of real courts, legislative bodies, or political parties that could challenge his authority. Qaddafi’s personal style remained decidedly unhinged. His bizarre ninety-minute speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2009 was hardly an advertisement for his soundness of mind. He rambled and ranted, occasionally consulting scraps of paper that he had scattered on the podium, veering from one crazy comment to another. His interpreter was so frustrated that after seventy-five minutes he shouted, “I just can’t take it anymore,” slammed down his headphones, and stormed out.
We kept our end of the bargain, however—normalizing relations, removing sanctions, and setting up an embassy in Tripoli. Led by Gene Cretz, the embassy managed to decipher the Qaddafi regime and all its strangeness and interpret its behavior to Washington. For his sins, Gene became one of the early casualties of WikiLeaks when his cables became public. In one especially vivid telegram, he described Qaddafi’s “voluptuous Ukrainian nurse,” a passage that did not endear him to the Libyan leader.8 After one of Qaddafi’s henchmen told us with chilling candor that “people get killed here for writing things like that,” Clinton withdrew Cretz from Tripoli at the end of 2010.
It was not a surprise when Libyans’ fractiousness spun up after the breathtaking revolutions on either side of them, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt. It was also not a surprise when Qaddafi reacted with characteristic venom and violence. Soon after Mubarak’s resignation next door, emboldened Libyans staged large-scale protests in Tripoli and Benghazi, traditionally a stronghold of anti-Qaddafi and Islamist movements. Intent on restoring fear in his domesti
c audience, and not particularly concerned about his wider audience, Qaddafi ordered the army to retake Benghazi, a city of seven hundred thousand, and “wipe out the rats and dogs” who resisted. “We will find you in your closets,” he declared. “We will have no mercy and no pity.”9
We tried and failed to dissuade Qaddafi. I telephoned my old negotiating partner, Musa Kusa, now Libya’s foreign minister, three times in February. In the first call, he complained that we had stabbed Mubarak in the back and didn’t understand the ugliness that was likely to unfold across the region. In our subsequent conversations, I told him that Qaddafi’s violence against his own people had to stop. I warned him that it would undo not only what we had worked to achieve over the past decade, but the Qaddafi regime itself. Kusa repeated that we didn’t understand the situation or the implacability of his leader. But when I told him again that this would not end well, he sighed heavily and said, “I know.” Kusa defected to the United Kingdom one month later.
President Obama was wary of direct American military involvement, but the pressure to act mounted as Qaddafi’s forces neared Benghazi. There were significant splits among Obama’s advisors, although as is often the case in the retelling of policy debates, I don’t remember them to have been quite as sharply defined as later reported. Biden and Gates made clear their reservations, arguing that there was no vital U.S. national interest at stake; that we already had our hands full trying to wind down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and that we had no idea where intervention might lead. Others maintained that the United States had a responsibility to protect innocent civilians. Acknowledging that the searing experience of Rwanda weighed on her, Susan Rice was especially outspoken. So was Samantha Power. And Hillary Clinton, in one of those rare moments in which she and Bob Gates diverged, eventually spoke out in favor of U.S. military action. No one dismissed or downplayed the risks.
In the end, Obama told Gates, it was a “51–49” call. A number of factors ultimately tipped the balance in favor of military action. First was the likelihood of a bloodbath, and the risks for the United States, moral as well as political, of not acting to prevent it. Some observers later argued that it might have been possible to negotiate a deal with Qaddafi to avert further violence and begin a political transition. I saw little evidence of that. When I later met Kusa, by then living in exile in Qatar, he said he knew Qaddafi as well as anyone, and believed in the spring of 2011 that the mercurial Libyan leader was living in his own world, determined to fight to the end. This was existential for Qaddafi, not the kind of strategic choice he had made with us a decade before. A meeting between an American delegation led by NEA assistant secretary Jeff Feltman and Libyan regime representatives in July 2011 went nowhere, and revealed no signs of Qaddafi’s willingness to step down or concede anything. I always thought the alleged readiness to negotiate of Saif al-Islam, Qaddafi’s son and sometime mouthpiece in the West, was vastly overstated. His rhetoric as the revolution grew was as nasty as his father’s, and his capacity for self-delusion nearly as large.
Second, Obama had to weigh action or inaction in Libya against the wider backdrop of the Arab Spring. In mid-March 2011, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt looked complicated but promising, with relatively little bloodshed. Unrest was bubbling across the region, from Syria to Yemen and Bahrain. To watch while Qaddafi put a violent end to the Libyan uprising would send an awful signal, both about the possibilities for peaceful change and America’s seriousness in encouraging it. Moreover, Qaddafi was the one Arab leader who united his peers in common antagonism. Nothing brought the region’s leaders together like antipathy for the Libyan dictator and his regime. Over four decades, Qaddafi had tried at one time or another to sabotage—or assassinate—just about everyone around the Arab Summit table. They didn’t doubt his vengefulness, and the Arab League called in March for the UN to intervene.
For Obama, Libya was one case where he didn’t have to worry about regional reaction. Several Arab states, including the UAE and Jordan, had even made clear that they’d join in an air operation in Libya. With Gulf Arab sensitivity about our “abandonment” of Mubarak still stinging, this was also an opportunity for us to recover some of their confidence.
Third, while post-Qaddafi Libya would be uncharted territory, it appeared to contain the ingredients for a relatively stable transition. Libya’s oil wealth provided a financial cushion, and an incentive for cooperation. The country’s population was small and significant expertise existed in the Libyan diaspora. The leadership of the political opposition, most of whom had been in exile for some time, seemed responsible.
Fourth, our principal European allies were champing at the bit to act militarily. President Sarkozy was full of bravado about the need to protect Libyan civilians in Benghazi, ideally with the United States and with NATO organizing the mission, but independently if necessary. With Libya just across the Mediterranean, the Europeans had a profound self-interest in getting the post-Qaddafi transition right.
Finally, a UN Security Council resolution authorizing intervention seemed achievable, and would give the operation the international stamp of legality and legitimacy that America’s second Iraq war lacked. The Russians and Chinese had already supported one resolution, in late February, condemning Qaddafi’s brutality. President Medvedev had indicated to the vice president on March 10 that Russia would likely abstain on a new resolution, and Putin had been unenthused but disinclined to countermand his protégé. The U.S. Congress was also strongly in support of limited military action, with the Senate unanimously backing a March resolution endorsing American participation in a no-fly zone.
The potential downsides were not insignificant. A decade before, we had employed careful diplomacy to pry Qaddafi away from international terrorism and the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, on the proposition that he could keep his regime if he changed his behavior. Abetting his overthrow now could undo that message for other proliferators. The still-raw wounds of post-Saddam Iraq were also a reminder of everything that could go wrong once authoritarian lids were removed from pots seething with sectarian and tribal troubles. Nevertheless, I thought the odds were weighted toward intervention—narrowly—and saw inaction in the swirling regional circumstances of the spring of 2011 as potentially even more problematic.
With similar reservations, Obama opted for carefully calibrated military action to stop Qaddafi’s forces short of Benghazi. In discussions at the White House on the evening of March 15, the president was displeased with the initial recommendations he received, dismissing the notion that a no-fly zone would block Qaddafi’s tanks and artillery, the bigger threats to civilians in Benghazi. After his advisors regrouped, Obama approved what was basically a “no-drive” option, under which coalition aircraft could strike at Qaddafi’s ground forces, now strung out along the coast road to Benghazi. In only two days, Susan Rice deftly maneuvered a resolution legitimizing the use of force through the Security Council—the first time in its history that the UN had authorized force to forestall an “imminent massacre”—and Obama emphasized publicly that the U.S. role would be limited. The United States would contribute “unique capabilities”—taking out Libyan air defenses, aerial refueling, intelligence support, precision strikes—at the front end of the mission, which would be led by our international partners. There would be no U.S. troops on the ground.
Although he was later pilloried for an unnamed White House official’s inartful characterization of the U.S. strategy as “leading from behind,” the president’s actions looked strikingly successful at first. Benghazi was spared Qaddafi’s attack, and his forces were beaten back. Rebel militias regained momentum, and by August had taken Tripoli. Almost inevitably, the civilian protection mission morphed into backing for the rebel ground forces, and Qaddafi’s overthrow—precisely what Moscow had feared, and what we had assured them would not be the case. After Tripoli fell, Qaddafi went on the run. He was eventually captured and ignominiously ki
lled in Sirte in October, near where I last met him, at a more hopeful moment, in 2005.
In the immediate aftermath of Qaddafi’s downfall, the Libyan operation seemed a classic example of how Obama’s “long game” strategy could limit American exposure in the Middle East and prod others to step up. It cost the Pentagon less than a billion dollars, half of what we were spending in Afghanistan every week. Our European and Arab partners carried out 90 percent of the air sorties. The UN sent a political mission into Tripoli to help a transitional government; oil production resumed; and we began to plan a training program for new Libyan security forces as militias demobilized. Chris Stevens, an intrepid Arabist who had been stationed in Tripoli before the revolution and had then taken a freighter into Benghazi during the revolt to lead our diplomacy with the opposition, became our first ambassador to post-Qaddafi Libya in the early summer of 2012.
I visited Chris and his team in Tripoli in July, just after Libya’s remarkably smooth first postwar elections. Secular parties had done unexpectedly well, and Islamist groups had not fared nearly as impressively as they had in Egypt or Tunisia. I had grown to respect Chris immensely in his previous posts in the Middle East, where at different times he had been my “control officer,” managing my visits to Jerusalem and Damascus, among other places. He had an easygoing professionalism that won over Arabs as well as American colleagues, and by now knew Libya better than anyone else in the Foreign Service, as well as the broader foreign policy bureaucracy.
The Back Channel Page 34