At the end of a long day of meetings, we decompressed over beer at his modest residence on the makeshift embassy compound. In the wake of the elections, he was cautiously upbeat, recognizing all the troubles on the landscape but confident in his ability to connect with Libyans and play a useful role. He acknowledged that security was a difficult problem and would likely become the country’s Achilles’ heel. He stressed that he would be careful, not just for his own sake, but for the entire mission. But he knew that there was no such thing as zero risk in our profession. That conversation has haunted me ever since.
On a trip to Jordan in September, I received the kind of call you always dread in the middle of the night. It was the State Department Operations Center, informing me that there had been an attack on American diplomats in Benghazi. There was no further information. A few hours later, a somber senior watch officer told me that Chris Stevens and three of our colleagues had been killed. I was numb and horrified as I learned more of the details. Chris had been on a brief visit to Benghazi, where we kept a small diplomatic outpost—not a formal consulate, but a base from which we could keep in touch with developments in the political center of Libya’s east, where the revolution had started. After a day of meetings in town, Chris and his security detail had returned for the night to our tiny compound. Shortly after 9 P.M., a group of Libyan extremists launched a coordinated attack, overwhelming the compound’s defenses. Fierce fighting continued until after midnight at a second American compound, run by the CIA, located a mile or so away.
I spent that sleepless night in Amman and continued on to Baghdad in the morning, as scheduled. I cut short my trip there to accompany Chris’s remains and those of our other colleagues back to the United States a couple days later. It was the longest plane flight I can remember, sitting in that cold, cavernous C-17 aircraft across from four flag-draped coffins. It was all surreal; I barely recall landing at Andrews Air Force Base, or the terribly sad arrival ceremony at which the president and Secretary Clinton spoke.
It didn’t take long for the Benghazi attack to become a political football at home. Legitimate questions about what more we should have done on security were wrapped up in a set of investigations and hearings that were astonishingly cynical, even by the standards of modern Washington. When Secretary Clinton fell and suffered a concussion, and thus was unable to testify before Senate and House committees in December, I stepped in on short notice, along with my friend Tom Nides, the deputy secretary for management and resources.
We spent seven hours before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. There is nothing like a high-profile hearing on a contentious, politically charged issue to focus your mind, or remind you just how brutal Washington politics can be. We did our best to project a calmness that neither of us felt. Nides leaned over before the House hearing began and whispered, “If you screw up, you’re on your own, buddy.” That broke the tension, and we soldiered on. We tried to be honest about our mistakes, and precise about the steps we were already taking to tighten security, while making clear that there could never be a risk-proof approach to diplomacy. Our colleagues overseas often operated in dangerous places, and that would remain the nature of our profession.
The Benghazi tragedy and the endless political circus around it substantially lessened the administration’s appetite for deeper involvement in Libya. Preoccupation with security made it difficult for American, European, and UN personnel to function. Tensions among Libyan militias increased, and disorder mounted. Other Arab states began to support competing proxies, with the Egyptians and Emiratis backing some groups in the east, and the Qataris funneling money and arms to Islamists. ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates sprung up. The fumbling authorities in Tripoli alternately clamored for and resisted Western help, complaining about lack of support but allergic to systematic advice or the practical requirements of signing memoranda of understanding or following through on their commitments.
Our embassy continued to perform valiantly, when it could operate in-country. On one visit in the spring of 2014, Deborah Jones, our ambassador, managed to corral all of the major rebel militia leaders to meet with me and discuss how they might coexist for the national good. It was a memorable scene, the motley crew of self-professed revolutionary heroes more suspicious of each other than they were of the Americans, with their bodyguards all standing just outside the room, fingers on triggers. We made little headway. I reported to Secretary Kerry that I had never seen Libya “in a more fragile state.”10 President Obama was less diplomatic in his Atlantic interview with Jeff Goldberg a couple years later. Libya, he said, had become “a shit show.”
The president wasn’t far off. Our intervention in 2011 had saved thousands of innocent lives, at relatively modest initial cost to the United States. Without a strong post-intervention American hand, our neat “long game” coalition stumbled—the incapacity and irresolution of most of the Europeans painfully exposed, most of the Arabs reverting to self-interested form, and rival Libyan factions unified only by their ardent opposition to any meaningful foreign support and engagement. Libya became a violent cautionary tale, whose shadow heavily influenced American policy toward the far more consequential drama unfolding in the Levant—Syria’s horrendous civil war.
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HINDSIGHT NEITHER DIMINISHES the continuing pain and cost of Syria’s civil war, nor illuminates any easy choices for policymakers. As I write this, more than half a million people have been killed. Thirteen million more, approximately two-thirds of the country’s prewar population, have been driven out of their homes, at least half of them flooding across Syria’s borders and unsettling political order and local economies in the Middle East and Europe. ISIS sprang out of the sectarian chaos of Syria and a still-wounded Iraq. Outside powers preyed on Syria’s divisions, from Iran and Russia to the Gulf Arabs, settling scores and angling for advantage across its battered landscape. The Assad clan has clung to power with unyielding harshness, mowing down peaceful protestors and gassing civilians. Syria remains bloody and broken, its recovery a distant aspiration, its pathologies still threatening its neighborhood.
It is hard not to see Syria’s agony as an American policy failure. Many see it as the underreaching analog to the disastrous overreach of the Iraq War a decade before. As someone who served through both, and shared in the mistakes we made, I am not persuaded by the analogy. There were times during Syria’s protracted crisis when more decisive American intervention might have made a difference. Like many of my colleagues, I argued for more active support in 2012 for what was then still a relatively moderate, if ragtag, opposition, and for responding militarily to Assad’s use of sarin gas in the summer of 2013. Neither step, however, would necessarily have turned the tide.
It was not only the shadow of Libya and its torment that hung over those choices, it was also the far darker shadow of Iraq. In terms of Obama’s “long game” calculus, having the discipline to avoid getting sucked into another military entanglement in the Middle East, which would likely only underscore the limits of our influence in a world of predators for whom Syria’s battles were existential, was paramount. It took cold-blooded rigor of the sort that Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft would have admired to resist the clamor for direct military action against Assad, tempting as it was.
Yet again, where we ran into trouble was in our short game. We misaligned ends and means, promising too much, on the one hand—declaring that “Assad must go” and setting “red lines”—and applying tactical tools too grudgingly and incrementally, on the other. If you added up all the measures we eventually took in Syria by the end of 2014, including a more ambitious train and equip program for the opposition, and telescoped them into more decisive steps earlier in the conflict, their cumulative impact might have given us more leverage over Assad, as well as the Russians and Iranians. They wouldn’t on their own have produced Assad’s downfall, but they mig
ht have created a better chance for a negotiated solution. It was in many ways another lesson in the risks of incrementalism.
In the Assad family playbook, conciliation was a fatal weakness, suspiciousness a guiding principle, and brutishness an article of faith. Nevertheless, before 2011, the Obama administration tested with Assad whether some modest improvement in relations might be possible. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell had extensive discussions in Damascus about reviving the Syrian track of the peace process, and I visited Assad twice to gauge his seriousness about clamping down on cross-border support for extremists in Iraq and broader counterterrorism cooperation. After a long one-on-one conversation with him in February 2010, I reported to Secretary Clinton that it made little sense to get our hopes up about the Syrians. “The safest bet,” I said, “is that they will evade and obfuscate; that’s generally their default position.”11
When the Arab Spring began to break in early 2011, Assad showed none of the initial hesitation that, he believed, had unraveled Ben Ali and Mubarak. Their experiences cast their own shadows onto the young Syrian dictator’s thinking, which was reinforced by reminders from his hard-edged family and advisors about Hafez al-Assad’s rigid rulebook. In Dara’a, near the border with Jordan, a group of schoolchildren spray-painted antiregime slogans on the wall of their building. “It’s your turn, Doctor,” was their not-so-subtle message to the ophthalmologist turned president in Damascus. They were arrested and tortured, sparking demonstrations. Syrian security forces responded harshly, with two dozen civilians killed on April 9.
As protests mounted across the country, so did the death toll. An armed opposition began to emerge, fragmented but gradually more threatening to the regime. In July, our ambassador in Damascus, Robert Ford, visited Hama, a large city north of Damascus that Hafez al-Assad had leveled thirty years before to suppress Islamist dissent. Hama had become another scene of large, peaceful protests, and the demonstrators showered Ford with flowers. Assad dug in harder, stubbornly resistant to calls for dialogue with dissidents. President Obama had been careful in his rhetoric, but the explosion of violence over the summer and Assad’s intransigence finally led him to conclude publicly that Assad had to go. “For the sake of the Syrian people,” he said, “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”
There was still a widespread sense in the region, and in the administration, that Assad’s demise was only a matter of time. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told me that Assad was “finished.” King Abdullah of Jordan had a similar view. In Abu Dhabi, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed was more nuanced; he thought Assad was on the ropes, but “could hang on for a long time” if the opposition didn’t squeeze hard now. Fred Hof, the State Department’s senior advisor on Syria, said Assad was “a dead man walking.” The U.S. intelligence community didn’t push back against that assessment.
Following the president’s judgment on Assad, the administration went through its own collection of tactical steps. Sanctions were enacted against senior Syrian regime officials; the European Union acted along similar lines; the Arab League spoke out against Assad; and an effort began to obtain UN Security Council authorization for tougher measures. With the bitter experience of the Libya resolutions and Qaddafi’s overthrow fresh in their minds, however, neither the Russians nor the Chinese were interested in signing any more blank checks. They repeatedly vetoed even the mildest of resolutions condemning Assad’s bombardment of unarmed civilians—undercutting international pressure and proving to Assad he would face no sanction for his war crimes. Their vetoes were callous and destructive, only exacerbating the human tragedy unfolding in Syria.
Despite setbacks at the UN, we engaged intensively with the Russians to try to find a pathway to a negotiated transition. In conversations with Secretary Clinton and me, Sergey Lavrov asserted that Russia was not “wedded” to Assad, but would not push him out, and worried about who or what might come after him. Obama and Putin had a testy exchange on Syria on the margins of a G-20 summit in Mexico in early June 2012. In Geneva at the end of the month, Clinton and Lavrov agreed to a formula brokered by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who was serving as UN envoy on the Syria crisis. According to the Geneva Communiqué, Russia and the United States agreed to press for the formation of a transitional governing body in Syria, “with full executive powers,” whose composition would be determined by “mutual consent” of the current Syrian authorities and the opposition. We believed “mutual consent” was effectively a veto for the opposition over Assad’s continued authority; the Russians conceded no such thing, and insisted that they weren’t going to lean on Assad to begin to transfer power. The communiqué was less an agreement than a neat summary of our differences.
I followed up in Geneva in December and then again in January 2013 with Lakhdar Brahimi, who succeeded a deeply frustrated Annan as UN envoy, and Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian deputy foreign minister responsible for the Middle East. I had considerable respect for both of them. Brahimi was the UN’s most accomplished troubleshooter, a former Algerian foreign minister with a sure feel for the Middle East and a passionate commitment to resolving conflicts. Bogdanov was the best of Russia’s impressive cadre of Arabists, with long experience in Syria and an encyclopedic knowledge of its regime and personalities.
In the winter of 2012–13 the Russians were growing nervous about Assad’s staying power. He had been steadily losing ground to opposition forces, regime morale was declining, and he was having trouble finding recruits for his military. In our private conversations, Bogdanov was candid about his concerns about Assad, and about the extent to which fighting in Syria was becoming a magnet for Islamic extremists. He was equally concerned about the difficulty of shaping a stable post-Assad leadership, and dubious about the political opposition, which was weakly led and divided. Bogdanov said he saw no signs of significant defections from Assad’s inner circle or military and security leadership; Bashar’s father had built a system around the notion that insiders would either hang together or hang separately, and that didn’t seem to be cracking.
We went round and round with Brahimi about how to translate the Geneva Communiqué into practice, but spun our wheels. We simply could not convince the Russians that we had a plausible theory of the case for the day after Assad, and the Russians were uninterested in offering their own. By the early spring of 2013, the sense of Russian urgency and nervousness evaporated as a substantial influx of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Iranian material support gave Assad a boost and his fortunes began to shift on the battlefield. I doubt the Russians were ever serious about pressuring Assad to leave, and they lacked the leverage to accomplish that unless the Iranians agreed, which was never going to happen.
Our own lack of leverage was a major diplomatic weakness. The argument for doing more in 2012 to bolster the opposition was never, at least in my mind, about victory on the battlefield. It was about trying to demonstrate to Assad and his outside backers that he couldn’t win militarily, and that his political options were going to narrow the longer the fighting continued. It was a way to manage the opposition, and to use our provision of training and equipment to help make them a more coherent and responsive force. And it was a way to herd the cats among the other supporters of the opposition—to try to discipline the feuding Gulf Arabs, help ensure that we weren’t acting at cross-purposes with one another, and keep their assistance away from the more extreme groups to which some of them were drawn. I hated the then-fashionable term “skin in the game,” which always seemed too glib in the face of Syria’s ugly realities, but that was essentially what this was about—giving greater weight and credibility to our political strategy.
Most of Obama’s senior advisors advocated this approach. At the end of the summer of 2012, Clinton joined David Petraeus, now director of the CIA, and Leon Panetta, who had succeeded Gates the year before as secretary of defense, in a concerted effort to persuade the president to approve a m
ore ambitious train and equip program. Obama was unconvinced. In the subsequent recollections of some of the protagonists, this debate and the pivotal NSC meeting in the Situation Room is portrayed as a kind of “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” with the president alone against the passionate and ironclad arguments of his subordinates. I don’t remember it in quite the same way.
It was like so many high-level deliberations among smart people about complicated problems—harassed by time pressures, domestic critics, and impatient allies. Clinton and Petraeus did argue carefully for doing more, and like most people in the room that afternoon, I agreed. The president asked penetrating questions, for which none of us had especially compelling answers. Our understanding of the capacity and makeup of the Syrian opposition was in truth quite limited. Predictions of Assad’s fragile future were far more educated guesses than scientific conclusions, and no one really knew what it would mean when the Iranians and Russians doubled down in response to any increase in American support for the opposition. With the legendary success of its covert program in Afghanistan in the 1980s as the unspoken predicate, the intelligence community tended to overstate how fast and how effectively it could arm the Syrian rebels. And fears of what had later happened in Afghanistan, with the U.S.-armed mujahedeen morphing into the Taliban and embracing bin Laden, loomed large for Obama. It was not an easy call.
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BY CONTRAST, I thought the choice to respond to Assad’s later use of chemical weapons (CW) was more clear-cut. In unscripted public remarks in August 2012, Obama declared that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would cross “a red line.” Throughout the rest of 2012 and the first half of 2013, we became more and more convinced that Assad was employing sarin gas and other chemical weapons against his own people. He seemed to be testing the edges of our response, with fairly small-scale use gradually growing bolder. I had been asked by the White House twice in the spring and early summer to telephone Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem, with whom I had dealt for decades, and make clear that we knew what his regime was doing and would not tolerate it. If it continued, there would be consequences. Muallem listened both times and smugly dismissed my claims. “We’re not responsible,” he said. “Maybe it’s your Islamist extremist friends.”
The Back Channel Page 35