The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  Then on August 21, the Syrian military used sarin against civilians in Ghouta, a rebel-controlled suburb of Damascus. More than fourteen hundred people were murdered, many of them children. The intelligence on this attack was solid, and gruesome video footage was shown around the world. Susan Rice, now national security advisor, convened a series of Principals Committee meetings to consider options. The overwhelming consensus of the group was that the issue was not whether to respond militarily, but how. American warships were positioned in the eastern Mediterranean, their cruise missiles well within range of a variety of potential targets—the airfields from which chemical attacks had been launched, suspected CW depots, and Assad’s own palace and helicopter fleet. The French were ready to join in a strike. So were the British—at least until a disastrous, ill-prepared vote in Parliament on August 29 denied Prime Minister David Cameron the authority to act militarily.

  At the request of the White House, John Kerry appeared in the State Department’s Treaty Room on August 30 and made a forceful statement, which I helped craft, and which all but promised military action. Both the secretary and I went home that evening convinced that the president would order a strike over the weekend. I firmly believed, like Kerry, that it was the right call. Assad had not only crossed our red line, but had violated a crucial international norm.

  There were obvious downsides. Striking at chemical weapons facilities risked plumes of poisonous materials, and we knew we couldn’t locate or destroy all of their stockpiles. Assad might up the ante and lash out even more brutally, pushing us all down a very slippery slope. It seemed to me, however, that we were on firmer ground than proponents of the slippery-slope argument would admit. I sympathized with the president’s cynicism about the Washington establishment’s tendency to retreat behind the argument that “American credibility is at stake” as the all-purpose justification for the use of force. This was not just about our credibility. Our intelligence was incontestable, and a strong punitive strike in response to CW use would be aimed clearly at defending an international norm and deterring future use. It didn’t imply an effort at regime change, or direct intervention in the civil war. It was the best case for using force that we’d have against Assad, and the best near-term window to shape the conflict’s trajectory.

  Kerry called later that night to tell me that there had been a change in signals. “I can’t believe it,” he said, “but the president just called to say we’re holding.” The chain of events had unfolded rapidly. Early on Friday evening, the president had gone for his customary end-of-the-day walk around the South Lawn of the White House with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough. Denis was as good a sounding board as the president could hope for—thoughtful and whip smart. Obama was uneasy about moving forward without congressional authorization; a strike in Syria could carry with it all sorts of unintended consequences, and Congress needed to take some ownership. If we were going to use force, we should do it the right way and break the bad habit of executive overreach (and congressional evasiveness) that had proved so corrosive since 9/11. Cameron’s parliamentary fiasco the day before was a reminder of what could go wrong, but the president was determined.

  The following day, Obama made a brief public statement indicating that he would seek congressional authorization for a strike against Assad. Prospects for approval were dim. Few Republicans wanted to be helpful to Obama, and many Democrats were uneasy, afflicted by 2003 Iraq War déjà vu. The French felt abandoned. Our Arab partners were appalled, and saw the decision as another sign of American wavering—one more sin in the litany that had begun with “abandoning” Mubarak.

  Meanwhile, Jake Sullivan and I went off to Oman in early September to resume secret talks with the Iranians. We made significant headway on the nuclear issue, certainly more than we had expected. Some critics have alleged that it was the secret talks and preserving their potential that caused Obama to hesitate about a strike against Assad, whom the Iranians were fiercely backing. I never once heard the president voice that concern. It always seemed to me that his choices on Syria at this moment had much more to do with the risks of getting mired in another conflict there than the risks of jeopardizing the secret channel with Iran. In fact, Jake and I sent a note to the White House during that early September round in Oman arguing that a strike (which we both favored) would complicate but not blow up the talks. The Iranians were perfectly capable of compartmentalizing our relations, with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif beginning a nuclear negotiation while Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani did his best to threaten our interests across the Middle East. We ought to be able to compartmentalize too.

  Over the medium term, we thought, it would actually help—reminding a variety of audiences, including the Iranians—that there were circumstances in which we would use force to protect our most critical interests in the region. That would be an unsubtle signal of our determination to ensure, by whatever means necessary, that Iran did not develop a nuclear weapon. It would also demonstrate that even if we reached an agreement on the nuclear issue, we would not ease up on other contested areas. That was a message that would help manage some of the inevitable angst from regional friends.

  While we were negotiating secretly in Oman, events moved quickly on the Syrian CW issue. The president saw Vladimir Putin, the recently reinstalled Russian president, at the G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg in the first week in September. Putin pitched a vague proposal for a diplomatic resolution of the CW problem, with Assad potentially agreeing to ship his remaining chemical stockpiles out of the country and end his program. It was hard to know how seriously to take the Russians. When Kerry was asked by the press in London on September 9 about what could be done to avoid military action in Syria, he responded offhandedly that the Syrians could turn over all their chemical weapons immediately, but expressed disbelief that they would. Lavrov called him right afterward and insisted that the Russians wanted to work with us on “our initiative.” In one of diplomacy’s stranger recent turns, Kerry, Lavrov, and their teams hammered out a framework agreement for the removal of Syrian CW, which they announced on September 14 in Geneva. It was a significant step, even though the Syrians concealed some remaining stocks from international inspectors. A diplomatic agreement to remove Assad’s declared CW arsenal was in many ways a better outcome than a punitive military strike. The lingering impression, however, was that the Obama administration had blinked at the moment of military decision. It would leave an enduring mark.

  Assad was willing to make a show of conceding chemical weapons to his Russian patrons, but his singular determination to stamp out the opposition never wavered. He was convinced that what he had bought for giving up chemical weapons, at least temporarily, was a “get out of jail free” card on future American use of force against him. Faced with significant manpower shortages, he was also able to count on the Iranians to fill the gap, principally by sustaining Hezbollah and other Shia militias.

  Secretary Kerry was relentless in his pursuit of diplomatic openings, and logged endless hours on the phone and in meeting rooms with Lavrov. The Russians had neither the leverage nor the inclination to try to show Assad the door, however unseemly a client he might be. Putin’s tolerance for unseemliness was high, and he enjoyed the emerging narrative in the Arab world that Russia was a more reliable partner than America. As King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told me, “The Russians are wrong to back Assad, but at least they stand by their friends.” Kerry was equally relentless in arguing in Washington for more support for the opposition, and later for targeted use of force against the Assad regime, to stem the tide of regime advances and bolster America’s diplomatic hand. He didn’t find much appetite in the White House, where the holes in the argument and the risks of setbacks always outweighed the potential gains.

  I was invited to an informal afternoon discussion in the Oval Office between the president and his White House advisors in the summer of 2014, a two-hour session focused mainly on the
Syria crisis. We talked about how moderates were losing strength within the opposition, and Sunni extremists were gaining. This fit Assad’s narrative that he was the last person standing between secular order in Syria and Islamic radicals. The Russians, I thought, were unlikely to engage in serious diplomacy, let alone throw their limited weight behind a political transition. I argued at one point that we needed to put “more pieces on the board” to reanimate diplomacy—to create a bigger and more effective train and equip program for the waning moderate opposition groups, and consider some form of “safe zones” in a few places in Syria along the borders of Jordan and Turkey. There the moderate opposition could train, safeguard displaced Syrians, and begin to develop habits of governance that could at least point in the direction of a future transition.

  This was not the first time the president had heard these arguments. He listened carefully and didn’t dismiss them out of hand, but it was not hard to sense his impatience with recommendations for safe zones, which begged much bigger questions of who exactly would help protect them and at what cost, not to mention the tangled issue of international legal justification.

  As 2014 wore on, it was the dramatic and unexpected rise of ISIS, the fall of Mosul, and the grave risk to Iraq’s stability that ultimately persuaded the White House to act more boldly. A $500 million Pentagon-led train and equip program was launched for the moderate Syrian opposition, aimed ostensibly at fighting ISIS, not Assad. It proved to be too cumbersome, too little, and too late to have any significant effect on the Syrian civil war. A coalition of Islamist fighters who benefited from some combination of CIA and Gulf Arab support was making notable gains, causing grave concern in Moscow.12 As a result, in the early fall of 2015, Putin intervened more decisively in Syria, using a relatively modest military deployment to maximum political effect. Russian airstrikes steadied Assad’s forces and helped them press their advantage on the ground. The American-led campaign against ISIS, accelerating as I was leaving government at the end of 2014, eventually rolled back the ISIS caliphate in Mosul and Raqaa. Bashar al-Assad remained in Damascus, having regained control of most of Syria’s major population centers, refuted predictions of his demise, and devastated his country for generations to come.

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  THE COMPLICATED STORIES of Syria, Libya, and Egypt during the Obama administration were only parts of a larger American policy tableau in the Middle East. Obama’s broad strategy—his long game—was to gradually break the region’s decades-long psychological, military, diplomatic, and political hold on American foreign policy. He knew we couldn’t detach ourselves entirely or neglect the festering risks; it was time, however, to shift the balance of tools we employed. For too long, the president thought, we had invested too much in an ill-considered combination of policy instruments, partners, and objectives. It was time to realign and rebalance—use our leverage where we could and solve the issues of biggest consequence to regional stability like Iran’s nuclear program or the Arab-Israeli conflict; construct two-way streets where for too long U.S. policy was giving a lot and getting too little in return from its partners and allies; and finally make a significant effort to help the region fill the deficits in education and economic and political modernization on which extremists fed.

  It made eminent sense. It just turned out to be much harder to execute than Obama expected. The distant promise of the long game was held hostage by the infinite complexities of the short game, by twists and turns that surprised him, and tactical choices and trade-offs that frustrated all of us. By the second term, the rhythm of White House principals and deputies meetings, well over half of them focused on the Middle East, made it difficult to see where the rebalance to Asia and other priorities had gone. Some of this, of course, was simply what international politics are all about. Assumptions don’t always hold. The unexpected intrudes. Yet precisely because Obama and his closest advisors had such strong convictions about the wisdom of their long game, they were sometimes reluctant to adjust to unforeseen forces and new facts.

  It was the Arab Spring that brought all this into sharpest relief. For all their drama and consequence, the Arab revolts during the Obama era were part of a much longer process, an early round in what will be a series of struggles to deal with the ills of a profoundly troubled part of the world. Egypt, Libya, and Syria were not the only societies affected, as Tunisians and Yemenis can attest, and they won’t be the last. Theirs were just the most compelling for American policy. With all the inevitable tactical missteps, and things we might have done differently or better, the Obama administration’s approach in Egypt was basically sound. We recognized the limits of our power, handled Mubarak’s departure about as well as we could have, and preserved a security relationship that—warts and all—still mattered.

  We made serious mistakes in Libya. They had less to do, in my view, with our initial decision to act, and more with our failure to plan for and sustain a realistic approach to security after Qaddafi’s fall. We helped prevent a massacre, and played a critical role in a tactically successful military intervention. We got our medium-term assumptions wrong, however; we badly overestimated Libya’s post-Qaddafi resilience and the staying power of our partners, and underestimated the ferociousness of the counterrevolutionary pushback, including from Egypt and some of our closest Gulf partners.

  Syria is most troubling of all. A major American military intervention would not have solved the conflict, and would likely have made it worse for us. The mistake we made between 2012 and 2014 was that we regularly paired maximalist ends with minimalist means. More modest objectives (a much slower pace toward post-Assad governance, for example) and more concentrated means (such as an earlier, more robust train and equip program for the opposition) would have been a more coherent combination. We might have given ourselves more diplomatic leverage, and enhanced the chances for a negotiated transition, if we had acted sooner and stronger—particularly in the late summer of 2012 and over the CW red line a year later. Instead, we did plenty to escalate the conflict and far too little to end it.

  Ultimately, Obama could not escape his inheritance in the Middle East. The array of problems facing him was much less susceptible to the application of American power in a world in which there was less of that power to apply. The events of the Arab Spring turned Winter overshadowed in many respects Obama’s effort to reset America’s role in the region and the world over the long term. His nuclear deal with Iran, however, would reinforce his convictions about the power of diplomacy and America’s pivotal leadership role.

  9

  Iran and the Bomb: The Secret Talks

  LATE ONE NIGHT in February 2013, I climbed into an unmarked U.S. government Gulfstream jet parked on the deserted tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. Secretary Kerry’s parting words, delivered with his characteristic optimism and self-assurance, still rang in my head: “We’ve got the diplomatic opportunity of a lifetime.” I felt far more uncertain.

  I spent much of that seventeen-hour flight to Oman reviewing briefing books, talking through strategy and tactics with our negotiating team, and trying to come to grips with the task before us. It had been thirty-five years since the United States and Iran had had sustained diplomatic contact. There was baggage on both sides, and massive mutual mistrust. The diplomatic stakes were high, with Iran’s nuclear program accelerating and military conflict between us an increasing possibility. The politics in both our capitals were explosive, with little room for diplomatic maneuver. International diplomacy had run aground, its thus far desultory exchanges missing a key ingredient—a direct discussion between the two principal protagonists, the United States and Iran.

  For all the anxiety, it was also hard not to feel a sense of possibility. Here was a chance to do what diplomats spend their whole careers trying to do. Here was a chance to apply tough-minded diplomacy, backed up by the economic leverage of sanctions, the political leverage of an international con
sensus, and the military leverage of the potential use of force. And here was a chance to demonstrate the promise of American diplomacy after a decade of America at war.

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  IRAN HUNG OVER much of my career, a country synonymous in American foreign policy terms with troubles, threats, and blunders. Iran seemed a menacing and impenetrable presence, too big and dangerous to ignore, but too intransigent to engage. It was a minefield for diplomats, and nobody had a good map.

  I took the Foreign Service entrance exam in November 1979, a few days after the seizure of our embassy in Tehran and the beginning of a hostage crisis that brought down a president. Iranian-backed terrorists twice bombed our embassy in Beirut, and killed more than two hundred Marines in another attack there. The Iran-Contra scandal nearly brought down a second president.

  The sweeping success of Desert Storm in 1991 propelled American influence in the Middle East to its zenith. The Clinton administration worked hard to contain Iran, but also explored in the late 1990s a possible opening with the Khatami government. It never got very far. The post–9/11 landscape offered a similar opportunity, which we never seized. Instead, the U.S.-led overthrow of Iran’s bitter historical adversaries in Kabul and Baghdad, and the chaos that ensued, delivered Iran a strategic opening that it was only too pleased to exploit.