HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  The first version, reflecting Obama’s view, called for Mubarak to get out in terms that neither he nor the nations of the world could possibly interpret as anything other than a full abandonment of the Egyptian president. But Hillary wasn’t ready to go as far as Rhodes’s original draft. Pen in hand, she began editing the text, as did Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other members of the NSC.

  “Going beyond Mubarak was entering into an unknown. Everybody knew Mubarak; nobody knew what was going to come after Mubarak.… When you don’t know what comes next, it’s hard to call for somebody to go,” said an Obama aide who was in the room. “The president’s point was ‘it’s not as [though] if we didn’t call for him to go, he’d be able to stay in power.’ It was almost an analytical point, which was ‘This guy has lost control of the country. What he’s trying to do to stay in power is not going to work, so we just need to get to that reality faster.’

  “The people around the table were a little more cautious about going that far,” the aide added. Another White House source said they were “nitpicking Ben’s statement.” Obama sided with his speechwriter and delivered remarks nearly in line with the original draft. From the Grand Foyer of the White House, the president aimed his speech at the world community rather than a strictly American audience. “What is clear—and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak—is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now,” he said.

  Ten days later the NSC scene played out a second time in similar fashion, with some of the same officials watching a defiant Mubarak from the Situation Room and then group-editing a Rhodes statement. Again, the president was willing to go further than his top lieutenants. But even with Obama taking a more forward-leaning position than his NSC, he still seemed behind the times. Ten days were an eternity in Egypt’s real-time revolution, and the tipping point had long since passed. But America, the leader of the free world, still didn’t know what it wanted to say—much less do—in the face of a democratic transformation in a region that had long been home to a handful of America-friendly dictators.

  While no one could have predicted the exact chain of events that transpired in the Middle East and North Africa, when the Arab Spring made its way into Egypt, the American foreign policy apparatus, informed by Hillary and like-minded officials at the White House and the Pentagon, proved slow to respond. It appeared to outsiders that the United States favored democratic reforms only if they didn’t threaten to replace autocratic American allies with elected extremists. Of course, each country was its own case, each call complicated by complex political calculations. It was hard enough for a superpower, with a deliberative and democratic political process, to react to real-time revolutions. In Egypt, the conflicting impulses of promoting democracy, supporting a longtime ally, and preventing extremists from taking control of a geopolitically important nation compounded the paralysis.

  Hillary “was reflecting a little bit her caution that every situation is different, and I think we learned in the last decade that just ‘rahrah democracy’ in every situation is too blunt a sentiment,” one of her advisers said. “She knew Mubarak pretty well. She knew some of the opposition figures and knew the military and was appropriately concerned about how this was all going to play out.”

  There was a personal element, too. The Clintons’ relationship with the Mubaraks dated back as far as April 1993, when Bill had hosted the Egyptian president at the White House. “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” Hillary had said in March 2009.

  As it turned out, Hillary’s concern about trading out a moderate dictator for an untested but democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president was warranted, as American officials would see two years later, when the new government was subjected to a counterrevolution that looked like a rerun of the movement that toppled Mubarak, aides to both Obama and Clinton said.

  Still, of all the president’s advisers, Hillary should have been the least likely to get caught behind the curve of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. She had long since recognized the emerging factors, primarily the power of technology to galvanize activists, which favored fast-sweeping political change. She knew that ideas, money, and power could be transferred from one place to the next in the time that it took to upload a YouTube video or hack into a computer. After all, it was Hillary who had said during her 2009 Senate confirmation hearing that “the promise and the peril of the twenty-first century could not be contained by national borders or vast distances.” She had traveled to the region just weeks earlier to warn the leaders of the Middle East and North Africa that change was coming, whether they wanted it or not.

  But it was far easier to topple a government than to create a new one. The modern leaderless revolution, accelerated by instantaneous electronic communication, could leave a country without anyone experienced in governance to establish a stable government. The writing was on the wall, but it didn’t include instructions for how America could play a constructive role in encouraging both democracy and stability in a region where American interests had for so long depended on moderate autocrats suppressing popular extremism. So Hillary could glimpse the future, but she couldn’t shape it—at least not yet.

  In the first week of January, as the Arab Spring was beginning to stir, Hillary had summoned Dan Schwerin—who had risen through the Hillaryland ranks from junior press aide to speechwriter—and another wordsmith, Meghan Rooney, to her personal office, a small alcove with a desk, a short sofa, and three or four chairs. The tiny space connected to Cheryl Mills’s office on one side and Hillary’s much larger official reception room on another.

  Hillary was heading to Doha, Qatar, the following week for an annual gathering of Middle Eastern leaders called the Forum for the Future, and she would have an unusually short window of five minutes in which to address the audience. She told Schwerin and Rooney that she was determined to make each moment count. “You know, we go to the Middle East all the time, and we give the same old message, and it never breaks through, and I am not going to do that this time,” she said. “They are sitting on a powder keg. No one is talking about it. Find something fresh and interesting that we can say that’s going to make them wake up.”

  Though the outcome wasn’t yet clear, the seeds of revolution had been planted the previous month in Tunisia, where a street vendor had set himself on fire to protest the government’s oppressive economic policies. That breathtakingly graphic act had touched off a wave of demonstrations that ultimately led to the downfall of the Tunisian government. Schwerin, liberated by the reversal of a diplomatic speechwriter’s typical assignment—it’s not often they are told to shake things up—quickly reached out to experts within the State Department and at Washington think tanks to ask what they had always wanted to say about the Middle East but had not because of political sensitivities. The result was a prescient call for Middle East leaders to reform their own societies before others took charge.

  “While some countries have made great strides in governance, in many others people have grown tired of corrupt institutions and stagnant political order,” Hillary said in Doha. “In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.… Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever.… Extremist elements, terrorist groups, and others who would prey on desperation and poverty are already out there, appealing for allegiance and competing for influence. So this is a critical moment, and this is a test of leadership for all of us. I am here to pledge my country’s support for those who step up to solve the problems that we and you face.”

  Hillary aides still recall that members of the State Department’s traveling press corps raved about her speech. “ ‘Why doesn’t she talk like this always? This is amazing,’ ” one aide remembered hearing. “And people in the audience were like ‘Wow, we didn’t expect to be talked to like this.’ Some
of them were offended. But some of them were inspired.”

  The Tunisian government fell the following day, putting a fine point on Hillary’s warning. And within two weeks, Egypt was on the brink. It was one thing, in the abstract, to think about a revolution spreading from one country to the next across an entire region in a matter of weeks, not years or decades. It was another to watch it happening live on television. If the experience with Egypt proved anything, it was that the United States was too slow to respond to political dynamics that it could see coming thousands of miles away. Despite Hillary’s prescience about the factors leading up to the Arab Spring, her reluctance to throw Mubarak out exemplified the administration’s equivocation.

  But when the Arab Spring spread from Egypt to Libya, Hillary slingshot the United States, and the rest of the Western world, from trailing the moment to leading it. More than at any other time during her four-year tenure at State, she showcased her skills as a strategist, a diplomat, and a politician in building a coalition for a war against Muammar Qaddafi—a coalition in which the responsibility would be truly distributed among partners. Unlike many previous “coalition” wars, the drive to crush Qaddafi would not be a de facto U.S. operation dressed up with minimal participation by partner countries. The key was Hillary’s ability to identify the policy sweet spot that satisfied the president, America’s Western European allies, the Arab League, and the nascent rebel governing body in Libya, while helping win tacit assent from initial opponents, such as Russia and Congress. The mission required Hillary to balance the interests of the various players within the United States and of those around the world.

  It was the same skill set—though applied on a much bigger stage and with much graver consequences for failure—as building a coalition for a bill in Congress among legislators, outside stakeholders, and voters. And of course, it’s a particularly Clintonian talent to fashion a deal that everyone can live with to advance an idea supported by the Clinton in question. Libya’s liberation, for better and worse, was Hillary’s War.

  On February 15, just a few days after Mubarak finally stepped down, protesters took to the streets in Libya, sparking violent clashes a couple of days later between Qaddafi’s forces and a ragtag band of rebel militias. While Qaddafi conducted a vicious crackdown on demonstrators, the rebels quickly seized control of several cities in the eastern half of the country. At the urging of Libyan government officials opposed to Qaddafi’s actions, French president Nicolas Sarkozy called for the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over the capital of Tripoli, in the western part of the country, so that Qaddafi could not easily move troops and supplies to the rebel-held territory in the east or launch air strikes against his own people. Foreign policy experts have pinned a lot of possible motives on Sarkozy: altruistic concern for the Libyan people, a need to show strength in advance of French elections, a wish for redemption for supporting Egyptian and Tunisian despots for too long, and solicitude for the interests of the French oil titan Total. Whatever the case, he was first out of the box, and British prime minister David Cameron, who had also been criticized for a slow response in the other Arab Spring countries, soon joined Sarkozy’s push for a no-fly zone.

  Within the United States, a fierce two-to-three-week debate broke out between a small set of Obama administration officials who were eager to prevent Qaddafi from slaughtering his own people and a second group who, for various reasons, were dead set against the use of American military force in Libya. By that point, the issue hadn’t risen to the president’s level, at least not in any official sense. The first group, later portrayed along with Hillary as a set of mythological Valkyries—or Norse women of war—included UN ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Staff member Samantha Power. But there were men, too, among the minority voices that argued for a military response. Ben Rhodes and Tony Blinken, the vice president’s national security adviser, joined them in making the case that the United States could not stand by and watch a genocide as it had in Rwanda in the 1990s.

  But the second group, much more powerful on the surface, included Biden, Gates, White House chief of staff Bill Daley, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey. They told Obama’s White House advisers that they were skeptical about whether America had any legitimate national security interest in Libya. They knew that the military was stretched too thin, and they worried about the prospect of starting a war in a third Muslim country when much of the Muslim world didn’t draw a distinction between the American war on terrorism and a war on Islam. All of that added up to an overarching concern that France and Britain were dragging the United States into a military action that ultimately would be funded and executed by America. “One of the principal arguments against intervention was, we’d be doing it by ourselves,” said a White House official who was in the room for the discussions. “Every time we do this, we have to hold the bag.”

  Hillary had been playing her cards close to the vest in the early deliberations but had begun to lean toward an intervention. In 1994 she had urged Bill to stop the Rwandan genocide, to no avail, and the arguments made by Power, Rice, Blinken, and Rhodes appeared to have an effect on her thinking. She was sympathetic to their view but very much worried that the intervention options on the table were too weak. The no-fly zone wasn’t enough to impede Qaddafi.

  “She understood the motivation to want to do something,” said Jim Steinberg, who sat in on national security meetings. “She recognized that just kind-of gestures, futile gestures, were the worst of all worlds. You made it feel like you were doing something, but it wasn’t actually going to make any difference. And much of what was being talked about in the early discussions about intervention were the kind of things we had already seen in the Balkans that would not make any difference—no-fly zones, safe havens, and the like. But those things were not going to transform the situation. And I think her perspective was ‘If we are going to intervene, we have to do it in a way that will be credible and effective.’ ”

  Obama wasn’t formally briefed on his options until he had to make decisions about whether and how to intervene later in the process. But his leanings lined up with Hillary’s—or hers lined up with his—according to senior administration officials.

  As the debate intensified in Washington, so did the war in Libya. In early March, Qaddafi started to push forward, retaking cities that the rebels had captured in the early weeks of fighting. There were reports of air strikes from Qaddafi-controlled planes in Brega. His tanks began powering eastward along the coastal highway, on a mission to crush the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. “There wasn’t a choice about time frames,” said a senior administration official. “That time frame was forced on us by the movement of tanks across the desert on the doorstep of Benghazi.”

  By March 12, as the twenty-one-member Arab League huddled at its Cairo headquarters, Qaddafi was on the verge of sacking the rebels. Some world leaders and human rights activists believed a slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Libyans might be imminent. After a closed-door meeting that lasted nearly six hours that Saturday, Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, announced that the Arab nations would support a no-fly zone. The Arab countries, which normally presented a bloc against outside intervention, were giving the go-ahead to Western powers to stop Qaddafi. Just like the Americans, they had to weigh whether to stand idly by while Qaddafi slaughtered his own people—fellow Arabs. Ultimately they preferred the rebels over Qaddafi, who had frequently thumbed his nose at his Arab neighbors over his forty-two-year reign.

  Their interest in protecting the rebels from Qaddafi gave Hillary just the opening she needed to push for more aggressive military intervention than the ambiguous no-fly zone embraced by the British and the French. She believed the no-fly zone was a false solution because it would let Western powers feel good about taking action but wouldn’t be forceful enough to stop Qaddafi. And it certainly wouldn’t provide the power necessary to assist the rebels in toppling him. A no-fly zone meant alli
ed forces would shoot down Qaddafi’s planes; but by mid-March, it was Qaddafi’s tanks that needed to be stopped.

  Hillary told her aides she was convinced that Libya presented a unique opportunity for America to exercise a new kind of international leadership that relied on building a partnership in which the bulk of the might and money would come from other countries. Potemkin coalitions had cost America blood, treasure, and international prestige, and Obama wasn’t about to commit the United States to taking the brunt of another war. Hillary’s strategy integrated the desire of Rice, Power, Blinken, and Rhodes to intervene with the reluctance of Gates, Biden, and Daley to land Marines on the shores of Tripoli, and it added a much harder punch than a no-fly zone.

  Libya was a particularly inviting crucible in which to test the theories of smart power, multilateralism, and democracy promotion that informed Hillary’s philosophy of American leadership. The country was rich in resources, particularly oil and gas, and had a relatively well-educated population that, absent the repression imposed by Qaddafi, was positioned to build the economic, political, and civil institutions that she believed formed the heart of thriving democracies. With a little help at the margins, Libyans would have all the tools to build an inclusive democratic society. In addition, there could hardly be a more just cause than stepping in to prevent a massacre. In other words, the conditions were ripe for an American-backed intervention.

  For some time, a coalition of the Friends of Libya had been discussing possible ways to get involved, but with no commitment from the United States, the plan for assistance was still, as one Hillary aide put it, “to be determined.” When she flew to Paris for a March 14 meeting of the foreign ministers of the G8, a group of the world’s wealthiest powers, Hillary was looking for evidence that would persuade Obama to back a war—essentially assurances that the Europeans would take the lead militarily, that Arab countries would participate in enforcing a no-fly zone so that it didn’t look like the West was attacking another Muslim country, and that the Libyan opposition’s government-in-waiting, called the Transitional National Council (TNC), could really create a democratic Libya. The United States had not yet given formal recognition to the TNC, a key indication that Washington remained skeptical of the organization.