by John McCain
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I made my first trip to Libya in April 2011, over the initial objections of the Obama administration. I had wanted to go to Benghazi since Joe and I had endorsed U.S. military intervention in the civil war. The administration, understandably, was reluctant to have a U.S. senator in the country while a civil war was raging, even if Benghazi was in rebel hands. Chris Stevens, the administration’s special envoy to the provisional Libyan rebel government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), was there as was a USAID team. So there was something like an official U.S. diplomatic presence in Benghazi that could coordinate my visit and see to it that I didn’t wander into any real harm. Nevertheless, my repeated insistence that I be allowed to go was met with repeated resistance until the Qataris offered to fly me into the city. I informed the administration I would be traveling to Benghazi courtesy of the Emir of Qatar, at which point they relented, and arranged to fly me from Crete to Benghazi. I spent a night in Crete, where, at the insistence of the administration, my Navy escort officer, Captain Jim Loeblein, remained behind. The President had maintained since the announcement that the U.S. would fly air strikes that no American ground troops would be deployed to any operation in Libya. Apparently, the prohibition extended to a surface warfare naval officer assigned to staff a U.S. senator. We flew to Benghazi without him early the next morning on an old Dash 8 turboprop that belonged to our embassy in Baghdad.
I should be more specific. This was my first visit to Libya since the rebellion began, and I would make five more trips there over the next three years. But it was not my first trip ever to Libya. That had been a visit I made to the country two years before, when I had one of the more unusual meetings with a head of state I have ever had, a ’round midnight discussion with Muammar Qaddafi in his desert compound outside Tripoli. Joe, Lindsey, Susan Collins, and I had been scheduled to depart the hotel for the meeting at four o’clock, but were informed by our Foreign Ministry minder that “Brother Leader” wasn’t prepared to meet with us yet, and that we should delay our departure a little while. Five o’clock arrived, and we were instructed to wait a bit longer. Six o’clock, still not ready. Seven o’clock, the same, and again at eight o’clock. Finally, as nine o’clock arrived, I announced to my colleagues, our embassy officials, and our Libyan hosts that unless we left within the hour, I was going to bed. Since we were leaving Libya in the morning, we would have to forgo the pleasure of Brother Leader’s company on this visit. That seemed to have an effect on the Libyans, and a little before ten o’clock we were in a motorcade speeding through the desert on a deserted highway in total darkness for forty-five minutes en route to the Bab al-Azizia compound. We learned later that we had taken a circuitous route to delay the meeting until Qaddafi was at last ready to receive us. Finally, we approached an army base where bright stadium lights had turned night into day, illuminating a polo match under way, and not the water sport variety, but the one with riders and ponies and mallets. It was an unusual sight given the circumstances. We passed the polo field and turned down a road that led to a dirt track, which we continued on for about a mile until we reached Qaddafi’s “tent,” which, to my eyes, appeared to be a Winnebago RV.
We met with Qaddafi’s son first, who served as his national security advisor, and two other aides. The discussion continued for a half hour or so until, at long last, our night-owl host entered the room, wearing white jeans and a black shirt with little green maps of Africa on it. He gave a rambling presentation that included references to a plot by Bulgarian nurses to infect Libyan children with the HIV virus. He began with an observation that had I not supported the surge in Iraq, I would have been elected President. Qaddafi had voluntarily surrendered his weapons of mass destruction in 2003, including a nuclear program, and there had been intermittent efforts since then to have something like normal relations with his government. There was some talk about improving security cooperation, but the only topic that gained any traction with the mercurial dictator concerned one of the bombers who had destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Britain was about to release him from prison for medical reasons, and we warned Qaddafi that were he given a hero’s welcome in Tripoli it would have a very bad effect on public opinion in the U.S. Qaddafi responded that he could not control the Libyan people’s reaction, to which Joe responded, “That may be, but then we won’t be able to control the American people’s reaction, either.” Qaddafi ended the meeting not long after that exchange. We drove back to the hotel in half the time it had taken us to get there.
I hadn’t known Chris Stevens before I met him in Benghazi, although he had worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a Foreign Service fellow. He was a talented diplomat, and an exceptional human being. He believed in what he was doing, supporting the Libyan people’s rights to freedom and justice, and helping them build an open society, and he was effective. I was bound to like the guy. We had the same hopes for Libya, and the same faith and optimism they could achieve them. He was a go-getter, a risk-taker, who didn’t wait on events but tried to shape them. He was positive, good-humored, and fun to be with. I liked and admired him a great deal, and I miss him very much.
The NATO air campaign was then about a month old. It had begun after the head of the provisional government, the National Transitional Council, had implored the West to establish a no-fly zone in eastern Libya and protect civilian populations. Qaddafi, who was moving armored and infantry columns to Benghazi from the south, had threatened to show Benghazi “no mercy.” He swore he would go “door to door” to “snuff out the rats.” When Joe and I had returned from that first trip to Egypt, we worked with John Kerry to get an understanding from the Pentagon of what enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya would entail, and to build support for it in the Senate and the White House. Toward that end, Kerry and I sponsored a bipartisan resolution authorizing the use of military force in Libya for a year. Inside the administration, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were the strongest advocates for intervention.
France and the U.K. were the first NATO countries to call for air strikes. They introduced a resolution in the U.N. Security Council approving a no-fly zone, and authorizing all necessary means to protect civilians, but expressly ruling out the use of ground forces. In response, and hoping to head off the inevitable, the Libyan foreign minister announced a cease-fire the next day. It was seen as an obvious ruse as the regime continued operations against a rebel-held city in western Libya, Misrata, and armor and ground troops were still approaching Benghazi. The French struck first on March 19, hitting regime forces converging on Benghazi. The U.S., U.K., and seven other countries also struck targets that day, with the U.S. planes concentrating on Qaddafi’s air defenses and airfields, while the U.S. Sixth Fleet imposed a blockade of Libya’s ports.
The U.S. Africa Command commanded the operations that first week. But by March 25, President Obama made the decision to transfer control of the campaign, which had expanded to include nineteen nations, to NATO under the command of a Canadian Air Force general. He explained his reasoning for intervening in Libya in a speech to the nation on March 28, announcing at the same time that NATO had assumed command, and the U.S would from that point on play “a supporting role.” Our allies would take the “lead in enforcing the no-fly zone and protecting civilians.” The U.S. would provide arms and supplies and fly most of the aerial refueling missions, but France, the U.K., and our other partners would fly the ground attack sorties. A couple days before the speech, my foreign policy aide, Chris Brose, told me he had received a call from a contact in the French embassy alerting him that the U.S. was withdrawing from a combat role. “They’re giving command to NATO,” Brose explained. I had a flashback to a point in the Balkans crisis in the 1990s, when the U.N. had authority over NATO air operations in Bosnia, and things had gotten thoroughly screwed up until we intervened and took command. At an Armed Services Committee hearing that day, I asked one
of the witnesses to confirm the U.S. role in the operation. “We’re acting in support of NATO,” he explained. “In support of NATO,” I repeated incredulously. “We are NATO.” An anonymous White House staffer defending the decision described the administration approach as “leading from behind,” a phrase that would come back to haunt them as it became shorthand for the general retrenchment and risk-averse nature of Obama’s world leadership, and the power vacuums it created. I would make mocking reference to the term more than once over the next several years.
The NATO air campaign was ongoing when I arrived in Benghazi and would continue until Qaddafi was captured and killed in October. He hadn’t been able to lay waste to the city as he had threatened, and Benghazi looked to me like any other run-down Arab city. Chris and his team had commandeered a dilapidated hotel as their headquarters, and he brought in a rotating cast of rebel leadership to meet us there. I was impressed by Mahmoud Jibril, who headed the NTC, essentially as provisional prime minister. He was a technocrat, sophisticated and widely traveled, with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh. He was a prominent moderating voice in rebel councils. Hillary Clinton had met with him in advance of the President’s decision to intervene, and, reportedly, the impression he had made had helped convince her to support the decision.
I went to a local hospital to visit wounded rebels, and met with the folks from Human Rights Watch and the Libyans they were helping build a civil society. Every Libyan I encountered was excited and positive that their deliverance from decades of oppression and corruption was at hand. If there was a spirit of the Arab Spring that Americans could relate to—a people’s confident belief in their ability to shape their own destiny—it was present in Benghazi. The Libyans I met were certain they were up to the challenge of defeating the regime, and ready for the difficult task of building a modern, free, and just society that would realize the most hopeful visions of the Arab Spring. They were thankful, too, for the help that had come from the West. I walked around Benghazi’s Freedom Square with one of the rebel leaders. I looked at photographs of Libyans killed by the regime or missing in action that covered a wall of a nearby government building. A crowd of a hundred or so chanted, “Thank you, McCain! Thank you, Obama! We need freedom.” I suspect the NTC had played a role in organizing the cheerleaders, but I enjoyed the experience just the same, noting to my guide that I hadn’t had many occasions to hear my name and the President’s chanted by the same people. “It’s usually just one or the other of us,” I explained. “We don’t always have the same fans.”
I had agreed that I wouldn’t remain overnight in Benghazi. I departed for Cairo that evening certain we were right to have intervened, and more hopeful than I had been before I arrived that a better Libya could emerge from the destruction of Qaddafi’s regime. Before I left, I agreed to hold a press conference. “We have prevented the worst outcome,” I said.
Now we have to increase our support so that the Libyan people can achieve the only satisfactory outcome to this mass protest for universal rights—the end of Qaddafi’s rule and the beginning of a peaceful and inclusive transition to democracy that will benefit all Libyans.
By the time I returned to Libya in September, Tripoli had fallen. We had just reopened our embassy, although it had been moved to temporary quarters because Qaddafi’s forces had ransacked the building. We met with our ambassador, Gene Cretz, a career Foreign Service officer, who had been forced to leave Libya even before NATO operations had begun. Cables he had written documenting Qaddafi’s corruption were disclosed in a massive WikiLeaks dump, which had also incidentally disclosed a cable reporting our strange encounter with Qaddafi in 2009. I asked to inspect a prison, where fifteen hundred Libyans were detained after they had been arrested by rebel militias. Human Rights Watch had recently conducted interviews with some of the prisoners and found many had been arrested for dubious reasons and held without trial. Many had also been physically mistreated. In the days just after Tripoli’s fall, there wasn’t a central authority directing militias. They were acting on their own more or less. The NTC had been based in Benghazi. I was encouraged that I had been allowed into the prison, but it was clear that militias were still acting independently from the NTC. When we met with Mahmoud Jibril, he acknowledged the difficulties in controlling the militias, and promised the Council would get control of the situation. We had again been requested not to remain in Libya overnight, and before we left that evening we walked around Green Square, renamed by the rebels Martyrs Square. It was crowded, militias were everywhere, and lots of folks were selling stuff on the street. No one knew we were coming this time. But as soon as we got out of our vehicles, they started chanting, “Thank you, America! We love America! Thank you, Obama! We love Obama!” and Lindsey quipped to one effusive Libyan, “I love America, too.”
Qaddafi was making a last stand in his hometown of Sirte. In a month, rebels found him hiding in a drainpipe, and killed him as he begged for his life. NATO operations ceased at the end of October. I was proud of what we had accomplished. At the point when Qaddafi’s forces had been retaking control of the country, while a vanguard of armor and infantry approached the outskirts of Benghazi, which would have ended in a massacre, NATO airpower had intervened and reversed the tide. Over seven months, NATO had acted as the revolution’s air force, obliterating the regime’s advantage in armor and heavy weaponry. The rebel forces improved and fought well as the war went on, but it was NATO that had ensured regime change, irrespective of official insistence that it had not been the purpose of our intervention. Protecting Libyan civilians, which had been the Security Council’s mandate, required overthrowing Qaddafi, and it was sophistry to pretend otherwise.
I came back again for another brief visit in February. That was the trip when I had asked to meet with Abdel Belhaj, the Libyan militia leader whose wife had been abused by the CIA. But the most memorable of all my experiences in Libya were the two days I spent in Tripoli in July 2012. I had come to observe Libya’s first free election. It was just Chris Brose, Captain Loeblein, and me on that trip, no other senators came with us. We stayed at Chris Stevens’s residence. He had succeeded Gene Cretz as ambassador a couple months earlier. He and some other embassy personnel were still living in temporary quarters while the embassy and Chris’s official residence were repaired after being torched and painted with anti-American graffiti. They had rented a compound with several villas from an oil company. Each villa had a swimming pool, and strikingly exotic decor of leopard skins and couches shaped like lips. No congressional delegation had been allowed to remain in Libya for more than a day, out of concern for their safety. But I had insisted on this trip that I would stay for two days and nights, and the State Department had relented.
I had been in regular contact with Chris since our first meeting in April of the previous year. We saw Libya the same way. We were both enthusiastic about its prospects even though it had been ruled by a tyrant for four decades and hadn’t national institutions that survived his downfall. Libyans would have to build everything from scratch while rival militias and political factions competed for turf. We both believed it was essential for the U.S. to be engaged in that project, using the relationships we had made in Libya over the last year, and our soft power resources to support national reconciliation and the rule of law. Chris was a California native, with the stereotypical Californian’s sunny disposition. He had graduated from Berkeley. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. His politics were decidedly liberal, but we didn’t discuss American politics much. He was good company and a gracious host. The morning of the election, he made us cappuccinos, knowing it was my preferred variety of caffeine. I’ve kept a picture that Brose took of Chris making us the coffees. We spent all day visiting polling sites, watching Libyans cast votes that actually mattered for the first time in their lives. They had showed up in encouraging numbers. There were long lines at all the polls we visited, and despite the huge turnout it appeared to be a very orderly election. Emb
assy staff and international observers had fanned out across the country. There were a few isolated instances of problems and boycotting here and there by some rebel factions, but on the whole they reported the same good turnout, well-run process, and enthusiastic voters we were finding everywhere we looked in Tripoli. It was awesome.
Mahmoud Jibril’s party would win the most seats, which I took as an encouraging sign. We had dinner that night on the patio of a restaurant adjacent to the Marcus Aurelius Arch that the Romans had built in AD 165 to commemorate their victories over the Parthians. We went for a walk after dinner. Everywhere Libyans were celebrating their freedom, hanging out car windows waving flags, honking their horns, shooting off fireworks, cheering us. I don’t know how many of the people who cheered and thanked us or stopped to pose for a picture with us knew exactly who we were. They just seemed to know we were Americans, and had helped make this day possible. It was a lovely, hopeful evening, and one of my favorite memories.
Two months later, Chris was dead. Most readers know the story, so I won’t go into detail here. He went to Benghazi on September 11. He had worried about the deteriorating situation there as rival militias clashed and reports warned of a growing al-Qaeda presence. The central government, in office for a month, appeared too weak to do much about it. Al-Qaeda had recently called for attacks on Americans as the anniversary of 9/11 approached. Chris had asked the State Department for more security for the Benghazi mission, but it had been denied. On the evening of the 11th, an al-Qaeda offshoot attacked the main U.S. mission compound in Benghazi and a CIA annex about a mile away with grenades, RPGs, mortars, and automatic rifles. The attackers entered the building where Chris was hiding, poured gasoline, and torched it. Chris was killed as was an embassy information officer, Sean Smith. Two former Navy SEALs helping to evacuate Americans at the CIA annex, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were subsequently killed. Libyans discovered Chris’s body, believed him to be alive, and tried to rescue him. He was pronounced dead at the hospital from smoke inhalation.