by Ben Rhodes
Obama was incredulous when he hung up the phone with Cameron, and he called a group of us into the Oval Office. “What is going on here?” He asked me to call the people traveling with Clinton while he called her himself. Later, after the call, Donilon told me he’d never seen him that upset, voice raised, standing at his desk. He’d already taken the unprecedented step of telling Mubarak he needed to step aside—something that was going to hurt his relationships with some powerful interests in the Gulf and Israel; now his own administration appeared to be walking that back.
There were other voices of caution. Brennan had spent much of his career working on issues related to the Middle East. Unlike some of the other principals, he knew Mubarak couldn’t weather the storm. But he warned that Egypt wasn’t ready for democracy, that the population had no experience of a politics that wasn’t zero-sum. The same Saturday, as I was working to clarify Wisner’s statement in the press, Brennan gave me a note: “It is a truism to say that there is a far greater unity among the masses in Egypt on what and who they want to see gone than there is on what and who they want in its/their place.”
The next several days felt like an inevitable conclusion to a drama whose main acts had already taken place. Nothing that Mubarak said mollified the protesters, and the Egyptian military began to distance itself from him. Our media, focused on the Washington angle, was filled with stories of mixed messages coming out of the U.S. government—a dynamic that ensured we were making everyone unhappy: the people in the streets, who thought Obama had been slow and uncertain, and the people in power, in Cairo and the Gulf, who thought that Obama betrayed an ally—a belief shared by many in Washington.
I was increasingly frustrated. The president I worked for had taken a bold step to embrace a social movement that was demanding change, and yet the ambivalence within his administration was going to ensure that he was seen as behind the curve. Meanwhile, I heard that the ambassadors from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two of the most powerful envoys in Washington, were telling people in the press and the foreign policy establishment that Obama had been badly advised by younger people like me who were more interested in preserving Obama’s brand than listening to the wise hands who understood that democracy couldn’t work in the Middle East. It was the beginning of a multiyear effort by those two countries to restore a dictatorship in Egypt, and it would ultimately succeed.
The one thing that seemed to be on our side, however, was the reality on the streets of Egypt. Day after day, the protests spread and Mubarak’s regime seemed to crumble around him. On February 11, I woke to the news that Mubarak had fled to the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh and resigned.
It was, it seemed, a happy ending. Jubilant crowds celebrated in the streets of Cairo. I drafted a statement for Obama that drew comparisons between what had just taken place and some of the iconic movements of the past several decades—Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesians upending a dictatorship, Indians marching nonviolently for independence.
I went up to the Oval Office that morning to review the statement with Obama. “You should feel good about this,” he said.
“I do,” I replied. “Though I’m not sure all of the principals do.”
“You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.”
As Obama delivered a statement to a smattering of press, it seemed that history might at last be breaking in a positive direction in the Middle East. His tribute to the protests was unabashed. Yet our own government was still wired to defer to the Egyptian military, and ill equipped to support a transition to democracy once the president had spoken.
When the statement was over, we walked back to the Oval Office. It was a bright winter day, sun splashing on the Rose Garden, as we walked down the colonnade. Obama had several calls scheduled with Arab leaders, including Mohammed bin Zayed, the powerful crown prince of Abu Dhabi who was known by his initials. “MBZ, ABZ, MBN,” he said, citing a few of the Gulf Arab leaders who were similarly known by their initials and who had been lobbying on behalf of Mubarak.
“Who are these guys?” Gibbs said.
“I don’t know,” I said to Obama, “but they’re not going to be paying for your presidential library.”
CHAPTER 10
LIBYA
One of my earliest memories of American foreign policy is of Ronald Reagan sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office and explaining, in his grandfatherly way, that we were bombing Libya. I was eight years old. My father loved Reagan, so to me he could do no wrong. If Reagan said we had to teach Gaddafi a lesson for sponsoring terrorist attacks, then surely he was right. Gaddafi was a villain, and our president was a hero who rode horses with the queen of England. I never imagined that Gaddafi would be at the center of events that would shape the Obama presidency and my own role in it.
Early in the administration, Gaddafi seemed more of a punch line than an adversary. In 2009, at our first United Nations General Assembly, he made waves when he was accompanied by a squad of female bodyguards and gave a rambling hundred-minute speech that called for an investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On the other hand, he had improved his international standing by giving up Libya’s nuclear weapons program. Gaddafi had turned into another aging and erratic dictator, with rich children who liked to hang out in London and intelligence services who fought al Qaeda.
A few days after Mubarak stepped down, the protests in neighboring Libya escalated sharply. There were new calls for Gaddafi to go. Security forces used live ammunition to fire into the crowds. Rebels seized control of parts of the country, including the second-largest city—Benghazi. Instead of Egypt, it was now Libya on every television screen in the West Wing, dominating the questions at press briefings, and forcing its way onto the agenda of the president of the United States. On February 22, we reached one of those turning points that became familiar in the Arab Spring—the moment when a dictator gives a big speech that indicates how he’s going to respond to the calls for him to step down. A group of us sat in my cramped office watching the television as Gaddafi—dressed in burnt-orange robes—stood in front of the remains of a building that had been bombed by Reagan, an English translation scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Defiant, he vowed to “purify Libya inch by inch, house by house, home by home, street by street, person by person, until the country is clean of the dirt and impurities.”
For me, this was a time when every moment had the electric charge of history. I would host meetings with Libyan Americans who came to the White House to share stories of their besieged families who were fighting for their lives, showing us photographs of children half a world away, imploring us to do something, anything, to help. Journalists who moved from one protest to another called me—not to seek comment, but to share stories, as they were experiencing their first glimmer of hopefulness in a war-torn Middle East and wanted to talk about it. Experts sent us papers trying to place the unfolding events in the Arab world in historical context: Was this analogous to the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the nations of Eastern Europe transitioned to democracy like flowers blooming; or was this like Hungary in 1956, or Tiananmen Square in 1989, popular movements that would be trampled by strongmen? I’d lie awake in bed, my mind racing. A few weeks ago, it seemed that helping to pass the New START treaty was the biggest thing I’d be a part of in government; now, every statement we made, every meeting I was in, every decision Obama had to make, felt like the most important thing I’d ever
been a part of—and I wanted us to do something, to shape events instead of observing them.
We exhausted the available options within days—freezing Gaddafi’s assets, putting in place travel bans for him and his family, working through the United Nations to impose an arms embargo, referring him to the International Criminal Court for potential crimes against humanity. People with ties to the Gaddafi family were sent messages that he should leave, take up residence somewhere else, let the country avoid a civil war—to no avail. On February 26, in the most routine kind of press statement—the “readout” of a call between Obama and Angela Merkel—we decided to call for Gaddafi to go. “The president stated that when a leader’s only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now.” Gaddafi was the second Arab leader whose departure we had sought in as many months. He would not be the last.
And yet even as it felt as if things were moving at an accelerated pace, the world outside the White House pressed in upon us, insisting that we were moving too slowly, doing too little too late. In 2011, it wasn’t just television images that brought the conflict home; in social media feeds, Gaddafi’s crackdown was narrated in text messages and Twitter posts. Because the world could now digest the brutal advance of Gaddafi’s forces in real time, whatever happened was on our watch. Members of Congress started to call for a no-fly zone over Libya, so that Gaddafi’s planes would be grounded. Reporters asked us how many more people had to die before Barack Obama did something.
Most people in government didn’t want to do anything. The military made it clear that Libya wasn’t a priority—they had two wars to deal with and little desire for a third. A no-fly zone wasn’t just a talking point, it was a complex undertaking that involved eliminating all of Gaddafi’s air defenses and patrolling the skies over Libya indefinitely. Others in the White House wondered why, with the economy foremost on the minds of Americans, the Arab Spring consumed so much of Obama’s time. No one had voted for Obama so that he’d do something about Libya. When the U.S. government wants to avoid doing something, it avoids producing the options to do something. And so as the days went by, no option for a no-fly zone made its way to Obama, even though it was being debated across Washington and other capitals around the world.
Arab leaders told Hillary Clinton that they were prepared to be part of an effort to punish Gaddafi. In Europe, the spotlight-loving French president Nicolas Sarkozy signaled that he was going to push for a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a no-fly zone. Soon we would have to take a position one way or another, so Obama convened a meeting of his National Security Council on March 15 to decide where we would stand at the UN.
The meeting was in the Situation Room and started with an assessment of the situation in Libya. Each of us had a map in front of us that showed Gaddafi’s methodical progress in taking back pieces of the country. His army had reached a place called Ajdabiya, a town of about eighty thousand people in the middle of the desert. Ajdabiya, the briefers explained, was the last stop on the way to Benghazi, a city of more than six hundred thousand and the center of anti-Gaddafi resistance for decades. From Ajdabiya, Gaddafi’s forces could effectively cut off access to power and water for the people of Benghazi. This was the type of siege that foreshadows a massacre.
Samantha—who lived with the permanent tagline “Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of ‘A Problem from Hell’: America in the Age of Genocide”—passed me a note saying that this was going to be the first mass atrocity that took place on our watch. I looked at the names of towns and cities written on the map in front of me, most of which I was unfamiliar with just a few weeks ago. And here we were, debating whether the people in those places would live or die. I looked at Obama, leaning back in his chair and holding the piece of paper, eyeing the same map, the same places.
Clinton had dialed in by phone from Paris. It was late there and she sounded tired. She had been on a long trip throughout the Middle East and Europe and, she said, the leaders there were ready to pledge diplomatic and military support for a no-fly zone, and she supported it.
Obama went around the table to get everyone’s views. Biden said that intervention was, essentially, madness—why should we get involved in another war in a Muslim-majority country? Gates and Mullen also argued against doing anything—the military already had its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill Daley, a bald, Chicago-accented centrist who’d recently been hired as chief of staff to make deals with Republicans and stabilize relations between Obama and the business community—seemed incredulous that we were debating the issue at all, given everything we had to do at home. Susan Rice argued for more assertive action. This is like Rwanda, she said, citing a genocide that had been a stain on her own conscience—she was a midlevel staffer in the Clinton White House when hundreds of thousands of people were killed there in only a few months, many with machetes. She’d been a minor character in Samantha’s book, and not one of the good guys. “We have a moral responsibility to act,” she said.
And then Obama diverged from his usual script: Having heard the views of his principals, the people sitting around the table, he started to call on people who occupied the seats along the walls. He wanted, I could tell, different views. One by one, the more junior staffers argued for action, highlighting the generational chasm that had opened up over the last several weeks. When it got to Samantha, she talked in humanitarian terms, pointing out that we knew what Gaddafi had done in the past when his rule was threatened. “He massacres civilians,” she said. “He told us what he was going to do in Benghazi—he’d go house to house, killing people.”
Obama turned his chair to face me. “Ben?”
I repeated some of the other arguments that had been made—the humanitarian risk, the danger of signaling that dictators could stay in power if they killed but would fall if they didn’t. As I spoke, I could sense Obama’s ambivalence. I realized that my job—my responsibility for communications—offered me an argument that might resonate: the fact that we would have to stand up and explain to the world why we weren’t acting in Libya if we chose not to.
“The international community is prepared to do this,” I said. “We know there’s going to be a debate at the United Nations. We know there’s support for action. We know the French are going to move forward. So the one thing I’d also say, I guess, is that we’d have to consider what we would say if we choose not to do something.” I paused to let that scenario sink in. “We’d have to explain to the American people and the world why we’re choosing not to join the international community in doing something.”
Bob Gates and Mike Mullen sat stoically at the table, looking as if they’d rather be discussing just about anything else, noting that no other country had the capacity to establish a no-fly zone without our support, reminding us that when we’d done so in the past—over northern Iraq or the Balkans—we had to bear the burden ourselves. Obama asked what impact a no-fly zone would have on the scenario we’d heard about from the briefers, an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s ground forces. None, they said. Even if our planes were securing the skies above Libya, Gaddafi’s troops could still advance on the ground.
“So we’re debating an option that won’t even solve this problem,” Obama said. There was an edge of anger in his voice. It was quiet for a moment. “What time is it?” he asked, looking over at the clocks on the wall. He had a dinner scheduled that night with Gates, Mullen, and all the U.S. military combatant commanders and their wives—an annual social event at the White House. “I’m going to go have dinner with the CoComms, and I want us to get back together afterward and look at some real options.”
Over the next few hours, pop-up meetings were held throughout the White House, options papers written, UN Security Council resolutions drafted, military plans sent over from the Pentagon—the types of contingenc
y plans that remain buried in the enormous bureaucracy until they’re called up by the White House. And then, around seven thirty, we all returned to our seats in the Situation Room, a new set of maps and papers in front of us, a stark menu of options in front of Obama: Bomb Gaddafi’s forces on the ground to stop their advance on Benghazi; put a no-fly zone in place; or do nothing, leaving any action to others.
We reconvened for a second meeting, taking the same seats we’d occupied a couple of hours ago. Obama was briefed on the new options, which included a no-fly zone and a more aggressive option to go after Gaddafi’s forces on the ground. At the end of the meeting, Obama told us he’d made a decision. We wouldn’t support the French resolution for a no-fly zone. Instead, Susan would put forward a U.S. resolution that went beyond a no-fly zone, calling for “all necessary measures” to protect civilians on the ground, a euphemism for war. To put the military at ease, he’d call Cameron and Sarkozy himself and make clear to them that we’d lead the effort to take out Gaddafi’s air defenses and ground forces at the beginning of the operation, but we’d expect the Europeans to move into the lead after a period of days. He turned to me. “Days, not weeks,” he said. That would be our public posture.
With that, things were set in motion. Within two days, after frantic work by Susan, a resolution passed the UN Security Council authorizing the use of force to protect civilians in Libya. Military plans accelerated and Obama secured commitments from the French and British. At the same time, a defiant letter from Gaddafi to Obama reached the White House. “We in Libya are confronting the terrorists of al Qaeda,” it read. “In Libya there are no political and administrative demands, nor are there any disputes….If you decide that terrorism need not be fought, then let’s negotiate with bin Laden.” This was not a man who was going to meet our demands.