by Ben Rhodes
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BRASÍLIA WAS AN UNLIKELY place to start a war—a planned capital city, built for government business, dotted with 1960s and ’70s–style concrete office buildings. It could not have been farther from the Middle East. While Obama met with Dilma Rousseff, the former Marxist guerrilla and political prisoner who had become president, I worked in a staff office at the Palacio do Planalto, the Brazilian equivalent of the White House. Our expectation was that military operations would start in Libya the next day. But at the same time that Obama was holding his meeting, Sarkozy was hosting a conference on Libya in Paris. With Gaddafi still advancing on Benghazi, Clinton reported that Sarkozy was pressing for military operations to begin that day. This could only work if the United States began taking out Gaddafi’s air defenses immediately.
While Obama wrapped up his meeting, we started to assemble his top national security team for a conference call. After some tense moments when the call kept dropping, Obama was patched through and I watched him listen intently. The military was ready to go now, they just needed his order. “You have my authorization,” he said, with formality. Brazil prides itself on not interfering in the affairs of other countries, and not going to war. Its president was a woman of the left, persecuted by Brazil’s former military government because of her politics. This was probably the first war ever launched from the offices of the Brazilian president, and it was being done by a foreigner.
We moved on to a luncheon for prominent Americans and Brazilians that was being hosted at the Foreign Ministry. I sat nervously eyeing my BlackBerry for news reports while the man next to me, a Brazilian businessman, quizzed me on the positions that Obama had taken on ethanol subsidies during the 2008 campaign. The whole scene spoke to an absurdity in the office of the American presidency—Obama sat at the head table, carrying out his duties, promoting American business in a country of more than two hundred million people, while the vast machinery of the U.S. government, on Obama’s order, was preparing to rain down bombs on a country of seven million.
The next event was a CEO forum at a convention center. Obama would have to say something public about the war he’d just started; otherwise, the first picture taken of him after giving this authorization would be sitting at a conference room table flanked by a bunch of CEOs. Everywhere a U.S. president goes, a venue is identified where he can give an emergency statement to a group of assembled press from behind a lectern bearing the seal of the president of the United States. When we got to the convention center, we delayed the start of the CEO forum, and I set to work writing a statement while the advance team set up the room.
“Today,” I wrote, “I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a military action in Libya in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians. That action has now begun.” I paused and looked around the room, a large empty space with a scattering of tables. Obama, Bill Daley, Tom Donilon, and a few other aides chatted on the other side of the room, giving me some space. Somewhere over Libya, American planes and missiles were making their way toward Gaddafi’s forces. But there was no time to process any of it. There was a statement to finish, a day’s schedule to complete. I wrote as strong a statement as I could in less than half an hour. Obama read it quickly but carefully. As with the Afghanistan speech, he dialed it down—gone was the invocation of “never again,” the reference to the Holocaust, the seminal massacre that prompted generations to consider going to war to stop human beings from killing other human beings. Even in that moment, Obama didn’t want to overpromise.
The next day we were in Rio. We drove into the City of God, a sprawling favela. As the motorcade snaked through streets of patchwork housing—corrugated roofs, colorful windowpanes, cratered sidewalks, thousands of Afro-Brazilians straining to get a glimpse of Obama—I thought about how to measure the impact of Obama and his presidency on this anonymous multitude, how to weigh the impact he had on people like those lining our motorcade route against the practical reality of a war that we had joined on the other side of the world. I watched him kicking a soccer ball with a handful of excited kids in a community center, wondering what was churning through his mind.
The rest of the trip, Obama existed within the bubble of his schedule—meetings, speeches on Latin America, state dinners—while the rest of us were on calls or in press briefings related to Libya. For the first time in my life, I was the spokesperson for a government that had just gone to war—I did press briefings on camera, or on the phone pacing next to a parked motorcade. Somewhere along the way, I lost my razor, and our last night in San Salvador, Obama snapped at me.
“What, you can’t even bother to shave?” he said.
At first I thought that he was kidding. “I think my razor is somewhere in Brazil,” I said.
“Pull yourself together,” he said. “We have to be professional here.” There was an edge to his voice; he wasn’t joking.
I felt like exploding. I haven’t slept more than three hours in days. I’m doing three jobs out there defending this war for hours each day. Obama seemed oblivious to the work I was doing out of his sight, work that left me no time to buy a razor. But as I calmed down, I realized that these little flashes were how he relieved some of the stress that he had to be feeling, and that being composed and professional—doing the job—was how he managed to take everything in stride. I hadn’t just failed to shave; I’d deviated from his ethos of unflappability.
On the flight back to Washington, I headed to the back of Air Force One to brief the journalists who were traveling with us. All of the pressure on us to act in Libya had taken a 180-degree turn the moment we did. Before, we had been getting questions about how many people had to die before we acted; now we were getting questions about how we could avoid mission creep, whether we could transition to a European command, and whether we were “at war” in Libya. I had been told by our lawyers that I was not supposed to use the word “war”—we hadn’t sought congressional authorization, and were arguing that it was a limited military operation, and therefore within the president’s constitutional authority. That legalistic position, of course, was why I was being asked the question.
“If it’s not a war,” a journalist from Fox News asked, “what’s the right way to characterize this operation?”
I’d answered dozens of questions about Libya over the last few days. I was exhausted, leaning against a wall with a bunch of tape recorders in my face. I didn’t have a good answer. “I think,” I said, “that what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone.” I was giving a stock response, which felt unsatisfactory—phony—so I went a step further. “Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.” “Kinetic military action” was the type of language used in the Situation Room, a euphemism for dropping bombs and blowing things up. In this context, it sounded like a dodge, a way to call a war something other than a war.
When we got back to D.C., it was apparent—in a way that you miss when you’re traveling—that we were not receiving the same benefit of the doubt that had greeted Reagan’s “kinetic military action” twenty-five years earlier. The Republicans who had demanded that we put a no-fly zone in place now shifted the goalposts, demanding that we do more to “win” in Libya. The left was nervous about another war in the Middle East. Critics on both sides were bemoaning the fact that we weren’t seeking congressional authorization, even though there was no way that a Republican House would pass it if we did. In short, there was little constituency for what we were doing in Libya.
This hit home for me one night when I was sitting on the couch watching Jon Stewart, the ubiquitous comic voice of authority for my demographic. He was running a series of segments on The Daily Show titled “America at Not-War.” He started to mock my phrase—“kinetic military a
ction”—while a photo of me looking about twelve years old flashed on the screen. My stomach started to churn and I turned the television off. My own worldview had been shaped, in part, by reading books like Samantha’s and watching liberals go on shows like Stewart’s to promote movies like Hotel Rwanda. Sure, I’d said something that sounded a bit Orwellian, and I was a spokesperson for the U.S. government—whose military actions overseas prompt skepticism from large chunks of the population at home. But in my mind, I was part of a group of people acting to implement a humanitarian principle. Now it felt as if I was being punished for it, and as if I had argued for Obama to do something that his own base recoiled against. My skin would have to get thicker.
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EVERY MORNING THOSE FIRST few days back in Washington, Obama convened a small meeting in the Situation Room to get briefed on the progress we were making in Libya—a much more hands-on approach than he ever took to daily operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. Gaddafi’s air defenses were destroyed. His forces were stopped on the outskirts of Benghazi, perhaps saving tens of thousands of lives. Not a single American had been injured. After a few days of American pilots being in the lead, we transferred the operation to a NATO command, with French and British pilots taking on the bulk of the bombing. It was what Obama wanted: multilateral, no ground forces, limited objectives.
One common criticism emerged from Congress and the media: Obama had not formally addressed the nation since authorizing military action. So, on March 28, two weeks after the Situation Room meeting that had set everything in motion, he gave a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. The television networks said they wouldn’t carry it in prime time, so it was scheduled for the second-tier window of 7:30 P.M., an apt metaphor for the Libyan operation—cable, not network; evening, not prime time; kinetic military operation, not war. The speech was on a Monday, and I spent a weekend writing it. Obama was defensive. Everything had gone as planned, and yet the public and political response kept shifting—from demanding action to second-guessing it, from saying he was dithering to saying he wasn’t doing enough. Even while he outlined the reasons for action in Libya, he stepped back to discuss the question that would continue to define his foreign policy: the choice of when to use military force. Unlike other wartime addresses, he went out of his way to stress the limits of what we were trying to achieve in Libya—saving lives and giving Libyans a chance to determine their future, not installing a new regime or building a democracy. He said that we would use force “swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally” to defend the United States, but he emphasized that when confronted with other international crises, we should proceed with caution and not act alone.
I stood backstage watching the words roll on the teleprompter. In just two months, the world had turned upside down. We’d seen a regime fall in Tunisia, broken from a longtime U.S. ally in Egypt, and intervened in Libya. History, it seemed, was turning in the direction of young people in the streets, and we had placed the United States of America on their side. Where this drama would turn next was uncertain—protests were already rattling a monarch in Bahrain, a corrupt leader in Yemen, a strongman in Syria.
After the speech, as we began to disperse to the motorcade, I got word that Obama wanted me to ride with him back to the White House. I slid into the seat opposite him, just the two of us in the limousine as it pulled out of the loading zone and onto the darkened streets of Washington.
“That turned out well,” he said.
“I think so,” I said.
“We still need to give a speech that puts all of this in context,” he said. “That steps back a little bit.”
“I was working on that a couple of weeks ago. Then Libya happened.” I started to talk about how we could frame all of these different countries by talking about a set of principles that would guide the United States, the opportunity that was emerging for change.
Obama’s eyes drifted out the window to the passing scenery, the National Mall, monuments to leaders and wars past. “It’s hard to get a grasp on what’s happening,” he said.
“It’s playing out pretty fast,” I said.
“We could spend all of our time on it,” he said. He’d spent a lot of time recently on foreign policy. There was still an unsettled economy, a looming debate with Republicans over raising the debt ceiling, a reelection campaign that was just gathering steam. “I just wish I had some more bandwidth,” he said as the limousine turned in to the south driveway of the White House.
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I HAD NEVER HEARD the phrase “lead from behind” until it appeared in a New Yorker article about Obama’s foreign policy in April 2011. The article was typical of a Washington genre: the step-back review of a particular policy—in this case, foreign policy—in which a writer interviews a mix of administration officials and outside critics to make sense of things. Most of these pieces disappear without much notice, adding to an accumulating conventional wisdom. But on occasion, a particular turn of phrase can become a bumper sticker that is affixed to a presidency. I knew we might be faced with that scenario when I sat in my office late one afternoon reading this long New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza, and reached the end: “Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisors described the president’s actions as ‘leading from behind.’ ”
I had no idea who the unnamed advisor was, but a lot of people thought it was me—one of the hazards of my job was that many people assumed that just about every quote attributed to an “unnamed advisor” on foreign policy was me. We were constantly asked about what the “Obama doctrine” was, and we usually rejected the question. The world was too complicated to sum up in a doctrine, and the only recent effort that a president made to declare a doctrine was George W. Bush’s regrettable assertion that we’d preemptively go to war to prevent countries from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. We were going to be damned if we did declare a doctrine and damned if we didn’t; looking at the risks of overpromising or oversimplifying, we decided to avoid the question.
Predictably, there was an explosion of criticism on the right, which branded “leading from behind” as “the Obama doctrine” and used it to cast him as weak, indecisive, and un-American. The more mainstream response concerned why Obama had chosen “leading from behind” as a doctrine, even though he hadn’t. It was all nonsense—Obama had never uttered the phrase, and he wouldn’t have used it to describe his own foreign policy; it was a show, designed to distill complicated international issues into a debate that could take place on cable news.
At the same time, the real estate developer and reality television show celebrity Donald Trump began flirting publicly with his own presidential run. Like anyone who grew up in 1980s New York City, I knew Trump as a tabloid punch line, more famous for his mistresses than his politics. But instead of protests in Arab cities, it was now Trump’s face popping up on the television screens throughout the West Wing, the cable news networks shadowing his every move. The thing that drew the most attention was his nakedly racist demand for Obama to release his birth certificate—a subject of derision, at first, within the White House, but as the days went on and the attention stayed on Trump, that derision turned to anger over the outright racism of the attack, and the ceaseless, credulous attention it was getting. Obama was more annoyed at the media than anything else—“I can’t believe they’re giving this airtime,” he said.
Personally, I recoiled at another part of Trump’s interviews and stock speech. Time and again, he talked about all the Americans getting killed in Libya, and the assertion would go unchallenged. I’d call reporters to demand a fact check—no Americans were getting killed in Libya, and Americans watching at home shouldn’t be misled to believe that they were. In response, they’d deflect any responsibility to fact-check everything Trump said—after all, who would take him seriously?
I took all of the cr
iticism of Obama too personally because I felt helpless in the face of what seemed to be the insanity of it all. No Americans are being killed in Libya! Barack Obama never said “leading from behind”! More profoundly, I thought a bar was being set that we could never clear. The same people who had been demanding a no-fly zone were now attacking Obama for being “weak” on Libya. Donald Trump was simultaneously criticizing Obama for not taking Libya’s oil and for getting Americans killed. The Arab Spring was upending a rotted, corrupt, authoritarian order in the Middle East, and yet the debate about these seismic events in Washington was an extension of our own partisan, diminished discourse.
CHAPTER 11
BIN LADEN
Life Inside a Secret
One April morning, I noticed multiple missed calls from the blocked number that normally signaled that it was the Situation Room calling. When I called back, I was told to come to work immediately. John Brennan and Denis McDonough wanted to see me.
When I got to Brennan’s office, they asked me to close the door, which was unusual. Brennan’s office was across the hall from me at the back of a suite of rooms designed to house classified information. It was a somewhat unpleasant place, with a mini-fridge, a single-cup coffee maker, a dropped ceiling, piles of intelligence reports, multiple computer screens at different levels of classification, different-colored phones, and shelves half-filled with books, most of which appeared to be unread gifts. During one semirenovation, they found dead rats in the walls. Yet in the global war against al Qaeda—the mix of surveillance, drone strikes, and special operations that take place in some of the most remote parts of the world—Brennan’s office was the nerve center. Any decision that Obama had to make about whether to launch an operation to kill or capture someone came through here.