The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  And defend it I did: on conference calls, in televised briefings, and in long conversations with reporters. I fought with lawyers to get clearance to say that Obama had decided to provide “direct military support” to the Syrian opposition, as we were in the impossible position of not being able to discuss details about a key element of our policy. Legally, we couldn’t say what the support was; all I could say were things like “This is going to be different—in both scope and scale—in terms of what we are providing to the opposition.” I was giving partial answers about an incremental response and felt as though whatever stockpile of credibility I had built up over four years was being drawn down.

  That summer had been thankless in so many other ways. It began with the spectacle of Edward Snowden releasing a devastating cache of classified information in June, fleeing to Hong Kong, and then somehow boarding a plane to Moscow even though he had no passport. There were weeks of drip-drip-drip revelations about U.S. surveillance, the same tactic that would shadow the run-up to our 2016 elections, involving the same people: Russia, Wikileaks. I had to spend my days explaining to our liberal base that Obama wasn’t running a surveillance state because of the activities of the NSA, which we couldn’t really talk about. Then came the Egypt coup, which we refused to call a coup. Instead of carrying out an affirmative agenda, I felt I spent my days in a defensive crouch.

  As our August vacation began, I was wrestling with my own creeping suspicion that Obama was right—maybe we couldn’t do much to direct events inside the Middle East; maybe U.S. military intervention in Syria would only make things worse. I wanted to get away from Washington, to stare at the ocean, to get reacquainted with my wife, to read a book. When our plane finally touched down in Portland, I had more than a hundred emails, some with harrowing accounts of how scores of people had been killed by clouds of gas on the outskirts of Damascus.

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  I HAD A SENSE of foreboding as Ann and I checked into our hotel. As we fell into the rhythm of a family vacation, I sensed Ann keeping a careful eye on how much I was looking at my BlackBerry, silently anticipating the inevitable encroachment of world events. At the same time, I could sense the frantic response building back in Washington through my in-box—invitations to meetings I wouldn’t be attending, draft talking points I had to approve, news stories pressing Obama to respond, photos of lifeless children who had choked to death.

  I was asked to find a way to attend a meeting that Obama was going to convene with his National Security Council. I drove to an FBI field office out by the airport and parked in an empty lot. A couple of guys who looked annoyed to be working on a weekend set up a secure video link for me so I could be patched in to the Situation Room. I listened as it was reported that there was a “high confidence assessment” that a sarin gas attack had killed more than a thousand people in a suburb of Damascus, and that the Assad regime was responsible. One after another, officials advised Obama to order a military strike. This included the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marty Dempsey, who had internalized the limits of U.S. military action in the Middle East. One time he surprised me in the hallway of the West Wing by recommending that I read Rachel Maddow’s book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. Up to this point, he had argued that Syria was a slippery slope where there was little chance of success; now he said that something needed to be done even if we didn’t know what would happen after we took action.

  When the conversation got around to Obama, he asked about the UN investigators who were going to the scene of the attack to obtain samples. Could something be done to get them out? I thought the tone of the whole meeting suggested an imminent strike. The advisor who urged the most caution against military action was Denis McDonough, who raised questions about the legal basis for it and what would come next. What if we bombed Syria and Assad responded by using more of his chemical weapons? Would we put in ground troops to secure those stockpiles?

  At the end of the meeting, Obama said he hadn’t yet made a decision but wanted military options prepared. I walked outside and convened a conference call with the lead communicators for the government on national security. Pacing back and forth in an empty parking lot, I started to plan a public campaign to ramp up to a military intervention. John Kerry could make a statement that Monday making the case for action. The intelligence community would have to make its assessment public. DoD needed to prepare for an announcement of strikes. It felt energizing, as though we were finally going to do something to shape events in Syria.

  I rejoined Ann and her family at a restaurant. I told her there was a chance I’d have to go back early. “Why can’t someone else do this?” she asked. McDonough called me and said that I needed to get back as soon as I could. I knew that that would upset Ann; we had plans to visit her father’s grave on the anniversary of his death. I asked McDonough if it was possible for Obama to call so he could talk to Ann—something he occasionally did for people who have grown weary of their spouse’s work schedule. Instead, I got a short email from Obama telling me to come home as soon as possible.

  Sitting in a crowded restaurant among my in-laws, I felt the loneliness of knowing that I’d have to do what the president of the United States was asking me to do, and that on the scale of what was going wrong in the world, my own inconvenience—however dramatic in the context of my family—was not going to be anyone else’s concern. I waited a couple of hours before telling Ann, trying to preserve for a little while longer the illusion of normalcy. I flew back to Washington the next morning.

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  AS WE SAT OUTSIDE the Oval Office waiting for the morning briefing with Obama, the director of national intelligence—Jim Clapper—looked agitated. A Vietnam veteran, former Air Force lieutenant general, and longtime intelligence professional, Clapper was an avuncular older guy with a bald head. He spoke in clipped sentences and had an easy rapport with Obama, who liked to needle him for always dropping paper clips on the rug in the Oval Office. Clapper never put spin on the ball; he told you what he knew and what he didn’t know. I respected him as much as anyone in government.

  Speaking to me and Susan, who had recently become national security advisor, Clapper said that it wasn’t yet a “slam dunk” case that Assad had authorized the chemical weapons attack. The assessment would firm up over time, as samples were gathered and information analyzed. The choice of words was striking—“slam dunk” was the exact phrase that George Tenet, then director of the CIA, had used to assure George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Clapper seemed to be signaling that he wasn’t going to put the intelligence community in the position of building another case for another war in the Middle East that could go wrong.

  When we entered the Oval Office, we took our usual seats—Obama in his armchair opposite Biden; Clapper at the end of one couch, opposite Rice; Lisa Monaco, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, and Tony Blinken, Rice’s deputy, in the other seats on the couches; and Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national security advisor, in a chair next to me, filling out a semicircle. I always took this seat because I liked to face Obama, which made it easy to make eye contact. Obama could signal a lot with his eyes.

  Clapper always opened with a summary of key intelligence. On this morning, he indicated that all signs pointed to Assad’s ordering a catastrophic sarin attack, but then he paused and repeated his line that the case was not yet a “slam dunk,” using air quotes for emphasis. His words hung in the air. Obama made eye contact with me, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing: This will find its way into the press.

  “Jim,” Obama said, “no one asked you if it was a slam dunk.”

  I felt the burden on Obama. He had to respond to this awful event in Syria while bearing the additional weight of the war in Iraq—which caused his own intelligence community to be cautious, his military to be wary of a slippery slope, his closes
t allies to distrust U.S.-led military adventures in the Middle East, the press to be more skeptical of presidential statements, the public to oppose U.S. wars overseas, and Congress to see matters of war and peace as political issues to be exploited. Later that day, in a Principals Committee meeting, Clapper repeated the slam-dunk formulation. Sure enough, later that week it leaked.

  In that same Principals Committee meeting, Clapper said that the intelligence community would not prepare an assessment for public release. Instead, he suggested they share all of their information and judgments with me and I could write a U.S. government assessment, which they would review for accuracy and sign-off. It took me a moment to understand what he was suggesting. In all my time at the White House, I had never written that kind of assessment, and never would again. These were usually technical documents produced by teams of people in the intelligence agencies.

  After the meeting, I called Jake Sullivan and Bernadette Meehan into my office. Meehan was a thirty-seven-year-old Foreign Service officer who worked for me. Twice she had nearly been killed during overseas tours. In Colombia, a group of men had kidnapped her and thrown her into the trunk of a car; after driving for some time, they stopped and tossed her out on the side of the highway. A few years later, posted in Baghdad, she was badly wounded by a rocket fired by an Iran-backed militia. Still she kept at it. She spoke Arabic and loved the Middle East.

  “He really asked you to write it?” she asked me.

  “That’s what he said. Ask Jake.”

  She looked over and he nodded, having been in the meeting.

  “Are you going to do it?” she asked.

  “What choice do I have?” I understood that Clapper was protecting the intelligence community from a repeat of the role it played before the war in Iraq. But this was different. Our intelligence community had a high-confidence assessment that a weapon of mass destruction had been used by the Assad regime. The evidence was running in a loop on our television screens.

  We worked out a plan whereby each of us would write a different piece of what would be a “U.S. government assessment” instead of an “intelligence assessment.” We were given stacks of intelligence reports about what had happened, as well as volumes of publicly available information. I sat at my computer and typed out the first sentence: “The United States Government assesses with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013.” For the next two days, I sat at my desk poring over the information and turning it into a short, stark, and simple analysis. I watched publicly available videos of people lying disoriented on the floors of hospitals, looked at pictures of dead children. I felt waves of anxiety, anticipating how I might be hauled before Congress if things went terribly wrong after a military intervention. I was responsible for writing the public document that would justify the United States’ going to war in Syria.

  Obama remained focused on the United Nations inspection team that was on the ground in Syria. That afternoon, he called Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and urged him to pull them out. Ban refused, saying that the team had to finish their work. “I cannot overstate the importance of not remaining in Syria for a lengthy time,” Obama said. Ban replied that it could take a few days. Obama pressed again, saying they should be out by the following night. To this day, I wonder if Obama would have launched a strike early that week if the UN team hadn’t been in the way.

  Obama’s next call was to Angela Merkel. There was no foreign leader he admired more. Like him, she was a pragmatist, driven by facts, dedicated to international order, deliberate in her decision making. She had emerged as the dominant leader in Europe, working closely with Obama to respond to the global economic crisis and the instability in the Eurozone that followed. I’d seen them sit together, sometimes for hours, with notepads in front of them, designing strategies that could keep the global economy crawling forward, or hold Afghanistan together. Now I sat in the Oval Office listening to Obama ask for her support for military action. Even if Germany didn’t participate, the United Kingdom and France had indicated that they would. But her public support would show that the United States and Europe were united, and could help bring along the rest of the European Union. Merkel argued that the UN team should have the time to prepare and submit its report, at which point we should pursue a Security Council resolution authorizing action. If the Russians blocked us, then at least we would have tried. This would take several weeks. Obama knew a delay of that length would tie his hands, especially because there wasn’t much public support for war in the United States. As the fresh horror of Assad’s attack faded, the opposition to a U.S. strike would build. With any additional time, Assad could also put innocent civilians around potential targets as human shields.

  I sat on the couch watching him make this case, waiting for Merkel’s words in response. I don’t want you to get into a situation where you are left on a limb, she said. Obama listened intently as he cradled the phone against his ear while the rest of us listened on speaker. She said she wanted to use the time to build agreement among the European countries. Then, she said, we have a situation where you are not exposed to vague allegations. This is what I say as a friend.

  After he hung up the phone, he came over to where we were sitting. It was the first time I saw him look uneasy about acting in Syria. He asked our opinion on the timing for military action. I plunged into the case I’d been making in meetings—that only action by us would change the emerging dynamic, that the biggest concern in the United States and Europe was that we were going to have another Iraq War. Only by acting in a limited way, with air strikes that were over after a period of days, could we demonstrate that we weren’t beginning an all-out war. He listened, but I knew he was skeptical that we could contain military action once we’d begun.

  Just as things were stalling in Europe, congressional opposition to strikes was building at home. On Wednesday, a large group of Republican members of Congress wrote Obama a letter that threatened him bluntly: “Engaging our military in Syria when no direct threat to the United States exists and without prior congressional authorization would violate the separation of powers that is clearly delineated in the Constitution.”

  This was followed by a letter from the Speaker of the House, John Boehner. “Even as the United States grapples with the alarming scale of the human suffering,” it read, “we are immediately confronted with contemplating the potential scenarios our response might trigger or accelerate. These considerations include the Assad regime potentially losing command and control of its stock of chemical weapons or terrorist organizations—especially those tied to al Qaeda—gaining greater control of and maintaining territory.” He listed fourteen detailed questions about various scenarios that could take place in Syria and demanded responses to each of those questions.

  Boehner also focused on the need for congressional authorization: “It is essential you address on what basis any use of force would be legally justified and how the justification comports with the exclusive authority of congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution.”

  After deriding Obama’s response to Syria as weak, Republicans were now making the same warnings about action that we had used to publicly defend our inaction in the past. In doing so, they were signaling that Obama would be held accountable if these scenarios were realized, while seeking impossible guarantees that they wouldn’t be. More ominously, a message was being delivered: Acting without going to Congress would be unconstitutional.

  Our lawyers also had concerns. There was no firm international legal basis for bombing Syria—no argument of self-defense, which justified our actions against al Qaeda; no UN resolution such as we had had in Libya. Nor was there any domestic legal basis beyond the assertion that the president had the inherent power to take military action that did not constitute a “war” under the Constitution, which the Republicans were disputing. Some argu
ed that the Republicans could even try to impeach Obama if he acted without congressional authorization—hardly a wild thought, given their posture toward Obama.

  On Thursday afternoon, Denis convened the national security team for a call with congressional leaders. One after the other, nearly all expressed some degree of support for strikes but demanded that Obama seek authorization. Some were quoting a candidate questionnaire that Obama had filled out for The Boston Globe in 2007, in which he had said, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation”—an argument that had also been mounted against Obama after we intervened in Libya.

  I sat listening to all this, exhausted from staying up late the last two nights working on the assessment, getting angrier and angrier. It felt as if I was trapped within a system fueled by hypocrisy and opportunism. For eight years, Republicans had defended Bush’s ability to do whatever he pleased as commander in chief; now they were suddenly devoted to constitutional limits on the commander in chief? I was used to the relentless style of politics from Obama’s opponents—the effort to find any piece of information that could embarrass him, put him on the defensive, wound him politically. But I’d spent two days reading detailed descriptions of people being gassed to death, watching video of children with vacant eyes lying on the floor of a makeshift hospital. Faced with this harsh reality, Congress was focused on creating a political trap.

  During the meeting, we got word that the British Parliament had voted 285–272 against joining U.S.-led strikes on Syria after a debate filled with demands that the United Kingdom not follow the United States down the path to war as Tony Blair had followed George W. Bush. A shell-shocked David Cameron called Obama to apologize, explaining that he could no longer offer his support. When I got back to my desk, I had distraught emails from Cameron’s aides in which they worried about the damage to Britain’s role in the world. The hangover from the Iraq War had left us staggering toward military intervention with next to no international support, and a Congress demanding that we go through the same divisive process of seeking authorization that had just failed in London.