by Ben Rhodes
On Friday morning, I sat at my desk rereading the assessment, which I had reread more times than I could remember. I had checked every word with the deputy director of national intelligence, Robert Cardillo, who stepped up to help us out—getting information declassified, editing the document, giving us maps to release, and offering to join the press briefing I would give when it was released. That morning, we released “The United States Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013.” Shortly after, Kerry delivered his final case against Assad at the State Department. “My friends,” he thundered, “it matters here if nothing is done. It matters if the world speaks out in condemnation and then nothing happens.”
We had a final National Security Council meeting that morning. Kerry suggested that we wait another week to bring other countries into a coalition. I argued that we had to act as soon as possible—time was not our friend, and our military action was likely to change the public dynamic. Obama, who seemed increasingly focused on the factors aligning against us, pressed for the domestic and international legal basis that we could cite for taking action. In short, there was no good answer, other than to point back to when NATO had acted without an international mandate in Kosovo. Still, throughout the day, the drama of Kerry’s speech and the horrific details in the public assessment seemed to tilt things back in the direction of action. It felt as if all of the week’s setbacks and preemptive criticisms were part of an unfolding drama that would inevitably conclude in cruise missiles hitting Syria.
Later that afternoon, I went to a meeting in Denis’s office where all the participants were slated to review their role in the event of a strike. We were discussing whether Obama had to address the nation in prime time as soon as the bombing began. Denis, the sole voice against military action, got a note at the beginning of the meeting that Obama wanted to see him; he left and never returned. An hour later, I was back in the Situation Room when I got a note asking me to come to the Oval Office.
I went upstairs and walked into Obama’s office. He was alone and looked more relaxed than he had all week. Gone was the grave look that had been frozen on his face. He was looser, standing up from behind his desk and directing me to sit down on the couch.
“I’ve got a big idea,” he said.
“Well,” I replied, “you’re the big idea guy.” Sometimes, the more intense the moment, the more casual I would be with Obama in my comments.
A handful of aides trickled in. Obama laid out his thinking: He had decided to seek congressional authorization for strikes on Syria. At some point, he said, a president alone couldn’t keep the United States on a perpetual war footing, moving from one Middle Eastern conflict to the next. In the decade since 9/11, we’d gone to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Now there was a demand that we go into Syria; next it would be Iran. “It is too easy for a president to go to war,” he said. “That quote from me in 2007—I agree with that guy. That’s who I am. And sometimes the least obvious thing to do is the right thing.” If he attacked Syria without congressional authorization, the Republicans would come after him, and it would be impossible to sustain any military engagement in Syria. If we got congressional authorization for an attack on Syria, everyone would be in on the action, and we’d have more credibility—legally, politically, and internationally. If we couldn’t, we shouldn’t act.
I sat slouched over on the couch across from him. I couldn’t argue with anything he was saying, even though everything I’d been doing for the last few days—and everything I’d been arguing for for the last two years—had been building up to a cruise missile strike on Syria the following day. It was as if Obama was finally forcing me to let go of a part of who I was—the person who looked at Syria and felt that we had to do something, who had spent two years searching for hope amid the chaos engulfing the Arab world and the political dysfunction at home.
Obama had not put forward more than one option—it was clear that his mind was made up. Still, as always, he went around the room. One after the other, people voiced agreement with his direction. The only exception was Susan Rice. “We needed to hold Assad accountable,” she said. “Congress is never going to give you this authority,” she said—the only person to offer that prediction. “It gives away too much of your power as commander in chief.” In the years to come, when nearly everyone involved in this drama decided to absolve themselves by saying that Obama should have bombed Assad without going to Congress, Susan never did.
When it was my turn, I found myself almost speaking my thought process out loud. I told Obama I agreed with him. The downside of getting congressional authorization was, ironically, that we’d then have even more ownership over Syria; we’d be raising expectations around the world about what we were prepared to do and what we could achieve. But then I conceded that we had to, at some point, show that we meant what we said about not being on a permanent war footing. “We keep saying that,” I said, “and I guess we have to show that we mean what we say.” Speaking from my experience defending national security actions that we couldn’t talk about—from drone strikes to supporting the Syrian opposition—I said I thought it was time to make decisions in the open.
Then I gave voice to the building frustrations I’d been feeling, the sense of being trapped in systems that don’t work. “In this Syria debate,” I said, “we’ve seen a convergence of two dysfunctions in our foreign policy—Congress and the international community. They both press for action but want to avoid any share of the responsibility.” All week, I had been thinking the answer to that problem was to go ahead and do something; now I saw Obama’s reasoning for why that wouldn’t work. “At some point, we have to address that dysfunction head-on.”
The meeting ended with Obama saying he would call each member of the national security cabinet that night and let them know his decision. The next morning, he would make a statement in the Rose Garden. The only caveat was the insistence by Susan and Obama’s lawyers that we reserve the right to take action even if Congress didn’t approve strikes—a point that made sense, in terms of preserving flexibility, but which undercut the moral, ethical, and legal clarity of the stance Obama was taking. Obama called a couple of foreign leaders, including Netanyahu. Your decision was right, he said, and history will be kinder than public opinion.
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OVER THE NEXT FEW days, we pivoted to seeking congressional support. In a meeting in the Cabinet Room between Obama and congressional leaders, Boehner pledged his support but said he would do nothing to help Obama get votes from within the Republican caucus. McConnell, who would end up criticizing Obama for not launching a strike, refused to offer his support. “Real profiles in courage,” Obama said to us afterward.
Foreign policy luminaries endorsed authorization; Clinton announced her support; AIPAC lobbied in support of our position; so did the Saudi government—but none of it mattered. No wave of support materialized in Congress or in public polls. One after another, members of Congress in both parties—including people who had demanded that we take action in Syria—announced that they would vote against authorizing it.
On Thursday, we flew to Russia, where the G20 was being held at a lavish Tsarist palace on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg. Putin, recently returned to the presidency, had spared no expense in his preparations. Enormous gardens had been meticulously restored and guesthouses set aside for each of the leaders. As we wandered the grounds, updates continued to pour in from Washington. A resolution authorizing the use of force had limped out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but looked increasingly uncertain; the picture in the House was worse. Denis was quarterbacking a frantic communications and legislative operation despite a creeping sense of inevitable failure in Congress.
Up to that point, I had generally avoided doing television interviews. The thought of them made me nervous, and I didn’t want to enlarge the tar
get on my back by diving into the cable news scrum. But Denis was insisting that everyone get out there, so I trudged what seemed like more than a mile through nineteenth-century gardens, along a lake with a floating bar filled with drinking Russians and journalists, across a field, and up a staircase where an enormous black scaffoldlike structure provided places for different international networks to hold interviews. I stood there in the slight chill of dusk, an earpiece playing questions in my ear, a microphone attached to my lapel, and dutifully answered questions—a disembodied head explaining why we needed to go into Syria.
The next morning, I had to get up at five to catch a van back to the palace where the summit was taking place. I was dropped off at the villa where Obama was staying, which looked like a newly built and neatly appointed condominium that you might find alongside a golf course in Arizona. We still had a couple of hours until the meetings began, and I was told Obama was working out. I was rummaging through the fridge looking for a soda or something to eat when Obama popped his head in and asked me to join him in the other room.
He sat at a table, wearing a gray T-shirt and black sweatpants. The television was playing the opening night game of the NFL season, a reminder of the time difference and just how far we were from home. The Broncos were running away with it. The game was on mute, and I started to update him on how support was slipping away, how even hawks on Syria—people like Marco Rubio—were tying themselves in knots to justify opposing authorization. “Maybe they just want to oppose you,” I said. “Or maybe no one wants to be on the record in support of another war.” I left unspoken the fact that the war could take a bad turn—like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
“Maybe we never would have done Rwanda,” Obama said. The comment was jarring. Obama had written about how we should have intervened in Rwanda, and people like me had been deeply influenced by that inaction. But he also frequently pointed out that the people urging intervention in Syria had been silent when millions of people were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “There’s no way there would have been any appetite for that in Congress.”
“You could have done things short of war,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like jamming the radio signals they were using to incite people.”
He waved his hand at me dismissively. “That’s wishful thinking. You can’t stop people from killing each other like that.” He let the thought hang in the air. “I’m just saying, maybe there’s never a time when the American people are going to support this kind of thing. In Libya, everything went right—we saved thousands of lives, we didn’t have a single casualty, and we took out a dictator who killed hundreds of Americans. And at home, it was a negative.”
His eyes shifted to the football game, a slow-motion replay of a Broncos player making a move. I saw what he had been doing—testing Congress, testing public opinion, to see what the real maneuvering room was for his office when it came to intervention in Syria. It was the same thing he’d done in Situation Room meetings on Syria and in his mind, testing whether anything we did could make things better there or whether it would turn out to be like Afghanistan and Iraq, if not worse. It wasn’t just politics he was wrestling with. It was something more fundamental about America, our willingness to take on another war, a war whose primary justification would be humanitarian, a war likely to end badly. “People always say never again,” he said. “But they never want to do anything.”
At that point, Susan Rice walked in, and the conversation shifted to the events of the day as a breakfast of bacon and eggs was served. Susan and I would spend all day trying to get a group of allies to issue a statement endorsing our position on Syria. It wasn’t easy. The Germans preferred to wait for an upcoming European Union meeting. The Saudis, who had spent so much time telling whoever would listen that Obama was weak on Syria, tried to avoid us—Obama finally had to intercept the leader of their delegation in a parking lot to lock in his support. “I wasn’t going to let him leave,” he told us later, “without looking me in the eye.”
On the flight home, Obama mentioned that he’d had a private conversation with Putin on the margins of the summit. For years, Obama had proposed that the United States and Russia work together to address the threat from Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile; for years, Russia had resisted. This time, Obama again suggested working together to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons. Putin agreed and suggested that John Kerry follow up with his Russian counterpart.
After we landed in Washington, Obama talked about the different ways in which the debate could play out. “The thing is,” he said, “if we lose this vote, it will drive a stake through the heart of neoconservatism—everyone will see they have no votes.” I realized then that he was comfortable with either outcome. If we won authorization, he’d be in a strong position to act in Syria. If we didn’t, then we would potentially end the cycle of American wars of regime change in the Middle East.
Kerry worked quickly to turn Putin’s overture into an agreement that could be implemented in a country—Syria—that had never even acknowledged having chemical weapons. Four days after we got back to Washington, the Syrian government announced they would give them up. Five days later, on September 10, Obama addressed the nation and announced that we would pursue this diplomatic opportunity. The congressional vote never took place. Thousands of tons of chemical weapons would be removed from Syria and destroyed, far more than could have been destroyed through military action. The war would continue. Barack Obama would continue to keep the United States out of it.
CHAPTER 19
BECOMING A RIGHT-WING VILLAIN
The more comfortable I became working in the White House, the more uncomfortable I became with the way the world looked at me from outside of it.
Over time, the White House complex becomes familiar, just the place where you happen to work. The recognition of the building appearing in the distance, the tourists taking selfies in front of the gate, the bomb-sniffing dogs that greet your car when you drive in—it all becomes the backdrop to your life, the setting where you attend daily meetings and have hallway conversations about sports and television shows. A bust of Abraham Lincoln sits outside the men’s restroom. A panel of drawings by Norman Rockwell in the West Wing lobby depicts what it was like to wait in that very spot to see Franklin Roosevelt. You find the smoking area next to the place where a wall is still discolored from when the British tried to burn the place down during the War of 1812.
But it can also be a dangerous place to work. During my first year in the job, I was hanging out in my friend Alyssa Mastromonaco’s office when Pete Rouse walked in—a senior advisor to Obama who had been such an institution on Capitol Hill that he was referred to as the 101st senator. He asked us if we had federal liability insurance. I didn’t even know what that was or why I’d need it. “Look it up,” he said. “This is not optional.” I did what I was told and ended up spending a couple hundred dollars a year to cover legal expenses that might come from investigations. This ended up saving me around $100,000.
My initiation into the ritual of being investigated began in the spring of 2012, when two national security leaks to the press took place within a matter of days. David Sanger of The New York Times published a book that included details about an alleged cyberweapon that had sabotaged parts of the Iranian nuclear program, and the Associated Press reported that the United States had a source inside the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen who helped thwart a terrorist attack. Leaks aren’t all that unusual. These two were different because they were detailed and took place in the spring of a presidential election year. Republicans demanded investigations. “They’re intentionally leaking information to enhance President Obama’s image as a tough guy for the election,” John McCain declared. “That is unconscionable!” Attorney General Eric Holder assigned U.S. attorneys to investigate.
Anyone who works in national security communications hates l
eaks because, inevitably, you have to respond to information that you aren’t allowed to discuss publicly. Given that part of my job involved talking to the press about national security, I was on the list of people who would be ensnared in both investigations. That fall, I received a subpoena and ended up having a couple of lengthy sessions with the FBI and the U.S. attorney from Maryland, Rod Rosenstein. I had to leave work at an appointed time, enter the FBI building in downtown Washington, and sit in a Spartan conference room for hours explaining emails and conversations that I’d had. I was told not to talk to my colleagues about this experience; I suspected, and later learned, that my friend Tommy Vietor—who sat right outside my office—was going through the same thing. To cement the absurdity of our situation, Tommy and I also had to answer angry criticisms from journalists and progressives who felt that our administration was too eager to pursue leak investigations.
Over the course of 2012, I also saw my name pop up with increasing frequency in right-wing media, cast as Obama’s political hack on the NSC. Early in the administration, I’d become a target for occasional right-wing ridicule for a few reasons: (1) I worked for Barack Obama; (2) I wrote the Cairo speech; (3) I received a master’s degree in fiction writing from New York University when I was twenty-four years old. The MFA alone was enough to make me a minor villain: “Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Failed Fiction Writer…” One time, in 2009, I was surprised to find a colleague of mine—a kind, soft-spoken young woman named Cindy Chang—sobbing at her desk because she was so upset by one of these pieces. “How can they say these things about you?” she cried. I told her not to worry, I was proud of my enemies. Then I went into my office, closed the door, and felt a fluttering in my stomach—reading the piece, unsettled by how unhinged it was, by how much the person who wrote it seemed to hate me.