by Kim Ghattas
“You don’t know my people. They know only I can create stability.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“But you don’t know my people.”
“Let’s talk in twenty-four hours.”
“No, no, we’ll talk in a few days. You will see, everything will be fine.”
“You could be right, but what if you’re not. The stakes are high for you too.”
Obama tried to be respectful and empathic as he tried to explain to a man who was old enough to be his father that it wasn’t because things had been a certain way for a long time that they would stay like that. Mubarak was too old to listen.
“I know my people. You don’t know them.”
They would never speak again. Obama gave a speech soon after the call. He was frustrated. He wanted to lock Mubarak into the promises he had made about reform. In a stern address, Obama put Mubarak on notice.
“I spoke directly to President Mubarak. He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable and that a change must take place. What is clear—and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak—is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.”
The next day, regime thugs forged into the crowds on horseback, beating demonstrators. Three people were killed, another 1,500 injured. The ferocious attack was a turning point in the protests and gave the lie to Mubarak’s assurances that only he could bring stability to the country. Tahrir Square erupted again, united once more in fury, demanding Mubarak’s departure. Any illusion that there was still time for the president to be part of the transition was gone.
Clinton called the intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who had just been appointed as vice president a few days earlier. She was firm: this would not be tolerated. Suleiman reassured her it wouldn’t happen again and that the violence would indeed be kept under control. You can’t put the salt back in the shaker, she told him. You have to preside over a real transition. You can’t just do some window-dressing reforms and stick around for another ten years. Real change had to come. Fast.
Every day, Clinton went to the White House. She met with Obama alone. She met with Bob Gates and the national security advisor Tom Donilon. They met all together. Clinton had always said that what had surprised her most about her job was how often she was at the White House. Now she was spending half her days there. Obama was surrounded by his own trusted circle of advisors who saw the world as he did, but over the course of the last two years, he had been listening more closely to Clinton. And she, in turn, voiced her views and gave advice with more and more confidence. Clinton had spent her first year in Obama’s cabinet trying to be, for the most part, the good soldier. Now she added to that role her own pragmatic views and a voice more forcefully heard. During national security meetings, the national security advisor would kick off with the agenda, and if the focus was foreign policy, Obama would turn to Clinton to ask for her input before the advisor had even finished. If she wasn’t present, Obama would say, I want to know where Hillary is on this. They didn’t always agree, of course, and he was still the ultimate decider, but Clinton was a steady hand and, perhaps most importantly, she was the implementer. If Obama wanted something done, he needed to know Clinton felt confident she could deliver the outcome that was required.
Hillary took the long view on Egypt, keeping one eye on the bigger picture. She had warned about moving too fast and making it look like the United States was abandoning its allies. She believed deeply in empowering people and in the need to support reform, but she was also the one who had given a speech in Doha just a few weeks earlier warning that the choice was not between reform and stability but between reform and chaos. Now, chaos was knocking at the door, and it was important to manage this properly. The United States had a reputation to think of. It wasn’t just a question of values but also one of credibility. And it was about money. Washington was already underwriting the Egyptian army, but the aftermath of any upheaval would require an influx of aid to fuel the economy. The United States had its own economic woes to worry about and could soon find itself knocking on Riyadh’s door to ask for their riyals to flow toward Egypt. It was unwise to alienate the rich uncle in the Gulf just before asking for his wallet. Israel’s fears about an Egypt without Mubarak also weighed on Clinton’s mind.
On February 5, a few days after Obama’s call for the transition to “begin now,” Wisner, by now a former envoy, gave a talk at a conference in Munich. He volunteered his opinion that it would actually still be best if Mubarak stayed in power to oversee the whole process of the transition toward democracy. This is what Wisner had been sent to tell Mubarak, but since then everything had changed. Conspiracy theories erupted across the globe. What did he mean by that? Hadn’t Obama said the transition started now? Didn’t that mean that Mubarak himself had to go now? Was Mubarak suddenly part of that transition? What was America’s plan? Once again, here was proof of America’s changeability: saying one thing, doing another. U.S. leaders claimed that they were with the people, but really they were protecting their ally, hedging their bets, waiting to see which way the wind would blow. The foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit complained during a television interview with PBS that America was sending mixed messages that were utterly confusing even to the Egyptian leadership.
The Obama administration was trying so hard to find the right words, to weigh every message, yet its response looked messy and uncoordinated. But what people often forgot was that American officials didn’t have it all figured out, every statement was not part of a methodical plan, and not everybody agreed on the best course of action. And this was not China, where decision making was hypercentralized and officials did not deviate from the party line, whether in public or private. The United States was a country where people loved to express their opinions, and it wasn’t always easy to stick to one message. If you had been hired as a freelancer and your mission was over, as in the case of Wisner, surely you could express your own opinions again. Hillary, who was at the same conference in Munich, was frustrated when she heard the news. She canceled her dinner plans and tried to fix the damage. Obama was annoyed by the uncertainty the different statements were creating about Washington’s policy. The White House issued clear instructions: not a word would be uttered anymore that hadn’t been approved; no one was to stray from the talking points.
* * *
After days of defiantly poking his finger in America’s eye, Mubarak finally promised the military he would announce his resignation in a speech on the evening of February 10. The army had been watching with alarm as the protests swelled. Their own power was at risk. Egypt’s generals told officials in Washington that everything was set for Mubarak’s departure. Speaking to Congress that morning, CIA chief Leon Panetta said there was “a strong likelihood that Mubarak may step down this evening.”
Clinton was convinced Mubarak was going to hedge. His first speech had been so ambiguous that she expected this one would be equally so. Chatting with her aides, she said she just couldn’t see how this old man could stand up and say, “I’m leaving.” It just wasn’t in his DNA.
Hillary watched the speech in her office on the seventh floor. Her television set, usually sitting silently behind a panel in the wooden wall unit to the right of her desk, had been turned on for the occasion. Mubarak’s speech was so convoluted that for seventeen long minutes, no one knew what he was trying to say. At some point, he did utter the sentence “Transfer all powers under the constitution to the vice president.” On Tahrir Square, barely anyone was listening anymore: there were howls of rage, tears, and protestors who had been chanting, “The people want the downfall of the regime,” started singing, “The people want to understand the speech.” When Mubarak was finished, I asked American officials whether the speech was satisfactory.
“We’re trying to decipher his words,” one of them said.
Panetta would later issue a correction about his statement to Congress, explaining that he had b
een relying on what he’d heard in the media. He made himself look like a fool: if the CIA director relied on the media for his information, the world was in trouble. But it was Mubarak who was really in trouble. Panetta knew Mubarak had promised to resign, but the pharaoh had reneged on his promise.
Obama watched the speech on board Air Force One, returning from a trip to Michigan. Mubarak had included a special message for him. “It is shameful and I will not, nor will I ever, accept to hear foreign dictations, whatever the source might be or whatever the context it came in.”
What on earth was going on? That evening, the White House sent out a written statement by President Obama.
“The Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of authority, but it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful, or sufficient … We therefore urge the Egyptian government to move swiftly to explain the changes that have been made.”
The focus—at least publicly—was on the Egyptian people.
“The Egyptian people have made it clear that there is no going back to the way things were: Egypt has changed, and its future is in the hands of the people … In these difficult times, I know that the Egyptian people will persevere, and they must know that they will continue to have a friend in the United States of America.”
Later that evening, Defense Secretary Gates called Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, Egypt’s defense minister, and told him this was a dangerous crossroads: Mubarak had to go. The army now needed to clean this up and help manage the transition. The United States stood ready to mentor them and help the Egyptian army do something they’d never done before—give birth to a democratic process.
Many in the administration worried that the army would do everything possible to preserve its own power and privileges, but Washington couldn’t tell how big of a problem it might become; the country would descend into chaos unless the crowds were calmed and the protestors got what they wanted. The army was Washington’s only recourse. The generals were tired and tense, worried about bloodshed. They had so far avoided shooting. The people kissed soldiers on the streets and praised the army, but it could all be lost in an instant. The generals weighed their options all night and all of the next day. Mubarak was a military man, and he had ruled for three decades. The generals may not have liked being bossed around by the United States, but it was that or risk destroying the whole edifice.
But it truly was not in Mubarak’s DNA to announce his departure, so he sent someone else to utter the fateful words. On February 11, at eleven in the morning in Washington, six in the evening in Cairo, Clinton arrived at the White House for a meeting. In Cairo, Omar Suleiman faced the cameras in a wood-paneled hallway of the presidential palace. Standing under neon lights, in a blue suit and tie, the seventy-five-year-old man looked like death, all color drained from his face. He spoke for thirty-five seconds. The president had resigned. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was in charge.
“God help everybody,” he said. The people had won.
On Tahrir Square, they celebrated and cried with relief that the decades of frustration, humiliation, corruption, repression, and poverty had come to an end. All their dreams had come true, said one woman. Few paused to wonder whether being ruled by the army was cause for celebration. They thought the revolution was the answer to all their problems, unaware that revolutions simply lift the veil that concealed the extent of problems plaguing a country, problems hidden for years by the state’s propaganda.
The State Department briefing for that day was canceled. On big momentous occasions such as this, the White House spoke first. No matter how big a star Hillary was on the world stage, the president was the president. Four hours later, Obama stood in the marble grand foyer of the White House. It had been a roller-coaster few days and weeks as the battle between American national interests and American principles was fought in offices in Washington, in people’s minds, in Obama’s heart, and on the streets of Cairo.
“There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place,” the president started by saying. “This is one of those moments. This is one of those times. The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.”
Nothing would be the same again. Not Egypt, not the Middle East, and not America.
“The word ‘Tahrir’ means liberation,” Obama said at the end of his speech. “It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people, of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.”
In Tahrir Square, Obama’s speech was carried live on big screens, his words texted around by jubilant protestors. Though they had been disappointed by what they saw as America’s initial reluctance to support them, they were now proud to be recognized by a president they still admired. But this was their victory. They had done it.
Throughout the process, Hillary didn’t call Hosni or Suzanne Mubarak, and they didn’t call her either. This was politics. Clinton wasn’t cold-blooded, just realistic. Democratic forces were at work, and leaders lost power. She was a veteran politician who had faced loss herself. She would shed no tears for a guy because he didn’t get to rule the way he’d ruled for the last thirty years.
* * *
That evening, some 1,080 miles west of the jubilant scenes in Cairo, Yael Lempert was glued to the television with her husband and some friends. She had recently served as an American diplomat in Egypt and was transfixed by the scope and pace of events. She thought of her Egyptian friends who had expressed such frustration about life under Mubarak. How elated they must be. She was now the acting deputy chief of mission at the brand-new U.S. embassy in Tripoli.
“It’s such a shame that this will not happen here,” she said. They turned off the television and went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
An hour later, Libyan state television’s news ticker carried a short sentence about Mubarak’s resignation. The country’s own much more colorful demagogue, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had been in power even longer—forty-two years—wearing purple or blue silk suits and epaulets, carrying a gold scepter, and surrounding himself with female bodyguards. But he was certain of his people’s love. They would not let themselves be used by foreign plotters. He was convinced that he was different from his neighbors on his eastern and western borders.
* * *
Three days later, on February 14, protests erupted in Bahrain, a small island state where Sunni monarchs ruled over a Shiite majority. For years, Shiites had faced discrimination in jobs and society, and now they were taking to the streets. The crackdown was shocking in its brutality. But Clinton chose her words very carefully when she spoke out about the violence.
“Bahrain is a friend and an ally and has been for many years, and while all governments have a responsibility to provide citizens with security and stability, we call [for] restraint.”
When the United States looked at Bahrain, it didn’t just see protestors demanding respect for their rights; it saw Iran lurking behind and the picture blurred. Shiite Iran had long had claims over the small island. But Bahrain was home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet and a key pillar for the U.S. regional military infrastructure. Sunni kingdoms like Bahrain and its bigger neighbor Saudi Arabia were a crucial counterweight to Tehran’s growing influence in the region. The undertone of sectarian tension, real or imagined, meant the United States was taking no chances. In Egypt, they had gambled on an army underwritten by Washington, but Bahrain could very well be the first domino to fall into the Iranian camp. Blinded by its fear of Iran, the United States would do nothing that risked bringing down Bahrain’s rulers.
With each revolution in each country came a new set of issues, a new set of headaches for the Obama administration, and challenges to the exercise of American power in the region and in the twenty-first century. Each one was a lesson about the chal
lenges and possibilities for the United States as a world leader.
14
SARKO’S WAR
On the night of February 18 when Yael Lempert went to bed in her home in Suqal Jumaa, Tripoli’s sprawling eastern suburb, she could hear shooting in the distance for the second night in a row. Earlier in the day, the American diplomat had asked Libyan officials about it, but they had brushed the gunfire away.
“Just a few excited shabab,” they had said.
Shabab means “young men” in Arabic, and it’s often used to describe a group of them, hanging out on street corners, rowdy, restless, bored, and underemployed. They harass girls, smoke cigarettes, and occasionally fire guns for fun or to mark their territory. There were shabab in Lebanon, in Jordan, in the Palestinian territories, places where young men often had little to do and where the state afforded them some latitude. But the tightly controlled Jamahiriya of Gaddafi? Not so much.
At three in the morning, Yael’s home phone rang. The cell phone network was out of commission. It was one of the embassy drivers.
“I’m in Green Square,” he said. “Fifteen people just died in front of me. The revolution has started.” Click.
All night the shooting continued. In the morning, Yael drove to work in her SUV. Suddenly, halfway into the fifteen-minute ride, she saw the Arabic writing scrawled on the walls. Anti-Gaddafi graffiti, pictures of the leader defaced. It was true: the revolution had started. Her mind raced through the different scenarios. How would this unfold? Would Gaddafi use violence? Would millions take to the street? The only thing Yael was certain of was that it wouldn’t be quick like in Egypt. There were no checks and balances here, no institutions, just a dictator with a Green Book of rules and slogans. She had to start planning with the embassy staff. And she had to think of her baby; her first child was due in just a month.