by Kim Ghattas
“C’mon, Sergei, this is important. And the Arab League and the Arab countries are behind us,” Hillary told him.33 He told her it was a mistake but that Russia would not use its veto.
We got on the plane and headed home; everyone was exhausted. Clinton got on the phone to Obama, Gates, and Donilon. Jake seemed to be melting as the trip proceeded, despite Molly’s and Andrew’s efforts to keep him fed with beef jerky. The first meal of the flight had been served while he was in the secretary’s cabin talking about the vote coming up at the UN, and he had missed it. In New York, the Security Council chambers were filling up with delegates. Susan Rice was making sure all the delegates needed for the vote were there for the crucial moment. Jake came to the Line of Death to chat with the traveling press. Engrossed in our travel bubble, we were not fully informed of the precise details of events at the UN and the exact wording of the resolution being voted on. We pounced on Jake.
“So is America really going to just stand by while Gaddafi marches on Benghazi?”
Somewhere above the Atlantic, an OPS e-mail dropped. This one was for wider distribution. The line officer printed it out and passed it around to the senior officials in the front area. The UN resolution had passed in New York. Russia and China abstained, as expected. More shocking was Germany’s abstention. Washington would not forgive that very soon. Also disappointing were the abstentions of Brazil and India, The rising powers were on the Security Council, and they were showing worrying signs of staying on the sidelines, unable to get over their own historic wariness about Western-led interventions, even to stop a dictator from killing his people.
Clinton came out of her cabin in her red fleece jacket and black kitten heels. Rarely did a trip end with such a visible result. Diplomacy was all about chipping away slowly. But for once there was a piece of paper being passed around the plane, with the words “all necessary measures” underlined. There was a definite buzz among the officials in the front cabin, the sense of a job achieved. Clinton had helped seal the deal. The United States had carefully orchestrated its approach, in a deliberate manner that got the international community in lockstep. Obama may never have gone to war at all if Sarkozy hadn’t been so intent on bombing Tripoli, but once the march toward war had become inevitable, the U.S. administration had stepped in to drive the effort in a way that would actually deliver results, not just knock a few buildings down.
Standing by the lavatory, the journalists who just moments ago had criticized Jake for the administration’s inaction on Libya turned on him again.
“So you’re taking America into a third war?” asked one of the journalists. “As if Iraq and Afghanistan are not enough! Are you insane?”
Jake rolled his eyes and walked back to his seat.
15
SUMMER OF DISPARATE DISCONTENTS
The stifling heat of D.C. summer had arrived, and I left for a short holiday by the Mediterranean. Lebanon was by no means cooler, but the sea breeze and open horizon made up for the humid chaos of Beirut. Amid all the upheaval in the region, Lebanon was, for once, unusually calm.
The war in Libya was still raging and made the front page of the local newspapers every day. The bombing campaign had started just a few days after the March 17 vote at the UN authorizing the use of all necessary measures to protect civilians. From an informal alliance of countries, it had become a NATO-led operation, and the Russians were fuming: the campaign meant to protect civilians was turning into a de facto full-blown operation designed to help the rebels advance on Tripoli and forcibly bring down Gaddafi. Toppling Gaddafi was not what the resolution had stated, although early on in the campaign, whispers of these unstated motives had abounded. I wondered if the shrewd Russians had really not seen beyond the subtle wording of the resolution when they agreed not to use their veto. Either way, Russia would in the future conveniently hold up this episode as proof that the West could not be trusted.
As the war dragged on, Hillary spent much of her time keeping the coalition together, refereeing spats between the French, Italians, and others who threw fits and threatened to quit. Through Amr Moussa, the Arab League’s cigar-smoking secretary-general, the league predictably criticized the military strikes the minute they started. Moussa stated that the attacks went beyond what had been called for. Qatar and the UAE got cold feet: four days after the war had started, the fighter planes they had promised to contribute were nowhere to be seen. Clinton picked up the phone and spoke to the Qatari and Emirati foreign ministers and other Arab leaders.
“This is important to the United States, it’s important to the president, and it’s important to me personally,” Clinton told them.34 The following day the Qatari Mirage jets and Emirati F16s appeared over Libya’s skies. She had attended four meetings of the Friends of Libya group, with dozens of other foreign ministers and the Libyan opposition, focused on putting together a vision for a post-Gaddafi Libya. Hillary was struggling with buyer’s remorse. She had weighed heavily in favor of intervention, and the Obama administration had publicly and repeatedly said the campaign would last weeks and not months. But more than four months later, there was no end in sight.
In the region, opinions and editorials were divided as usual: some deplored the fact that America wasn’t deploying all its firepower to finish the job; others were furious about American military intervention. Despite the very public Libyan plea for intervention—as well as a wider Arab call—many Arab citizens and pundits believed the United States had engineered the conflict to get its hands on Libya’s oil, that it was yet another ploy by the neocolonial imperial power to take over the region’s riches, using U.S. regional allies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to give the campaign legitimacy. Much had changed in the region, but much remained the same.
Back in Beirut, I found myself on my friend Rania’s35 couch in an affluent Christian neighborhood, chatting about her daughter, common friends, new restaurants in the city. The conversation inevitably turned to politics.
“I think there’s something weird about all these revolutions, don’t you?” she asked. “It’s just strange how all of a sudden people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, they all woke up and started a revolution. I mean—what got into them?”
“Well, you know, this was boiling under the surface for a long time,” I ventured, uncertain about where she was going with the conversation. “No one predicted it would explode like this, all at once, but there had been warnings for a long time that the situation in the region was unsustainable. You know, dictators, poverty, demographic explosion, unemployment, it’s a very combustible combination. Then one guy killed himself, and it started a revolution that spread across the region. I think the region was ripe.”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I think it’s strange. I guess the Americans decided all these dictators had outlived their usefulness or something. But I don’t know what their plan is exactly.”
Plan? I thought of Jeffrey Feltman, the former ambassador to Beirut now sitting in Washington, shuttling endlessly to the Arab world, trying to keep track of which leader was about to fall, had fallen, or was ruthlessly trying to hold on to power. He was exhausted and selfishly hoping that amid their awakening, the Arabs would take a nap so he could catch his breath. American officials and their Arab counterparts barely bothered to pretend that the peace process was still alive. Some American officials were asking me what I thought was going to happen in Syria. Others expressed their frustration with Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, who couldn’t sign an agreement and stick with it, or with the Bahrainis, who refused to rein in their security forces, or with the Saudis, who were still upset because the United States had let down Mubarak. Everybody was making America’s life difficult, and unless chaos was actually the plan, I failed to see how the United States was pulling any of the strings here. There were no doubt many layers of the American foreign policy machine that were hidden to me, but it was hard to believe that everyone in the State Department and the White House was in on the ploy to look unprepared
and scrambling to cope.
A bit later that afternoon, I went shopping in downtown Beirut. A close friend of mine, Randa,36 was a fashion designer, and I loved picking a few items from her collection to show off everywhere I traveled, my own tiny effort to advertise Lebanon. I always arrived too late in the season to buy anything, as rich women from the Gulf had usually bought up all the good stuff. I walked into the shop; the racks were full. The rich women had stayed at home that summer since there was so much uncertainty in the region. No one was buying.
“So what do you think is going to happen to Lebanon? What are you hearing in Washington?” Randa asked. I wasn’t hearing anything; for once, Lebanon was not high up on Washington’s agenda. American officials kept an eye on it mostly because it was Syria’s neighbor and home to Hezbollah. Instead, I offered my own prognosis about how this time Lebanon would probably muddle through the turbulent times, and stay out of trouble.
“But what do you think they have planned, you know, for Lebanon, for Syria?” Randa asked. I looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Plan? Randa, there is no plan. You know, Americans are trying to figure this out day by day and manage it as best they can.”
A look of horror descended on her face. She raised her hands in the air.
“Kim, Kim! What are you saying? What do you mean there is no plan? If the Americans don’t have a plan, then who the hell is in charge of everything?”
The idea that the United States wasn’t masterminding anything was too alien a concept to my friends. It didn’t seem to matter that popular revolutions were sweeping the region, that people were bringing down dictators and taking charge of their countries, that all the headlines were about America being on the decline—again. The United States somehow must have been behind everything. In one breath, people both praised their own newfound power and accused the United States of bringing down their leaders. The image of a plot being cooked up in an office in the United States, so popular for all those decades, was so ingrained in people’s brains it was hard to dismiss.
In 2005, when Lebanon had gone through its own popular uprising after the assassination of Rafic Hariri, the Bush administration gave it unequivocal support. Jeffrey Feltman, who was still in Beirut at the time, was at a dinner with politicians from the pro-Western camp when he casually mentioned that he was going on holiday for two weeks. The table fell silent.
“But what will we do?” one of the politicians suddenly wailed. The anti-Western camp often accused Jeff of being the real ruler of Lebanon and pulling all the strings. This politician’s reaction seemed to reflect that belief—except that Jeff was frustrated that none of these politicians actually ever seemed to listen to his advice.
So who was in charge? This was the paradox in much of the Arab world and beyond—the U.S.-as-puppet-master provided a tidy explanation for the problems in the region, though America also seemed to be expected to swoop in and fix everything. Despite the fear and loathing of America, people still pinned their hopes on the United States for answers or even support. Even as they excoriated Obama for not coming out early enough to support their revolution, Egyptians had called on him to do more and faster to precipitate the fall of Mubarak.
* * *
Many countries seemed to have a hard time letting go of their reliance on the United States, which was, for now, the top superpower. America had long fed that dependence. But now the Obama administration, trying to empower other countries to do some of the heavy lifting, was finding that the world wasn’t catching on that quickly to the idea. The phones were still ringing off the hook at the Near Eastern Affairs bureau at the State Department. The Yemeni opposition was desperate for the United States to come and remove Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Bahraini opposition wanted Washington to force the authorities to accept their demands for better representation, but they didn’t want to enter into a dialogue with the authorities themselves. The Libyan National Transitional Council wanted all the African countries to turn their backs on Gaddafi, but they didn’t want to do the asking themselves; could Washington please lobby on their behalf? And although the United States had walked slowly and reluctantly down the road to action in Libya, American military airpower had been crucial to delivering crippling blows to Gaddafi’s forces in the first few days of the military campaign. When the United States stepped back to allow others in the coalition to drive the operation, the Obama administration was criticized for entering the war halfheartedly, for failing the rebels who wanted more drone strikes and more intelligence. President Obama was criticized for “leading from behind,” even though the United States had played a key, albeit little-advertised, role in framing the debate about intervention and ultimately shaping the platform that allowed it to happen.
The Libya war had been a new experiment for Europe. Though the United States and Europe had waged war together through NATO before, America had always been the leader. Europe would never have imagined leading a military campaign: in the past, they simply followed. Libya was a more cooperative process. The Europeans were much more willing to work with America when Washington wasn’t being a bully. But it was a steep learning curve, and even the Americans seemed shocked to find out how much their own hardware was still needed. Europe wanted to pedal on its own, but the United States still had to supply the wheels and, in fact, the pedals themselves. The United States worried that Europe would fall off the bike. It was a confidence- and trust-building exercise for everybody.
Washington hoped that this approach would allow European countries to achieve a new and much-needed maturity on the world stage. No one knew whether future wars would be waged in the same way, but each party had learned how to pull off international action in situations when America did not want to act unilaterally or could not foot the entire bill.
* * *
The Arab Spring both inspired Obama and distracted him all at once. The slow economic recovery and unemployment rate that still hovered around 9 percent were his real concerns. The United States’ debt ceiling was about to be broken, and the United States could default on its debt if it couldn’t borrow more money. The Treasury regularly adjusted the limit but this required permission from Congress. For decades, it had been a routine affair but with a Republican majority in Congress and the Tea Party movement angling for a showdown, the process became opaque. Raising the ceiling automatically meant more spending, but Congress wanted the ceiling to be raised only as part of a bigger deal to cut government spending over the coming years. No one was willing to cave in first.
The Lebanese media did a fair amount of coverage on the acrimonious bickering between Democrats and Republicans, politicians and pundits, a sorry spectacle somewhat bizarrely reminiscent of the partisan spats among Lebanese politicians with differing worldviews. But we seemed to bicker on forever, in circular arguments, whereas others would eventually find a resolution, however imperfect, to their dispute.
The debt crisis was unfolding right as Clinton was embarking on one of her craziest trips yet—ten days, Greece, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and China. Greece was crumbling under its own debt crisis and being bailed out by France and Germany. At each stop, Clinton was asked whether America would come to its senses and raise its debt ceiling, or take the world down with it.
“Let me assure you we understand the stakes. We know how important this is for us and how important it is for you,” she told an audience of business leaders—and through these leaders the world—in Hong Kong on July 25. Acknowledging the other side’s concern was a classic Hillary Clinton first step in calming fraying nerves. She had faith in her country because she had seen it all before. America went through slumps, economic and psychological, in cycles. She remembered the late 1970s, when oil prices had skyrocketed, cars lined up at gas pumps, and unemployment was above 10 percent. She believed in American innovation, ingenuity, and resilience, and she believed in the American political system because she had seen it close to collapse before as well when she was at the White House.
“Thes
e kinds of debates have been a constant in our political life throughout the history of our republic. And sometimes, they are messy,” she told the audience of anxious businessmen. “I well remember the government shutdown of the 1990s; I had a front-row seat for that one. But this is how an open and democratic society ultimately comes together to reach the right solutions.”
On July 31, the showdown in Washington was over. Congress and the White House came to an agreement that raised the debt but also cut spending over ten years by an almost equal amount.
From the island of Hong Kong, Clinton’s motorcade drove two hours across a bridge toward the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen in southern China. State Councilor Dai Bingguo was waiting with a lavish lunch and army of staffers to make the American delegation comfortable.
Over a four-hour meal in a government guesthouse, the two officials and their delegation talked in detail about all the issues that mattered to both countries, in a smaller, informal version of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Clinton’s ability to manage a diplomatic conversation had matured, and she had learned to draw Dai out of the formulaic conversations Chinese officials preferred. The discussion flowed more freely, even though Hillary was the woman who had dared challenge the Chinese in their own backyard about their behavior on the high seas. Worse, she had stated in an interview with the Atlantic magazine a few months earlier that China’s system of rule and its attempts to stop democracy from taking hold in the country were a fool’s errand. And yet here she was talking about how to tackle global problems together.
The relationship itself was maturing, and the two rivals were learning to keep ties steady even as crisis erupted. Although they now understood that Hillary and America could not be pushed around, Chinese leaders still seized on every detail that appeared to show their system was working and America’s wasn’t. The meltdown in Washington was an appalling display of American decay in the eyes of a Communist Party that never allowed the outside world to see its divisions.