by Kim Ghattas
On our way to Tunis, we stopped in London for another conference, on Somalia. Many of the ministers who would be attending the Syria conference were there too, and after spending hours with them on the phone from Washington, Clinton was going to make sure, in person, that everybody was on the same page.
Behind the scenes, American officials were busy helping the divided Syrian opposition coalesce into a group that represented all of Syria’s religious and ethnic communities and could engage in a serious dialogue with the Syrian leadership to start a real political transition to a post-Assad Syria. If no one wanted to remove Assad and he wasn’t going to fall any time soon, a negotiated transition was the next best thing. The opposition was represented by the Syrian National Council, led by Burhan Ghalioun, a white-haired, uninspiring sociology professor who had lived in exile in Paris for more than three decades. Since its creation in August 2011, the SNC had been mired in internal divisions and was accused of being corrupt. The SNC was criticized for being too close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been banned in Syria for almost fifty years. SNC members resigned regularly and new rival opposition groups kept springing up. There was no Mahmoud Jibril here. The SNC also seemed unable to put together a document laying out its vision for the post-Assad period, one that was inclusive of all the nation’s communities, including Christians and Assad’s own Alawite sect, which each made up roughly 10 percent of the Syrian population. The SNC failed to include any Kurdish representatives, Syria’s largest ethnic community. American officials were dropping as many hints as they could about what the opposition needed to do to galvanize support, but they didn’t want to write the program for them: screams about American interference would erupt, overshadowing the tragedy unfolding in Syria. Washington also worried about the fact that the SNC did not properly represent the thousands of activists, trapped under fire inside Syria, risking their lives each day to coordinate protests and send out news of their rebellion. The last time the United States had relied on advice solely from an opposition in exile, in Iraq, it had been a disaster. The State Department hoped that the opposition would manage to smuggle some representatives out of Syria or have them join the conference by Skype. Clinton wanted the Syrian opposition and the outcome of the conference to represent the will of people on the inside who were angry with opposition leaders in exile for failing to galvanize international support fast enough, if at all.
The Tunisians were nervous about their first foray into international crisis solving since removing their own dictator. The conference in London provided an opportunity for some hand-holding before the big day. There, they received help on how to run the gathering and formulating the final communiqué of the conference and advice about how to run the conference. Some sixty countries and organizations would be attending the gathering. There had to be broad consensus on a text that would be powerful enough to send a clear message to Assad. The Emirati sheikhs gave the Tunisian minister a ride back to Tunis and provided even further guidance and advice, practically dictating the text of the statement in an effort to speed things along.
* * *
We arrived in Tunis at two in the afternoon and headed to the seaside Gammarth Palace hotel, where the conference was taking place. We were still on our way to town when the motorcade came to a standstill on a deserted highway, in the middle of a small forest. Diplomatic Security agents got out of the car and for a moment I wondered whether we were in the middle of an ambush of some sort. But DS agents posted at the hotel had informed agents in the motorcade that a pro-Assad demonstration under way in front of the hotel had gotten out of hand, and we were hanging back waiting for the crowds to calm down.
After a brief pause, we were back on our way to the Gammarth and to the mayhem. The hotel lobby was heaving with delegates and journalists. Tunisian security guards seemed in a panic, the restaurants out of food. Behind closed doors, key participants in the conference were giving their speeches. The Tunisians upset the SNC when they abruptly suggested that Ghalioun shouldn’t take the podium but finally agreed to let him speak. They had also been unable to find a table large enough to accommodate all the ministers around it, so they seated delegates in rows and the French, sitting in the third row, were fuming. No panic, the American delegation thought, the first Friends of Libya meeting had also been a challenge. Clinton was going to give her own speech at the conference and then hold a series of talks with several of her counterparts.
The Saudis were there, no longer sulking about America, the fickle friend that threw its allies under the bus. Iran, their nemesis in the region, seemed to create antibodies that pushed countries closer to the United States. Fear of Iran and rivalry with Shiites drove everything in the Sunni kingdoms. Now the Saudis were sulking about something else. Before his meeting with Clinton started, Saud al-Faisal answered questions from reporters, instead of sticking to pleasantries in front of the cameras. Was it a good idea to arm the rebels?
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” he said. “Because they have to protect themselves.”
Sitting next to him on a red upholstered chair, Clinton was taken aback. Arm the rebels? The focus of the conference was humanitarian aid and the political transition. The UN and the Arab League were about to name an envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, to implement the transition plan suggested by the Arab League, bringing monitors to oversee an end to the violence. Arming the rebels would only feed the conflict. This was not part of the agenda. Washington was wary of any move that would further feed the violence and militarize the uprising. For months, American officials had repeatedly and publicly exhorted the protestors in Syria to remain peaceful, “selmiyya,” until the repression by Assad’s forces became so violent that Washington’s position was no longer tenable. But openly arming the rebels was yet another story. In Libya, the Transitional National Council, led by Jibril, represented the political and the military wing of the rebellion. The United States had also sought and received assurances that the fighters were not affiliated with al-Qaeda. But even then, the United States had supplied the Libyan rebels only with non-lethal equipment, no weapons. The Free Syria army, on the other hand, was not the armed wing of the SNC and the two bodies were in fact often at odds. The SNC had initially rejected the use of violence in the Syrian uprising. The fighters in Syria were not all under the FSA command and there were signs that radical Islamists were increasingly taking up arms.
With reporters out of the room, Clinton and her delegation probed some more, asking who those rebels were exactly that Saudi Arabia wanted to arm. Saud al-Faisal gave a vague answer.
“We know who they are, we know.”
He suggested putting money in a bank account and letting the rebels use it as they saw fit.
On the hotel doorstep I bumped into a senior Saudi official I knew from my days reporting in the Middle East.
“What do you think the conference will achieve?” I asked.
“It’s a waste of time, all this talk about humanitarian aid, fine, but it’s time to get rid of Assad, and all this talk isn’t going to help,” he said.
“So are you going to arm them? Do you think that’s going to help get rid of Assad?” I asked.
“We think something needs to be done,” he responded. “All this talk is useless. Assad is an occupier now. It’s time to take Syria back.”
Those were very strong words. In the Arab world, “occupation” and “occupier” had become synonymous for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Whenever an Arab talked about “the occupation,” it was understood he meant the Israeli occupation. The rulers of Saudi Arabia, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, had now put Assad in the same category as Israeli leaders.
But no matter how nefarious or violent Assad was, arming the rebels was a risky business. The last time Saudi Arabia had helped armed rebels, it was in Afghanistan in the 1980s with Washington’s cooperation, to fight the Russian occupation. That effort gave birth to a generation of jihadi fighters, the Tal
iban and al-Qaeda, all of them still wreaking havoc in Afghanistan and beyond. But my Saudi friend was adamant that concrete action had to be taken and that actively arming the rebels was a first step. He seemed to indicate that what was really needed was a military intervention.
“So is Saudi Arabia going to intervene and take him out?” I asked.
The Saudi official looked at me as though I had just lost my mind.
“We’re not a superpower. America is the superpower,” he said.
Superpower or not, Saudi Arabia and the United States had just sealed a $30 billion deal for eighty-four new F-15 fighter jets. Another seventy fighter jets were being refurbished. A year earlier, hundreds of Saudi troops and army vehicles had been sent across the border into Bahrain to help quell Shiite demonstrators rising up against the country’s Sunni rulers. In 2009, Saudi jets had bombed Yemeni rebels challenging the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, their neighbor. Though the Saudis had the means to intervene and had done it before, they did so only when it was in their immediate backyard and when the solution was straightforward. Syria was a bigger challenge, a viper’s nest: better leave that to America.
During the Libya crisis, the Obama administration had said it was willing to go as far as the Arabs; the United States had then led the way to intervention. But on Syria, the Arabs were divided. The Tunisians opposed arming the rebels. The Bahrainis said armament was premature. The rebels were not just an unknown quantity, they also held no territory. Unlike in Libya, there was no safe haven where they could organize themselves and mount an organized attack against Assad. But the key player here was Turkey, Syria’s neighbor to the north. Ankara made vague reference to the need for a safe haven but stopped short of calling for one to be forcibly established.
Erdoğan and Davutoğlu had initially been keen to demonstrate the benefits of their zero-problem-neighborhood policy and their close relationship with Assad. They asked Washington to give them the time to bring Assad around. They had met and spoken to the Syrian leader repeatedly at the start of the uprising, counseling dialogue and reform, but Assad had said one thing and done another. By the end of 2011 Erdoğan felt personally let down. The Turks started calling for action, in vague terms. When American officials had asked exactly what they envisaged, it appeared that Erdoğan and Davutoğlu had not exactly consulted their generals. Once they actually looked down the barrel of military action, their public ardor for action became more measured, and Turkey’s discussion with Washington focused on what Ankara’s red lines were: floods of refugees and a spillover of the conflict. With Washington, they set up a defensive military planning contingency cell.
The Syrians themselves were divided about calling for military intervention. After weeks of working with opposition leader Burhan Ghalioun to help him put his best foot forward, his performance at the conference had been uninspiring. Even worse, he told journalists that the gathering “doesn’t meet his people’s aspirations.” Hillary’s team was furious—the secretary had come all the way from Washington to show support, Ghalioun had said nothing during the meeting that indicated he was disappointed, and now he was declaring that all of this just wasn’t enough for Syria. At least the opposition activists had been able to join the conference, speaking from Syria by Skype.
Night had fallen and the rowdy gathering came to an end. The Tunisian chair gave a press conference, and at nine in the evening it was Clinton’s turn. Faced with questions about what had really been achieved and how the talking in Tunisia could end the killing in Syria, the secretary sounded both combative and reassuring, like a chairman of the board praising participants for what had been achieved, including pledges of humanitarian aid, and detailing the path that still lay ahead.37
“Let’s stay focused on what we accomplish today. I’ve been to a lot of meetings over many, many years—rarely one that was put together with such intense effort on such a short timetable that produced so much consensus. So let’s stay on the path we have begun on.”
She appealed to soldiers and officers and others around Assad to defect so the fighting would end. She reserved her toughest words for the Russians and the Chinese.
“They are basically saying to Tunisians, to Libyans, to others throughout the region, well, we don’t agree that you have a right to have elections, to choose your leaders. I think that is absolutely contrary to history. And it is not a position that is sustainable,” Clinton said.
“It is just despicable. And I ask, whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people, and they need to ask themselves some very hard questions about what that means for them as well as the rest of us.”
* * *
After another half a day in Tunisia and a few hours in Algeria, Hillary awoke on a Sunday morning, in her suite on the eighth floor overlooking the white Moroccan city of Rabat, frustrated and angry. The pace had been frenetic since Washington. London had been a long, busy day. The Tunis conference had been a zoo. The day-stop in Algeria was exhausting. She had barely had time to reflect on where things stood on Syria. But that morning, the full extent of the deadlock in Tunisia dawned on her. Hillary just couldn’t see how this played out, how it ended. When I sat down with her for an interview in the hotel restaurant converted for the occasion into a television stage, I asked her the same question I had asked her almost a year earlier: how did she think the Obama administration would be judged by history if it allowed Assad to level a town like Homs while Washington dillydallied, wondering what to do.
“I wish that people inside Syria were responding as people inside Libya responded,” she said. “They are not, at this point, perhaps because of the firepower and the absolute intent that we’ve seen by the Assad regime to kill whomever.”
But what about her criticism of Russia and China; surely their obstructionism made it easy to avoid action that no one wanted anyway?
“No. If they had joined us in the Security Council, I think it would have sent a really strong message to Assad that he needed to start planning his exit, and the people around him, who are already hedging their bets, would have been doing the same. [But] they know they’ve got Iran actively supporting them, Russia selling them arms and diplomatically protecting them, and China not wanting anybody to interfere with anybody’s internal affairs. So that gives them a lot of comfort.”
The extent of her disappointment at the conference became more and more apparent as the interview went on.
“I would not be doing my job if I were not looking at the complexity. I mean, I could come on and I could do an interview with you and I could say, ‘Oh, we’re all for them. Let’s go get them.’ But what would that mean? Because clearly I know how complex this is, and anybody who is thinking about it and having to actually consider what could happen next understands it.”
As a reporter, my job was to grill her with tough questions and never be satisfied with the answers. As a woman who had grown up during a war, this was the kind of frank and human response I wished American leaders gave more often. The truth was painful but I felt it was better than empty promises of help.
But on a policy level, Clinton’s candor was often a double-edged sword. This was not the message that the administration wanted to put out, but this is where she was in her head that morning. Her words were seen as a blow to the opposition—was the United States abandoning them? Pundits warned that Clinton’s statement would be comforting to Assad.
Calibrating a message in this day of instant news was a struggle. Should American officials be up front about the limits of their power and make clear to those waiting for help that they should help themselves? Part of the responsibility to protect people in danger was perhaps to admit to them that the cavalry wasn’t coming and that they had to do a better job organizing and helping themselves. A hard message to send to people under fire, but then they also deserved better than the poor excuse of a leadership in exile that they had ended up with.
* * *
Clinton also had little by way of facts to
deliver to Obama. When she had gone to Paris just over a year prior, not fully decided about military action in Libya, she had methodically crossed off every item on her political shopping list. She spoke to the French and the British, who assured her that they were on board and understood that more than a no-fly zone was needed. The Arabs had promised her face-to-face that they would put their money where their mouth was. The Libyan opposition chief looked like someone you could do business with. A year later, Libya was not exactly a shining example of democracy, but at least the dictator was gone and people had tasted the freedom of their own power. The rest was up to them, this was their country, and they had to drive it. Soon, parliamentary elections would be held that would be touted as historic with Mahmoud Jibril’s centrist coalition in the lead.
But at the Tunis conference on Syria, Hillary hadn’t been able to cross off anything. The French didn’t want to do anything too close to the presidential elections. The British didn’t want to mount any sort of coalition. Some of the Arabs wanted to arm the opposition, and others didn’t. The Arab League hadn’t called for action, neither had the Gulf Cooperation Council. Turkey talked a lot but didn’t actually want to do anything. The Syrian opposition was useless. The bar was not high—no one was trying to organize a coalition for a military intervention—but Hillary had nothing to work with: no international unity, no unity within the Syrian opposition. She didn’t even have something in her hands that she could sell to Lavrov. There were no clear answers; the diplomatic stars weren’t lining up, not yet. But the longer the fighting continued in Syria, the messier it was going to become. I began to see echoes of Lebanon.
* * *
Back in Washington, I continued to watch the footage coming out of Syria. More reporters were finding their way into the country, but most of the pictures were from activists and citizen journalists. Their unverified footage made it hard to confirm what was happening exactly on the ground, and there was no doubt that a propaganda war was under way as well, with the anti-Assad rebels keen to show the extent of the regime’s crime and none of their own abuses.