The differences in tone and substance from what I said in Cairo were relatively small, and I felt comfortable that we had not sacrificed our values or credibility. Few, if any, outside observers even noticed any change at all. Soon the Arab jets were flying over Libya.
I wished we had better options in Bahrain and more leverage to produce a positive outcome. We continued to speak out in the months that followed, emphasizing that mass arrests and brute force were at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens and would not make legitimate calls for reform go away. We also continued to work closely with the government of Bahrain and with its Gulf neighbors on a range of issues.
In November 2011, in a speech at the National Democratic Institute in Washington, I addressed some of the questions that had arisen about America and the Arab Spring. One that we heard often was: Why does America promote democracy one way in some countries and another way in others? In short, why do we call on Mubarak to give up power in Egypt and mobilize an international military coalition to stop Qaddafi in Libya, while retaining relations with Bahrain and other Gulf monarchies?
The answer, I said, began with a very practical point. Circumstances varied dramatically from country to country, and “it would be foolish to take a one-size-fits-all approach and barrel forward regardless of circumstances on the ground.” What was possible and made sense in one place might not be possible or wise in another. It was also true, I said, that America has many important national interests in the region, and they will not always align perfectly, despite our best efforts. “We’ll always have to walk and chew gum at the same time.” That was certainly true in Bahrain. America will always have imperfect partners who doubtless view us as imperfect too, and we’ll always face imperatives that drive us to make imperfect compromises.
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I saw this in February 2012 when I returned to Tunisia, where the convulsions of the Arab Spring had begun. The riot police were gone. There was no more pepper spray in the air. The din of protest had quieted. A moderate Islamist party had won a plurality of the votes in an open, competitive, and credible election. Its leaders promised to embrace freedom of religion and full rights for women. The United States pledged significant financial support, and we began working to boost trade and investment that would get the economy going again. The new government faced many challenges, and the years ahead would be rocky, but there was reason to hope that, in Tunisia at least, the promise of the Arab Spring might actually be realized.
I wanted to talk to the young people who had provided the emotional core of the revolution and who stood to gain the most if democracy took root in Tunisia. About two hundred of them met with me in the Palais du Baron d’Erlanger, a center for Arab and Mediterranean music perched on a cliff above the sea. I spoke about the hard work of making a transition to democracy and about the role their generation could play. Then I took questions. A young lawyer asked for the microphone. “I think that there exists among many young people in Tunisia and across the region a deep feeling of mistrust towards the West in general and the United States in particular. And many observers partly explain the surge of extremism in the region and in Tunisia by this skepticism,” he said. “And even among the mainstream of moderate and pro-Western youth, there is a sense of despair and fatalism when it comes to the possibility of building a real and lasting partnership that is based on mutual interests. So is the United States aware of this issue? And how do you think we can address it?”
He had just put his finger on one of our biggest challenges. And I understood that the distrust he and so many others felt was connected to the compromises we had to make in the Middle East. “We are aware of it,” I responded. “We regret it. We feel that it doesn’t reflect the values or the policy of the United States.” I tried to explain why America had worked with autocrats in the region for so long, from Ben Ali in Tunisia to Mubarak in Egypt to our partners in the Gulf. “You deal with the governments that are in place. And yes, we did. We dealt with the governments that were in place, just like we deal with the governments elsewhere. Right now, we’re in a big argument with Russia and China because they won’t agree to the Security Council resolution to help the poor people in Syria. But we don’t stop dealing with Russia and China across a whole range of issues because we have serious disagreements with them. So I think part of it is to recognize the reality that governments have to deal with, and to look at the whole picture.”
I knew this wasn’t very satisfying, but it was the truth. America will always do what it takes to keep our people safe and advance our core interests. Sometimes that means working with partners with whom we have deep disagreements.
But there is another part of the big picture that is often lost, a truth about America that is easy to miss amid the daily headlines of one crisis or another. The United States has sacrificed enormous amounts of blood and treasure to help other people around the world achieve their own freedom. Looking around at the open and engaged young Tunisians, I rattled off a string of examples, including how America helped the people of Eastern Europe emerge from behind the Iron Curtain and nurtured democracies across Asia. “I will be the first to say we, like any country in the world, have made mistakes. I will be the first to say that. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. But I think if you look at the entire historical record, the entire historical record shows we’ve been on the side of freedom, we’ve been on the side of human rights, we’ve been on the side of free markets and economic empowerment.” The young lawyer nodded and sat down.
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Libya: All Necessary Measures
Mahmoud Jibril was late.
It was March 14, 2011, little more than a month after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Attention had already shifted to the next crisis in the region, this time in Libya, a country of some 6 million people located between Egypt and Tunisia along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Protests against the authoritarian regime of longtime Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, had turned into a full-scale rebellion after he used extreme force against the demonstrators. Now Jibril, a Libyan political scientist with a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, was on his way to meet with me on behalf of the rebels fighting Qaddafi’s forces.
I had flown through the night and arrived in Paris early that morning to meet with the Foreign Ministers of the Group of 8 leading industrialized countries—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, and the United States—to discuss ways to stop Qaddafi from slaughtering his own people. (Russia was expelled from the group in 2014, after the invasion of Crimea, and it went back to being the G-7, as it was before 1998.) Joining us were Ministers from several Arab countries who were calling for robust international action to protect Libyan civilians, especially from Qaddafi’s air force. When I arrived I spent most of the day locked in intense discussions with European and Arab leaders concerned that Qaddafi’s superior forces were poised to overwhelm the rebels. When I met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he urged the United States to support international military intervention to stop Qaddafi’s advance toward the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in eastern Libya. I was sympathetic, but not convinced. The United States had spent the previous decade bogged down in long and difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and before we joined yet another conflict, I wanted to be sure we had thought through the implications. Would the international community, including Libya’s neighbors, unite behind this mission? Who were these rebels we would be aiding, and were they prepared to lead Libya if Qaddafi fell? What was the endgame here? I wanted to meet Mahmoud Jibril face-to-face to discuss these questions.
My suite in the grand old Westin-Vendôme on rue de Rivoli looked out over the Tuileries Garden, and from the window I could see the Eiffel Tower lit up against the Parisian sky. The beauty and color of Paris were a long way from the horror unfolding in Libya.
It had started in a now-familiar way. The arrest of a promi
nent human rights activist in Benghazi in mid-February 2011 had sparked protests that soon spread across the country. Libyans, inspired by what they had seen in Tunisia and Egypt, began demanding a say in their own government. Unlike in Egypt, where the Army refused to fire on civilians, Libyan security forces unleashed heavy weapons on the crowds. Qaddafi turned loose foreign mercenaries and thugs to attack demonstrators. There were reports of indiscriminate killings, arbitrary arrests, and torture. Soldiers were executed for refusing to fire on their fellow citizens. In response to this violent crackdown, protests morphed into armed rebellion, especially in parts of the country that had long chafed at Qaddafi’s quixotic rule.
In late February, the UN Security Council, shocked by Qaddafi’s brutal response, called for an immediate end to the violence and unanimously approved a resolution to impose an arms embargo on Libya, freeze the assets of key human rights violators and members of the Qaddafi family, and refer the Libyan case to the International Criminal Court. The ICC eventually charged Qaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, and the military intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi with crimes against humanity. The United States also imposed sanctions of its own and moved to provide emergency humanitarian aid to Libyans in need. At the end of February, I traveled to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to remind the international community that it had a responsibility to protect universal rights and to hold violators accountable. I said that Qaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to govern,” and “the people of Libya have made themselves clear: It is time for Qaddafi to go—now, without further violence or delay.” A few days before, in the same chamber in the Palais des Nations, the Libyan delegation had dramatically renounced their allegiance to Qaddafi and declared their support for the rebels. “Young people in my country today are with their blood writing a new chapter in the history of struggle and resistance,” one diplomat said.
A week later the rebels in Benghazi formed a transitional governing council. Armed militias across the country made gains against the regime, including in the western mountains. But then Qaddafi unleashed firepower they could not match. His tanks rolled through town after town. The resistance started to crumble, and Qaddafi pledged to hunt down and exterminate all who opposed him. The situation was increasingly desperate. That’s why Jibril was coming to plead his case.
As I waited for him to arrive, I thought about Muammar Qaddafi, one of the most eccentric, cruel, and unpredictable autocrats in the world. He cut a bizarre and sometimes chilling figure on the world stage, with his colorful outfits, Amazonian bodyguards, and over-the-top rhetoric. “Those who do not love me do not deserve to live!” he once said. Qaddafi seized power in a coup in 1969 and ruled Libya, a former Italian colony, with a mix of new-age socialism, fascism, and personality cult. Although the country’s oil wealth kept the regime afloat, his capricious governance hollowed out Libya’s economy and institutions.
As a state sponsor of terrorism, client of the Soviet Union, and proliferator of weapons of mass destruction, Qaddafi became a top enemy of the United States in the 1980s. In 1981, Newsweek put him on its cover with the headline “The Most Dangerous Man in the World?” President Reagan called him the “mad dog of the Middle East” and bombed Libya in 1986 in retaliation for a terrorist attack in Berlin that killed American citizens, which Qaddafi had planned. Qaddafi claimed one of his children died in the air strikes, which further strained relations.
In 1988, Libyan agents planted the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Thirty-five of the passengers killed on that flight were students from Syracuse University in upstate New York, and I got to know some of their families when I represented them in the U.S. Senate. In my eyes, Qaddafi was a criminal and a terrorist who could never be trusted. Many of his Arab neighbors agreed. Most of them had tangled with him over the years. At one point he had even plotted to assassinate the King of Saudi Arabia.
When Condoleezza Rice met Qaddafi in Tripoli in 2008, she found him to be “unstable,” with a “slightly eerie fascination” with her personally. In 2009 he made a stir in New York when he spoke at the UN General Assembly for the first time in his forty-year rule. He brought along a large Bedouin tent but was told he could not pitch it in Central Park. At the UN he was given fifteen minutes to speak but rambled on for a full hour and a half. His bizarre diatribe included rants about the Kennedy assassination and the possibility that swine flu was really a biological weapon designed in a laboratory. He suggested that Israelis and Palestinians live together in a single state called “Isratine” and that the UN move its headquarters to Libya to reduce jet lag and avoid the risk of terrorist attacks in New York. In short, it was a bizarre performance—but, for Qaddafi, typical.
Despite all this, in recent years Qaddafi had tried to show the world a new face, giving up his nuclear program, mending fences with the international community, and contributing to the fight against al Qaeda. Sadly any hope that he was mellowing into something resembling a statesman in his old age evaporated as soon as the protests started. Then it was back to the old murderous Qaddafi.
All of this—the defiant dictator, the attacks on civilians, the perilous position of the rebels—led me to consider what many of my foreign counterparts were debating: Was it time for the international community to go beyond humanitarian aid and sanctions and take decisive action to stop the violence in Libya? And if yes, what role should the United States play to advance and protect our interests?
Just a few days earlier, on March 9, I had joined the rest of President Obama’s national security team in the White House Situation Room to discuss the crisis in Libya. There was little appetite for direct U.S. intervention. Defense Secretary Robert Gates believed that the United States did not have core national interests at stake in Libya. The Pentagon told us that the most talked-about military option, a no-fly zone like the one we had maintained in Iraq during the 1990s, was unlikely to be enough to tip the balance toward the rebels. Qaddafi’s ground forces were just too strong.
The next day I testified before Congress and argued that this was not a time for America to rush unilaterally into a volatile situation: “I’m one of those who believes that absent international authorization, the United States acting alone would be stepping into a situation whose consequences are unforeseeable. And I know that’s the way our military feels.” Too often, other countries were quick to demand action but then looked to America to shoulder all the burdens and take all the risks. I reminded Congress, “We had a no-fly zone over Iraq. It did not prevent Saddam Hussein from slaughtering people on the ground, and it did not get him out of office.”
Retired General Wesley Clark, an old friend who led the NATO air war in Kosovo in the 1990s, summed up the argument against intervention in an op-ed in the Washington Post on March 11: “Whatever resources we dedicate for a no-fly zone would probably be too little, too late. We would once again be committing our military to force regime change in a Muslim land, even though we can’t quite bring ourselves to say it. So let’s recognize that the basic requirements for successful intervention simply don’t exist, at least not yet: We don’t have a clearly stated objective, legal authority, committed international support or adequate on-the-scene military capabilities, and Libya’s politics hardly foreshadow a clear outcome.”
The very next day a development in Cairo began to change the calculus. After more than five hours of deliberation and debate, the Arab League, representing twenty-one Middle Eastern nations, voted to request that the UN Security Council impose a no-fly zone in Libya. The Arab League had previously suspended the Qaddafi government’s membership, and now it recognized the rebel council as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people. These were major steps by an organization previously known as a club for autocrats and oil barons. One of the prime movers was the Egyptian diplomat Amr Moussa, who was serving as the Arab League’s Secretary-General but had his eye on the upcoming Presidential elections in Egypt. This no-fly zone resolution was, in p
art, his bid for support from the revolutionary factions that had helped drive out Mubarak. The Gulf monarchs went along, in part to show their own restive populations that they were on the side of change. And, of course, they all hated Qaddafi.
If the Arabs were willing to take the lead, perhaps an international intervention was not impossible after all. Certainly it would put pressure on Russia and China, who might otherwise be expected to veto any Western-backed action at the UN Security Council. But the Arab League statement used the term humanitarian action and did not explicitly mention military force. I wondered if Amr Moussa and the others were really prepared to back what it would take to stop Qaddafi from massacring his people.
AbZ, the Foreign Minister of the UAE, a powerful behind-the-scenes player at the Arab League, was in Paris when I arrived. We met in my hotel before the G-8 dinner, and I pressed him on how far the Arab commitment went. Were they prepared to see foreign planes dropping bombs on Libya? Even more important, were they prepared to fly some of those planes themselves? From the Emiratis, at least, the answer to both questions was a surprising yes.
The Europeans were even more gung ho. I got an earful about military intervention from Sarkozy. He is a dynamic figure, always full of ebullient energy, who loves being at the center of the action. France, a former colonial power in North Africa, had been close to Ben Ali in Tunisia, and the revolution there had caught Sarkozy flat-footed. The French had not been players in Egypt. So this was their chance to jump into the fray supporting the Arab Spring, demonstrating that they too were on the side of change. Sarkozy was also influenced by the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had hitched a ride in a vegetable truck from the Egyptian border to see for himself what was happening. They were both genuinely moved by the plight of the Libyan people suffering at the hands of a brutal dictator, and they made a persuasive case that something had to be done.
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