When I saw British Foreign Secretary William Hague at dinner that night, he pressed the case for action. If Hague thought military action in Libya was necessary, that counted for a lot. I knew that he, like me, was wary of making such decisions without confidence in the rationale, strategy, and endgame.
Back at the hotel I met with our Ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, and our newly appointed Special Representative to the Libyan rebels, Chris Stevens, who had earlier served as Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’affaires in Tripoli. Cretz was a colorful character, a brash and funny diplomat from upstate New York. When his secret cables to Washington describing Qaddafi’s excesses were published by WikiLeaks, Cretz had faced threats and intimidation in Tripoli, and in late December 2010, I made the decision to bring him back to Washington for his own safety. By late February 2011, with the revolution heating up, our remaining diplomatic staff evacuated. Many left on a ferry to Malta that hit unusually high and heavy seas, but thankfully everyone made it to safety.
Stevens was another talented diplomat with long experience in the region. A blond-haired, charismatic Californian who spoke both French and Arabic, he had served in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jerusalem. Chris devoured old Libyan histories and memoirs and delighted in sharing obscure historical trivia and cracking jokes in the local dialect. I asked Chris to return to Libya to make contact with the rebel council in their stronghold of Benghazi. It was a challenging and dangerous mission, but America needed to be represented there. Chris agreed and accepted the assignment. His mother liked to say that he had sand in his shoes, always moving and running and working, seeking out new challenges and adventures across the Middle East. After years of experience in the field, he understood that the difficult and dangerous places are where America’s interests are most at stake and where it’s most important that we’re represented with skilled and subtle diplomacy. Later in the spring he and a very small team arrived in Benghazi on board a Greek cargo ship, like a 19th-century envoy, and got right to work building relationships with the civilian and military leaders of the rebellion. He did such an impressive job I would later ask the President to nominate him to succeed Cretz as our Ambassador to Libya.
Finally, around 10 P.M., Jibril arrived at the Westin in Paris accompanied by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had helped arrange the meeting. They made quite a pair, the rebel and the philosopher. Hard to tell who was who. Jibril appeared more like a technocrat than a firebrand. He was small and bespectacled, with thinning hair and a stern demeanor. Lévy, by contrast, cut a dramatic and stylish figure, with long wavy hair and his shirt open practically down to his navel. He has been quoted as saying, “God is dead but my hair is perfect.” (To that I’d say, I think God is alive, but I’d love to have perfect hair!)
I found Jibril to be impressive and polished, especially for the representative of a rebel council on the verge of annihilation. He had served as head of the National Economic Development Board under Qaddafi before defecting to join the revolution and seemed to understand how much work would be necessary to rebuild a country devastated by decades of cruelty and mismanagement. He told us that hundreds of thousands of civilians in Benghazi were in imminent danger as the regime’s forces marched toward the city, raising the specters of the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. He pleaded for international intervention.
As Jibril spoke, I tried to take his measure. We had learned the hard way in Iraq and elsewhere that it’s one thing to remove a dictator and another altogether to help a competent and credible government take his place. If the United States agreed to intervene in Libya, we would be making a big bet on this political scientist and his colleagues. Over four decades Qaddafi had systematically removed anyone who might pose a threat to his rule and pulverized Libya’s institutions and political culture. So we were unlikely to find a perfect George Washington waiting in the wings. All things considered, Jibril and those he represented might well be the best we could hope for.
Afterward I reported to the White House what I had heard in Paris and my progress with our international partners. Our NATO allies were prepared to take the lead in any military action. The Arab League would support it, and some would even actively participate in combat operations against an Arab neighbor—a telling sign of how far Qaddafi had gone. I believed we could wrangle the votes in the Security Council to back a strong resolution. We had managed to get the Russians and Chinese on board with tough sanctions against North Korea and Iran in 2009 and 2010, and I believed we could do the same now. And, based on my meeting with Jibril, I thought there was a reasonable chance the rebels would turn out to be credible partners.
The National Security Council remained divided on the wisdom of intervening in Libya. Some, including UN Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Council aide Samantha Power, argued that we had a responsibility to protect civilians and prevent a massacre if we could. Defense Secretary Gates was firmly opposed. A veteran of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and a realist about the limits of American power, he did not think our interests in Libya justified the sacrifice. We all knew the consequences of intervention were unpredictable. But Qaddafi’s troops were now a hundred miles from Benghazi and closing fast. We were looking at a humanitarian catastrophe, with untold thousands at risk of being killed. If we were going to stop it, we had to act now.
The President decided to move forward with drawing up military plans and securing a UN Security Council resolution. But there were two key stipulations. First, because the Pentagon had assured us that a no-fly zone by itself would be little more than a symbolic gesture, we would need to secure UN backing for more robust military action if necessary: the authority to use “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. Second, the President wanted to keep U.S. involvement limited, so our allies would have to shoulder much of the burden and fly most of the sorties. These conditions would require extensive additional diplomacy, but Susan and I both thought it was possible and started working the phones.
The next day at the Security Council in New York, the Russians offered a weak resolution calling for a cease-fire that I thought was actually a ploy to muddy the waters and blunt the building momentum for a no-fly zone. Unless we could convince them not to veto our stronger resolution, it was dead in the water. Beyond Russia, we were also concerned about China, which had veto power as well, and several nonpermanent members.
On the morning of March 15, I flew from Paris to Cairo to meet with Amr Moussa and emphasize how important it was that the Arab League come out strongly for military intervention and agree to actively participate. This policy had to be recognized as being driven by Libya’s neighbors, not the West, or it wasn’t going to work. Moussa confirmed that Qatar and the UAE were prepared to contribute planes and pilots to the effort, a major step forward. Later Jordan would step up as well. I knew this support would make it easier to convince wavering Security Council members in New York.
Qaddafi made our job easier when he went on television on March 17 and warned the citizens of Benghazi, “We are coming tonight, and there will be no mercy.” He pledged to go house by house looking for “traitors” and told Libyans to “capture the rats.” By then I was in Tunisia and called Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He had previously told me that Russia was dead set against a no-fly zone, but since then several nonpermanent members of the Security Council had gotten on board with our resolution. Now it was important to assure the Russians that this would not be like Iraq or Afghanistan and to be clear about our intentions. “We don’t want another war,” I told Lavrov. “We don’t want to put troops on the ground.” But, I explained, “Our goal is to protect civilians from brutal and indiscriminate attacks. The no-fly zone is necessary, but insufficient. We need additional measures. Time is critical.”
“I take your point about not seeking another war,” he responded. “But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get one.” However, he added, the Russians had no interest in protecting Qaddafi or seeing him slaug
hter his people. I explained that our resolution would incorporate the Russian proposal for a cease-fire, but that it had to also authorize a forceful response if Qaddafi refused to stop his advance. “We can’t vote in favor,” Lavrov said. “But we will abstain and it will pass.” That was all we needed. In this context an abstention was nearly as good as a yes vote. In later discussions, especially about Syria, Lavrov claimed he had been misled about our intentions. That struck me as disingenuous since Lavrov, as a former Ambassador to the UN, knew as well as anyone what “all necessary measures” meant.
Next I called Luís Amado, the Foreign Minister of Portugal, a nonpermanent member of the Security Council. Even if we avoided a veto, we still needed to be sure we had a majority, and the more votes we got, the stronger the message to Qaddafi would be. “I wanted to reiterate that the United States has no interest, or intention, or planning of any kind of using ground troops or a ground operation,” I told Amado. “We believe passing this resolution will give a big wake-up call to Qaddafi and the people around him. This could clearly influence the actions that he takes in the next days.” He listened to my arguments and then agreed to vote yes. “Don’t worry, we’ll be there,” he told me.
President Obama called South African President Jacob Zuma and made the same case to him. Susan lobbied her counterparts in New York. The French and British were working hard as well. In the end the final vote was 10 to 0, with five abstentions; Brazil, India, China, and Germany joined Russia in sitting out the vote. We now had a strong mandate to protect Libyan civilians with “all necessary measures.”
Almost immediately, there were difficulties and drama.
President Obama was very clear with our team and our allies that the United States would participate in a military operation to enforce the UN resolution, but only in a limited way. A key first step for enforcing a no-fly zone would be knocking out Qaddafi’s air defense system, and the United States was better equipped to do that than any of our partners. But the President wanted allied air forces to take the lead as soon as possible, and he was adamant that there would be no U.S. troops deployed. “No boots on the ground” became a mantra. All of that meant that we needed a broad and well-coordinated international coalition that could step in and take over after U.S. cruise missiles and bombers cleared the way. I soon found out that getting all our allies to work together as a team on this would be harder than any of us anticipated.
Sarkozy was eager to take the lead. In the run-up to the UN vote, he had been the most vocal advocate for international military action, and now he saw his chance to reassert France’s role as a major world power. He invited a wide range of European and Arab nations to Paris for an emergency summit on Saturday, March 19, to discuss implementation of the UN resolution. Conspicuously not invited, however, was our NATO ally Turkey. There were already tensions between Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan because of France’s objections to Turkey joining the EU. Then Erdoğan had emerged as a voice of caution on Libya, and Sarkozy worked to exclude him from the coalition. The snub infuriated Erdoğan and turned him even more decidedly against intervention.
When I spoke with Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoğlu I tried to ease some of the hurt feelings. “I first want to tell you that I pushed very hard for you to be invited,” I said. As I feared, Davutoğlu was quite upset. “We are expecting action through NATO and suddenly in Paris, there is a meeting and we are not invited,” he complained, with good reason. Was this a French crusade or an international coalition? I explained that the summit had been organized by the French but that we were pushing hard for the military operation itself to be run by NATO.
In Paris I delivered President Obama’s message about our expectation that others would step up. Just after landing, I checked in by phone with AbZ. As described earlier, this turned into a very difficult conversation, as he threatened to pull the UAE out of the Libya operation because of U.S. criticism of their actions in Bahrain.
Then, before the official meeting even began, Sarkozy pulled me and British Prime Minister David Cameron aside and confided that French warplanes were already headed toward Libya. When the larger group found out that France had jumped the gun, it caused an uproar. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was just as strong-willed and eager for the spotlight as Sarkozy, was particularly incensed. There is an informal belief that old colonial powers should take the lead in addressing crises in their former dominions. That’s why, later, France was the one to send troops to Mali and the Central African Republic. In the case of Libya, a former Italian colony, Berlusconi felt that Italy should be out front, not France. What’s more, because of its strategic location jutting out into the Mediterranean, Italy provided the natural launching pad for most of the air sorties into Libya. It had already started opening a number of air force bases to allied jets. Now Berlusconi felt upstaged by Sarkozy, and he threatened to walk out of the coalition and close access to his country’s bases.
Beyond the bruised egos, though, Berlusconi and others had good reason to be concerned. We had learned in the Balkans and Afghanistan that coordinating a multinational military operation is complicated. Unless there are clear lines of command and control, with everyone working together to implement the same strategy, it can devolve into dangerous confusion. Imagine if a dozen different nations sent warplanes to Libya without coordinating with one another on flight plans, targets, and rules of engagement. It would be pandemonium in the sky, with the real possibility of a mishap resulting in the loss of life.
Because we had the most capabilities, the United States started out in the lead coordinating role. The next logical step was to have NATO organize the intervention. The Alliance already had an integrated military command and experience coordinating in previous conflicts. Sarkozy did not like that idea. For starters, it might mean less glory for France. But he also thought making Libya a NATO mission would alienate the Arab world, whose leadership had helped sway opinion before the UN vote. Qatar and the UAE had pledged to send planes to help enforce the no-fly zone—would they do so under the banner of NATO? What’s more, NATO operates by consensus, which means any one member, including Turkey, could block action. We had worked very hard at the UN to secure language authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians so that we could do more than prevent Qaddafi’s planes from attacking rebel towns—it was crucial that we be able to stop his tanks and troops on the ground before they reached Benghazi. Some called that a “no-drive zone.” But Erdoğan and others were drawing the line at a pure no-fly zone with no air-to-ground strikes. Sarkozy feared that if NATO ran the mission, we would end up watching as Benghazi burned.
The Paris meeting ended without an agreement on what should happen after the initial American-led phase of intervention. But with Qaddafi’s forces on the move and French jets already in the air, there was no time for hesitation. I went before the cameras and announced, “America has unique capabilities and we will bring them to bear to help our European and Canadian allies and Arab partners stop further violence against civilians, including through the effective implementation of a no-fly zone.” A few hours later U.S. Navy warships in the Mediterranean fired more than a hundred cruise missiles, targeting air defense systems inside Libya and at a large column of armored vehicles approaching Benghazi. President Obama, who was traveling in Brazil, said, “I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice and it’s not a choice that I make lightly.” But, he went on, “actions have consequences, and the writ of the international community must be enforced. That is the cause of this coalition.”
Over the next seventy-two hours Libya’s air defenses were successfully destroyed and the people of Benghazi were saved from imminent devastation. President Obama was later unfairly criticized as “leading from behind” in Libya. That’s a silly phrase. It took a great deal of leading—from the front, the side, and every other direction, to authorize and accomplish the mission and to prevent what might have been the loss
of tens of thousands of lives. No one else could have played the role we did, both in terms of the military capability to land a decisive first blow against Qaddafi’s forces and the diplomatic capacity to build and hold together a broad coalition.
Unfortunately relations inside the Alliance went from bad to worse over the next few days. On Monday, only two days after the Paris summit, representatives gathered at NATO headquarters in Brussels to try to work out the differences. But the meeting soon descended into acrimony, with the French Ambassador storming out of the room. Both sides were doubling down. As feared, the Turks were insisting on narrow parameters for a NATO mission, and the French were refusing to give up control. On Monday evening President Obama called Erdoğan to explain again the importance of “all necessary measures” and underscore that this would not include sending ground forces for an invasion. He later spoke to Sarkozy, who was willing to let NATO take over the no-fly zone if the French, British, and others could continue the more aggressive no-drive zone on their own. From our perspective, setting up two parallel missions was fraught with potential difficulties. But we agreed with Sarkozy that we couldn’t give up the ability to target Qaddafi’s ground forces, as they threatened to exterminate rebel communities.
On Monday night a terrifying incident heightened the stakes for all of us. An F-15 Strike Eagle fighter piloted by two U.S. airmen, Major Kenneth Harney and Captain Tyler Stark, suffered a mechanical failure over eastern Libya around midnight. Just after dropping a five-hundred-pound bomb on their target, the jet went into a tailspin. The two airmen ejected, but a tear in Stark’s parachute sent him off course. Harney was rescued soon afterward by a U.S. search-and-rescue team, but Stark was missing. I was worried sick thinking about this twenty-seven-year-old from Littleton, Colorado, lost in the Libyan desert.
Hard Choices Page 47