Kerry and Wendy pressed ahead with President Obama’s backing and, along with our partners, managed to fashion a compromise. Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of higher-enriched uranium and continue enriching only to 5 percent (far below weapons grade); keep thousands of centrifuges offline, including all of its next-generation centrifuges; allow intrusive inspections; and stop work on new facilities, including a plutonium reactor. In return the international community would provide several billion dollars in sanctions relief, mostly from previously frozen Iranian assets. From the White House President Obama hailed the deal as “an important first step toward a comprehensive solution” and credited years of patient diplomacy and pressure.
When we came into office back in 2009, the international community was fractured, diplomacy was stalled, and the Iranians were marching steadily toward a nuclear weapon. Our dual-track strategy of engagement and pressure reversed those trends, united the world, and finally forced Iran back to the negotiating table. I remained skeptical that the Iranians would deliver a final comprehensive agreement; I had seen too many false hopes dashed over the years to allow myself to get too optimistic now. But this was the most promising development in a long time, and it was worth testing to see what could be achieved.
Although it took five years to get this initial deal, the hardest work was still ahead. All the tough issues that had bedeviled Iran’s relationship with the international community are still unresolved. And even if the nuclear issue was eventually satisfactorily settled by an enforceable agreement, Iran’s support for terrorism and its aggressive behavior in the region would remain a threat to the national security of the United States and our allies.
Going forward, Iran’s leaders—its Supreme Leader in particular—face real choices about the future. At the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iran’s economy was nearly 40 percent larger than Turkey’s; in 2014 this is reversed. Is the country’s nuclear program worth beggaring an illustrious civilization and impoverishing a proud people? If Iran had a nuclear weapon tomorrow, would that create even one more job for a country where millions of young people are out of work? Would it send one more Iranian to college or rebuild the roads and ports still crumbling from the war with Iraq a generation ago? When Iranians look abroad, would they rather end up like North Korea or South Korea?
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Syria: A Wicked Problem
History is a somber judge—and it will judge us all harshly if we prove incapable of taking the right path today,” said Kofi Annan as he looked around the table at the Ministers who had answered his invitation to come to Geneva’s Palais des Nations at the end of June 2012 in hopes of resolving the bloody civil war raging in Syria.
Kofi had been through his share of difficult diplomatic negotiations. As the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, from 1997 to 2006, the soft-spoken Ghanaian had won the Nobel Peace Prize. “Collectively, you have the potential to wield tremendous power and to change the direction of this crisis,” he told us. “By being here today, you suggest the intention to show that leadership.” Yet, as Kofi knew well, opinion in the room was sharply divided over what kind of leadership was actually needed.
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The crisis began in early 2011, when Syrian citizens, inspired in part by the successful peaceful protests in Tunisia and Egypt, took to the streets to demonstrate against the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad. As in Libya, security forces responded with excessive force and mass detentions, which in turn eventually led some Syrians to take up arms to defend themselves and, eventually, to try to topple Assad. It was a lopsided fight, however, and by June 2011, the regime had killed about 1,300 people, including children. (As of early 2014, estimates put the total killed at more than 150,000, but that is likely too low.)
In early 2010, about a year before the maelstrom began in Syria, I recommended that the President nominate Robert Ford, an experienced diplomat who had served across the Middle East, most recently in Iraq, as the first U.S. Ambassador to Syria in more than five years. It was not an easy decision. The United States had withdrawn our Ambassador to signal displeasure with the Syrian regime, and returning one might be taken as an endorsement of Assad. But I thought then, and continue to believe now, that we are generally better served by having an Ambassador on the ground, even with regimes we strongly oppose, to deliver messages and serve as our eyes and ears.
President Obama agreed with my recommendation and nominated Robert in February 2010. He was held up by the Senate because of opposition, not to him personally (his credentials were stellar) but to the idea of sending an Ambassador to Syria at all. Just after Christmas the President used his Constitutional authority to make appointments during the Congressional recess to put Robert in place. He arrived in Damascus in January 2011, just in time to get settled before the demonstrations began. Protests escalated in March, and security forces opened fire and killed protesters in Daraa. Assad deployed the Army. Government forces laid siege to Daraa at the end of April, deploying tanks and conducting sweeps of houses.
The United States strongly condemned all violence against civilians. As a result Ambassador Ford and our embassy team faced harassment and threats, including one serious incident in July 2011, when pro-government protesters breached the embassy compound, smashed windows, sprayed graffiti, and attacked Robert’s residence.
Despite the danger, he went to Hama, the scene of an infamous 1982 massacre, to meet with protesters and express American solidarity and sympathy with those calling for democratic reform. As Robert drove into the city, residents covered his car with flowers. He visited a hospital where people injured by Syrian security forces were being treated, and he tried to learn more about the protesters, what their objectives were and how to establish ongoing contact with them. That visit established Robert’s status as our lead in working with the opposition. Many of the same Senators who had blocked his confirmation were so impressed with his courage and intelligence that they voted to confirm him in early October. This was another example of an experienced diplomat taking risks to get out from behind the embassy’s walls to do the job right.
Despite an international outcry over the violence in Syria, Russia and China vetoed a modest resolution at the UN Security Council in October 2011 that would have condemned Assad’s human rights abuses and demanded that peaceful protests be allowed to proceed. Russia had long-standing political ties with Syria, dating back to the Cold War, including an important naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and there were religious ties between Syria’s Orthodox Christians and the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia was determined to retain its influence and steadfastly backed the Assad regime.
Bashar al-Assad is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who seized control of Syria in 1970 and served as its leader for thirty years until his death in June 2000. A trained ophthalmologist, Bashar was groomed as his father’s successor only after his older brother’s death in a car accident in 1994, and he assumed the presidency following his father’s death. Bashar’s wife, Asma, had a career in investment banking before becoming First Lady. A 2005 profile of the couple said, “They seemed the essence of secular Western-Arab fusion.” But, as the article noted, this image was a “mirage,” as the high hopes for the new Syrian ruler turned into “a pattern of empty promises, nasty oratory and bloody tactics.” As unrest spread across the Middle East, it was these “empty promises” and unrealized hopes that motivated many of the protests of the Syrian people.
Assad and his ruling clique were Alawites, a Shiite sect closely aligned with Iran that had ruled over the Sunni majority in Syria for decades, going back to the French mandate after World War I. Alawites made up 12 percent of the country. The rebels were predominantly Sunnis, who constituted more than 70 percent of the population, while the Kurds made up 9 percent. Another 10 percent of Syrians are Christians, and approximately 3 percent are Druze, a sect originating from Shiite Islam with elements of
Christianity, Judaism, and other beliefs. As the crisis unfolded, one of the biggest challenges we faced was helping the opposition unite across the country’s many religious, geographic, and ideological lines.
In October 2011, the Arab League demanded a cease-fire in Syria and called on the Assad regime to pull its troops back from the major cities, release political prisoners, protect access for journalists and humanitarian workers, and begin a dialogue with the protesters. Most predominantly Sunni Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, backed the rebels and wanted Assad gone. Under pressure from his neighbors, Assad nominally agreed to the Arab League plan, but then almost immediately disregarded it. Regime forces continued killing protesters in the following days. In response the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership.
In December, the Arab League tried again. As before, Assad agreed to their plan. This time, though, Arab monitors were sent to Syria’s battle-scarred cities. Unfortunately even the presence of this international monitoring team did little to calm the violence, and once again it quickly became clear that Assad had no intention of keeping his word. In late January 2012, the Arab League pulled the observers out in frustration and asked the UN Security Council to back its call for a political transition in Syria that would require Assad to hand over power to a Vice President and establish a government of national unity.
By this point the regime’s Army was using tanks to shell residential suburbs of Damascus. The rebels’ determination to resist at all costs was hardening; some were becoming radicalized, and extremists were joining the fight. Jihadist groups, including some with ties to al Qaeda, began trying to exploit the conflict to advance their own agendas. Refugees were fleeing across Syria’s borders in large numbers into Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. (As of 2014, there were more than 2.5 million refugees from the Syrian conflict.)
At the end of January 2012, I attended a special session of the Security Council in New York to hear the Arab League’s report and debate how to respond. “We all have a choice,” I told the Council. “Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there.”
A new resolution supporting the Arab League’s peace plan ran into the same trouble as previous attempts. The Russians were implacably opposed to anything that might constitute pressure on Assad. The year before, they had abstained in the vote to authorize a no-fly zone over Libya and to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians and then chafed as the NATO-led mission to protect civilians accelerated the fall of Qaddafi. Now, with Syria in chaos, they were determined to prevent another Western intervention. Assad’s regime was too strategically important to them. Libya was “a false analogy,” I argued in New York. The resolution did not impose sanctions or support the use of military force, focusing instead on the need for a peaceful political transition. Still the Russians weren’t having any of it.
I spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov from my plane on the way to the Munich Security Conference and then met there with him in person. I told him we needed a unified message from the international community. Moscow wanted the resolution to be tougher on the rebels than on the regime. Lavrov pressed me on what would happen when Assad refused to comply. Would the next step be a Libya-style intervention? No, I responded. The plan was to use this resolution to pressure Assad to negotiate. “He’ll only get the message when the Security Council speaks with one voice. We have gone very far in clarifying this isn’t a Libya scenario. There is not any kind of authorization for force or intervention or military action.”
The Russian rhetoric about upholding sovereignty and opposing foreign intervention rang particularly hollow given their track record elsewhere. In 2008 and 2014, Putin did not hesitate to send troops into Georgia and Ukraine, violating the sovereignty of those countries, simply because it suited his interests.
As Lavrov and I talked in Munich, there was a surge in violence in Syria. Regime forces targeted Homs, the country’s third largest city and a cradle of the rebellion, with a barrage of shelling that killed hundreds. It was the bloodiest day in the conflict thus far.
I told Lavrov that every word in the resolution in New York had been thoroughly debated. We had made concessions, while keeping the minimum of what we hoped would end the violence and begin a transition. Now it was time to vote. The resolution would be called to the floor that day.
“But what is the endgame?” Lavrov asked. Sitting there in Munich, I could not predict every step to come, and I knew it would be a mistake to minimize the challenges Syrians would face after Assad. But I was sure about one thing: if we did not begin a peace process, the endgame would be grim indeed. There would be more bloodshed, hardening defiance from those whose families were being brutalized and whose homes were being bombed, and a greater likelihood that a full-blown civil war would attract extremists, possibly resulting in a failed state, with different areas of the country controlled by warring factions, including terrorist groups. Every additional day of repression and violence made it more difficult for Syrians to reconcile and rebuild and increased the risk of instability and sectarian conflict spreading from Syria across the region.
A few hours after my meeting with Lavrov, the Security Council convened and called for a vote. I went before the press corps in Munich, saying, “Are we for peace and security and a democratic future, or are we going to be complicit in the continuing violence and bloodshed? I know where the United States stands, and we will soon find out where every other member of the Security Council stands.” Even after the bloodiest day yet in Syria, Russia and China used their veto power to prevent the world from condemning the violence. To block this resolution was to bear responsibility for the horrors on the ground. It was, as I said later, despicable.
As predicted, the situation kept getting worse. The UN and the Arab League named Kofi Annan as their Joint Special Envoy on Syria at the end of February. His mandate was to convince the regime, the rebels, and their respective foreign backers to agree on a political resolution to the conflict.
To support this new diplomatic track, I helped pull together a meeting of like-minded countries to consider other avenues for increasing pressure on the regime and providing humanitarian assistance to suffering civilians, since our first choice was blocked at the UN. We supported diplomacy, but we weren’t going to just wait for it. The roster of those who felt equally compelled to act kept swelling, and we ultimately had more than sixty nations come together in Tunisia at the end of February for what became known as the Friends of the Syrian People. We formed a sanctions working group to cut off Assad’s access to funds (although the Russians and Iranians were quite effective in replenishing his coffers), pledged to send emergency supplies to refugees fleeing the violence, and increased training of Syrian civilian opposition leaders.
Behind the scenes there was a lot of talk in Tunis about funneling weapons to the rebels to begin evening the odds against the regime’s Army and its Iranian and Russian backers. Our partners in the Gulf were watching Sunni rebels and civilians being slaughtered live on Al Jazeera, and they were increasingly impatient. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said he thought supplying weapons was “an excellent idea.” I understood his frustration at how things were going and the desire to shift the military balance on the ground. But there were also reasons to be wary of further militarizing the situation and accelerating the spiral to full-scale civil war. Once guns went into the country, they would be hard to control and could easily fall into the hands of extremists.
Assad’s backers had no such worries. Iranian forces from the Revolutionary Guard and its elite paramilitary unit, the Quds Force, were already in Syria supporting Assad and the Syrian military. The Iranians were playing a key advisory role, accompanying Syrian forces to the field and helping the regime organize its own paramilitary forces. Militants from Hezbollah, Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, also joined the fight on behalf of the Syrian regime. The combined Iranian-Hezbollah presence was
critical to the regime’s grasp on power.
I asked Prince Saud if he thought Assad would cooperate with a plan to end the violence and commence a political transition, if we could convince the Russians to agree on one. He did not think so, he said, because Assad’s family would never permit him. Led by his mother, he was under constant pressure to uphold his family’s position and follow his father’s brutal example of how to suppress an uprising. That was a reference to when Hafez al-Assad infamously destroyed the city of Hama in 1982 in retaliation for another uprising.
In Riyadh, at the end of March, I met with Prince Saud and King Abdullah and participated in the first meeting of a new strategic partnership between the United States and all six Gulf countries. Much of the focus was on the threat from Iran, but we also discussed the need to do more to support the rebels in Syria. Late that night I flew to Istanbul, where I met with representatives from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar and heard the same messages about the need to get arms to the rebels.
I was in a difficult position. On the one hand, the United States was not prepared to join such efforts to arm the rebels, but we also didn’t want to splinter the anti-Assad coalition or lose leverage with the Arab countries. “Some will be able to do certain things, and others will do other things,” I said carefully in Riyadh. “So when we talk about assistance, we are talking about a broad range of assistance. Not every country will do the same.” That was as close as I could get to publicly acknowledging what was a fait accompli: Certain countries would increase their efforts to funnel arms, while others would focus on humanitarian needs. (As of April 2014, the United States had pledged more than $1.7 billion in such assistance and is the largest donor of aid for displaced Syrians.)
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