by Obama Barack
In a speech before the Turkish parliament and a town hall meeting with Istanbul college students, I tried to echo such optimism. But because of my conversations with Erdogan, I had my doubts. During the NATO summit, Erdogan had instructed his team to block the appointment of highly regarded Danish prime minister Anders Rasmussen as the organization’s new secretary-general—not because he thought Rasmussen was unqualified but because Rasmussen’s government had declined to act on Turkey’s demand that it censor the 2005 publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. European appeals about freedom of the press had left Erdogan unmoved, and he had relented only after I’d promised that Rasmussen would have a Turkish deputy and had convinced him that my upcoming visit—and U.S. public opinion of Turkey—would be adversely affected if Rasmussen’s appointment didn’t go through.
This set a pattern for the next eight years. Mutual self-interest would dictate that Erdogan and I develop a working relationship. Turkey looked to the United States for support of its E.U. bid, as well as military and intelligence assistance in fighting Kurdish separatists who’d been emboldened by the fall of Saddam Hussein. We, meanwhile, needed Turkey’s cooperation to combat terrorism and stabilize Iraq. Personally, I found the prime minister to be cordial and generally responsive to my requests. But whenever I listened to him speak, his tall frame slightly stooped, his voice a forceful staccato that rose an octave in response to various grievances or perceived slights, I got the strong impression that his commitment to democracy and the rule of law might last only as long as it preserved his own power.
My questions about the durability of democratic values weren’t restricted to Turkey. During my stop in Prague, E.U. officials had expressed alarm about the rise of far-right parties across Europe and how the economic crisis was causing an uptick in nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and skepticism about integration. The sitting Czech president, Václav Klaus, to whom I made a short courtesy visit, embodied some of these trends. A vocal “Eurosceptic” who’d been in office since 2003, he was both ardently pro–free market and an admirer of Vladimir Putin’s. And although we tried to keep things light during our conversation, what I knew of his public record—he had supported efforts to censor Czech television, was dismissive of gay and lesbian rights, and was a notorious climate change denier—didn’t leave me particularly hopeful about political trends in central Europe.
It was hard to tell how lasting these trends would be. I told myself it was the nature of democracies—including America’s—to swing between periods of progressive change and conservative retrenchment. In fact, what was striking was how easily Klaus would have fit in with the Republican Senate caucus back home, just as I could readily picture Erdogan as a local power broker on the Chicago City Council. Whether this was a source of comfort or concern, I couldn’t decide.
* * *
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I HAD NOT, however, come to Prague to assess the state of democracy. Instead, we had scheduled my one big public speech of the trip to lay out a top foreign policy initiative: the reduction and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. I’d worked on the issue since my election to the Senate four years earlier, and while there were risks promoting what many considered a utopian quest, I told my team that in some ways that was the point; even modest progress on the issue required a bold and overarching vision. If I hoped to pass one thing on to Malia and Sasha, it was freedom from the possibility of a human-made apocalypse.
I had a second, more practical reason for focusing on the nuclear issue in a way that would make headlines across Europe: We needed to find a means to prevent Iran and North Korea from advancing their nuclear programs. (The day before the speech, in fact, North Korea had launched a long-range rocket into the Pacific, just to get our attention.) It was time to ramp up international pressure on both countries, including with enforceable economic sanctions; and I knew this would be a whole lot easier to accomplish if I could show that the United States was interested in not just restarting global momentum on disarmament but also actively reducing its own nuclear stockpile.
By the morning of the speech, I was satisfied that we had framed the nuclear issue with enough concrete, achievable proposals to keep me from sounding hopelessly quixotic. The day was clear and the setting spectacular, a town square with the ancient Prague Castle—once home to Bohemian kings and Holy Roman emperors—looming in the background. As the Beast wended its way through the city’s narrow and uneven streets, we passed some of the thousands who were gathering to hear the speech. There were people of all ages, but mostly I saw young Czechs, dressed in jeans, sweaters, and scarves, bundled up against a crisp spring wind, their faces flushed and expectant. It was crowds like this, I thought, that had been scattered by Soviet tanks at the end of the 1968 Prague Spring; and it was on these same streets just twenty-one years later, in 1989, that even bigger crowds of peaceful protesters had, against all odds, brought an end to Communist rule.
I had been in law school in 1989. I recalled sitting alone in my basement apartment a few miles from Harvard Square, glued to my secondhand TV set as I watched what would come to be known as the Velvet Revolution unfold. I remember being riveted by those protests and hugely inspired. It was the same feeling I’d had earlier in the year, seeing that solitary figure facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square, the same inspiration I felt whenever I watched grainy footage of Freedom Riders or John Lewis and his fellow civil rights soldiers marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. To see ordinary people sloughing off fear and habit to act on their deepest beliefs, to see young people risking everything just to have a say in their own lives, to try to strip the world of the old cruelties, hierarchies, divisions, falsehoods, and injustices that cramped the human spirit—that, I had realized, was what I believed in and longed to be a part of.
That night, I had been unable to sleep. Rather than reading my casebooks for class the next day, I had written in my journal deep into the night, my brain bursting with urgent, half-formed thoughts, uncertain of what my role might be in this great global struggle but knowing even then that the practice of law would be no more than a way station for me, that my heart would take me elsewhere.
It felt like a long time ago. And yet looking out from the backseat of the presidential limousine, preparing to deliver an address that would be broadcast around the world, I realized there was a direct if wholly improbable line between that moment and this one. I was the product of that young man’s dreams; and as we pulled up to the makeshift holding area behind a wide stage, a part of me imagined myself not as the politician I had become but as one of those young people in the crowd, uncompromised by power, unencumbered by the need to accommodate men like Erdogan and Klaus, obliged only to make common cause with those chasing after a new and better world.
After the speech, I had a chance to visit with Václav Havel, the playwright and former dissident who had been president of the Czech Republic for two terms, finishing in 2003. A participant in the Prague Spring, he’d been blacklisted after the Soviet occupation, had his works banned, and been repeatedly jailed for his political activities. Havel, as much as anyone, had given moral voice to the grassroots democracy movements that had brought the Soviet era to an end. Along with Nelson Mandela and a handful of other living statesmen, he’d also been a distant role model for me. I’d read his essays while in law school. Watching him maintain his moral compass even after his side had won power and he’d assumed the presidency had helped convince me that it was possible to enter politics and come out with your soul intact.
Our meeting was brief, a victim to my schedule. Havel was in his early seventies but looked younger, with an unassuming manner, a warm, craggy face, rusty-blond hair, and a trim mustache. After posing for pictures and addressing the assembled press, we settled into a conference room, where, with the help of his personal translator, we spoke for forty-five minutes or so about the financial crisis, Russia, and the fu
ture of Europe. He was concerned that the United States might somehow believe that the problems of Europe were solved when in fact, throughout the former Soviet satellites, the commitment to democracy was still fragile. As memories of the old order faded, and leaders like him who had forged close relationships with America passed from the scene, the dangers of a resurgent illiberalism were real.
“In some ways, the Soviets simplified who the enemy was,” Havel said. “Today, autocrats are more sophisticated. They stand for election while slowly undermining the institutions that make democracy possible. They champion free markets while engaging in the same corruption, cronyism, and exploitation as existed in the past.” He confirmed that the economic crisis was strengthening the forces of nationalism and populist extremism across the continent, and although he agreed with my strategy to reengage Russia, he cautioned that the annexation of Georgian territory was just the most overt example of Putin’s efforts to intimidate and interfere throughout the region. “Without attention from the U.S.,” he said, “freedom here and across Europe will wither.”
Our time was up. I thanked Havel for his advice and assured him that America would not falter in promoting democratic values. He smiled and told me he hoped he had not added to my burdens.
“You’ve been cursed with people’s high expectations,” he said, shaking my hand. “Because it means they are also easily disappointed. It’s something I’m familiar with. I fear it can be a trap.”
* * *
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SEVEN DAYS AFTER leaving Washington, my team climbed back onto Air Force One, worn out and ready to return home. I was in the plane’s front cabin, about to catch up on some sleep, when Jim Jones and Tom Donilon walked in to brief me on a developing situation involving an issue I’d never been asked about during the campaign.
“Pirates?”
“Pirates, Mr. President,” Jones said. “Off the coast of Somalia. They boarded a cargo ship captained by an American and appear to be holding the crew hostage.”
This problem wasn’t new. For decades, Somalia had been a failed state, a country on the Horn of Africa carved up and shared uneasily by various warlords, clans, and, more recently, a vicious terrorist organization called al-Shabaab. Without the benefit of a functioning economy, gangs of jobless young men equipped with motorized skiffs, AK-47s, and makeshift ladders had taken to boarding commercial vessels traveling the busy shipping route connecting Asia to the West via the Suez Canal and holding them for ransom. This was the first time an American-flagged ship was involved. We had no indication that the four Somalis had harmed any members of the twenty-person crew, but Secretary Gates had ordered the navy destroyer USS Bainbridge and the frigate USS Halyburton to the area, and they were expected to have the hijacked vessel within their sights by the time we landed in Washington.
“We’ll wake you, sir, if there are further developments,” Jones said.
“Got it,” I said, feeling the weariness I’d staved off over the past few days starting to settle in my bones. “Also wake me if the locusts come,” I said. “Or the plague.”
“Sir?” Jones paused.
“Just a joke, Jim. Good night.”
CHAPTER 15
OUR ENTIRE NATIONAL SECURITY TEAM spent the next four days absorbed by the drama unfolding on the open seas off Somalia. The quick-thinking crew of the cargo-carrying Maersk Alabama had managed to disable the ship’s engine before the pirates boarded, and most of its members had hidden in a secure room. Their American captain, a courageous and levelheaded Vermonter named Richard Phillips, meanwhile, had stayed on the bridge. With the 508-foot ship inoperable and their small skiff no longer seaworthy, the Somalis decided to flee on a covered lifeboat, taking Phillips as a hostage and demanding a $2 million ransom. Even as one of the hostage-takers surrendered, negotiations to release the American captain went nowhere. The drama only heightened when Phillips attempted escape by jumping overboard, only to be recaptured.
With the situation growing more tense by the hour, I issued a standing order to fire on the Somali pirates if at any point Phillips appeared to be in imminent danger. Finally, on the fifth day, we got the word: In the middle of the night, as two of the Somalis came out into the open and the other could be seen through a small window holding a gun to the American captain, Navy SEAL snipers took three shots. The pirates were killed. Phillips was safe.
The news elicited high fives all around the White House. The Washington Post headline declared it AN EARLY MILITARY VICTORY FOR OBAMA. But as relieved as I was to see Captain Phillips reunited with his family, and as proud as I was of our navy personnel for their handling of the situation, I wasn’t inclined to beat my chest over the episode. Partly, it was a simple recognition that the line between success and complete disaster had been a matter of inches—three bullets finding their targets through the darkness rather than being thrown off just a tad by a sudden ocean swell. But I also realized that around the world, in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.
* * *
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THAT PART OF my job involved ordering people to be killed wasn’t a surprise, although it was rarely framed that way. Fighting terrorists—“on their ten-yard line and not ours” as Gates liked to put it—had provided the entire rationale behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as al-Qaeda had scattered and gone underground, metastasizing into a complex web of affiliates, operatives, sleeper cells, and sympathizers connected by the internet and burner phones, our national security agencies had been challenged to construct new forms of more targeted, nontraditional warfare—including operating an arsenal of lethal drones to take out al-Qaeda operatives within the territory of Pakistan. The National Security Agency, or NSA, already the most sophisticated electronic-intelligence-gathering organization in the world, employed new supercomputers and decryption technology worth billions of dollars to comb cyberspace in search of terrorist communications and potential threats. The Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, anchored by Navy SEAL teams and Army Special Forces, carried out nighttime raids and hunted down terrorist suspects mostly inside—but sometimes outside—the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. And the CIA developed new forms of analysis and intelligence gathering.
The White House, too, had reorganized itself to manage the terrorist threat. Each month, I chaired a meeting in the Situation Room, bringing all the intelligence agencies together to review recent developments and ensure coordination. The Bush administration had developed a ranking of terrorist targets, a kind of “Top 20” list complete with photos, alias information, and vital statistics reminiscent of those on baseball cards; generally, whenever someone on the list was killed, a new target was added, leading Rahm to observe that “al-Qaeda’s HR department must have trouble filling that number 21 slot.” In fact, my hyperactive chief of staff—who’d spent enough time in Washington to know that his new, liberal president couldn’t afford to look soft on terrorism—was obsessed with the list, cornering those responsible for our targeting operations to find out what was taking so long when it came to locating number 10 or 14.
I took no joy in any of this. It didn’t make me feel powerful. I’d entered politics to help kids get a better education, to help families get healthcare, to help poor countries grow more food—it was that kind of power that I measured myself against.
But the work was nece
ssary, and it was my responsibility to make sure our operations were as effective as possible. Moreover, unlike some on the left, I’d never engaged in wholesale condemnation of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism (CT). I’d seen enough of the intelligence to know that al-Qaeda and its affiliates were continuously plotting horrific crimes against innocent people. Its members weren’t amenable to negotiations or bound by the normal rules of engagement; thwarting their plots and rooting them out was a task of extraordinary complexity. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush had done some things right, including swiftly and consistently trying to tamp down anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States—no small feat, especially given our country’s history with McCarthyism and Japanese internment—and mobilizing international support for the early Afghan campaign. Even controversial Bush administration programs like the Patriot Act, which I myself had criticized, seemed to me potential tools for abuse more than wholesale violations of American civil liberties.
The way the Bush administration had spun the intelligence to gain public support for invading Iraq (not to mention its use of terrorism as a political cudgel in the 2004 elections) was more damning. And, of course, I considered the invasion itself to be as big a strategic blunder as the slide into Vietnam had been decades earlier. But the actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hadn’t involved the indiscriminate bombing or deliberate targeting of civilians that had been a routine part of even “good” wars like World War II; and with glaring exceptions like Abu Ghraib, our troops in theater had displayed a remarkable level of discipline and professionalism.