Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  That was a rare instance when I outcursed Rahm.

  Looking back, I sometimes ponder the age-old question of how much difference the particular characteristics of individual leaders make in the sweep of history—whether those of us who rise to power are mere conduits for the deep, relentless currents of the times or whether we’re at least partly the authors of what’s to come. I wonder whether our insecurities and our hopes, our childhood traumas or memories of unexpected kindness carry as much force as any technological shift or socioeconomic trend. I wonder whether a President Hillary Clinton or President John McCain might have elicited more trust from the two sides; whether things might have played out differently if someone other than Netanyahu had occupied the prime minister’s seat or if Abbas had been a younger man, more intent on making his mark than protecting himself from criticism.

  What I do know is that despite the hours Hillary and George Mitchell spent doing shuttle diplomacy, our plans for peace talks went nowhere until late in August 2010, just one month before the settlement freeze was set to expire, when Abbas finally agreed to direct talks, thanks largely to the intervention of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan. Abbas conditioned his participation, however, on Israel’s willingness to keep the settlement freeze in place—the same freeze he’d spent the previous nine months decrying as useless.

  With no time to lose, we arranged to have Netanyahu, Abbas, Mubarak, and Abdullah join me at meetings and an intimate White House dinner on September 1 to launch the talks. The day was largely ceremonial—the hard work of hammering out a deal would shift to Hillary, Mitchell, and the negotiating teams. Still, we dressed up the whole affair with photo ops and press availabilities and as much fanfare as we could muster, and the atmosphere among the four leaders was warm and collegial throughout. I still have a photograph of the five of us looking at President Mubarak’s watch to check that the sun had officially set, since it was the Muslim month of Ramadan, and we had to confirm that the religiously prescribed fast had been lifted before seating everyone for dinner.

  In the soft light of the Old Family Dining Room, each of us took turns describing our visions for the future. We talked of predecessors like Begin and Sadat, Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein, who’d had the courage and wisdom to bridge old divides. We spoke of the costs of endless conflict, the fathers who never came home, the mothers who had buried their children.

  To an outsider, it would have seemed a hopeful moment, the start of something new.

  And yet later that night, when the dinner was over and the leaders had gone back to their hotels and I sat in the Treaty Room going over my briefs for the next day, I couldn’t help feeling a vague sense of disquiet. The speeches, the small talk, the easy familiarity—it all felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance that each of the four leaders had probably participated in dozens of times before, designed to placate the latest U.S. president who thought things could change. I imagined them shaking hands afterward, like actors taking off their costumes and makeup backstage, before returning to the world that they knew—a world in which Netanyahu could blame the absence of peace on Abbas’s weakness while doing everything he could to keep him weak, and Abbas could publicly accuse Israel of war crimes while quietly negotiating business contracts with the Israelis, and Arab leaders could bemoan the injustices endured by Palestinians under occupation while their own internal security forces ruthlessly ferreted out dissenters and malcontents who might threaten their grip on power. And I thought of all the children, whether in Gaza or in Israeli settlements or on the street corners of Cairo and Amman, who would continue to grow up knowing mainly violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.

  A world without illusions—that’s what they’d call it.

  The Israelis and Palestinians would end up meeting only twice in direct peace talks—once in Washington, the day after our White House dinner, and then again twelve days later for a two-part conversation, with Mubarak hosting negotiators in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el Sheikh before the group moved to Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence. Hillary and Mitchell reported that the discussions were substantive, with the United States dangling incentives to both sides, including plumped-up aid packages, and even considering a possible early release of Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel who’d become a hero to many right-leaning Israelis.

  But it was all to no avail. The Israelis refused to extend the settlement freeze. The Palestinians withdrew from negotiations. By December 2010, Abbas was threatening to go to the U.N., seeking recognition of a Palestinian state—and to the International Criminal Court, seeking Israel’s prosecution for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu was threatening to make life harder for the Palestinian Authority. George Mitchell tried to put things in perspective, reminding me that during negotiations to end the Northern Ireland conflict, “We had seven hundred bad days—and one good one.” Still, it felt as if in the near term, at least, the window for any peace deal had closed.

  In the months to come, I’d think back often to my dinner with Abbas and Netanyahu, Mubarak and King Abdullah, the pantomime of it, their lack of resolve. To insist that the old order in the Middle East would indefinitely hold, to believe that the children of despair wouldn’t revolt, at some point, against those who maintained it—that, it turned out, was the greatest illusion of all.

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  INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE, we had frequently discussed the long-term challenges facing North Africa and the Middle East. As petrostates failed to diversify their economies, we asked ourselves what would happen when their oil revenues dried up. We bemoaned the restrictions placed on women and girls—hindering their ability to go to school, work, or, in some cases, even drive a car. We noted the stalled growth and its disproportionate impact on the younger generations in Arabic-speaking nations: People under the age of thirty made up about 60 percent of the population and were suffering unemployment rates double that of the rest of the world.

  Most of all, we worried about the autocratic, repressive nature of nearly every Arab government—not just the lack of true democracy but also the fact that those who held power seemed entirely unaccountable to the people they ruled. Even as conditions varied from country to country, most of these leaders maintained their grip through an old formula: restricted political participation and expression, pervasive intimidation and surveillance at the hands of police or internal security services, dysfunctional judicial systems and insufficient due process protections, rigged (or nonexistent) elections, an entrenched military, heavy press censorship, and rampant corruption. Many of these regimes had been in place for decades, held together by nationalist appeals, shared religious beliefs, tribal bonds, familial ties, and webs of patronage. It was possible that the stifling of dissent combined with plain inertia would be enough to keep them going for a while. But although our intelligence agencies mainly focused on tracking the actions of terrorist networks, and our diplomats were not always attuned to what was happening on “the Arab street,” we could see indications of a growing discontent among ordinary Arabs—which, given the lack of legitimate outlets to express such frustration, could spell trouble. Or, as I told Denis after returning from my first visit to the region as president, “Sometime, somewhere, things are going to blow.”

  What to do with that knowledge? There was the rub. For at least half a century, U.S. policy in the Middle East had focused narrowly on maintaining stability, preventing disruptions to our oil supplies, and keeping adversarial powers (first the Soviets, then the Iranians) from expanding their influence. After 9/11, counterterrorism took center stage. In pursuing each of these goals, we’d made autocrats our allies. They were predictable, after all, and committed to keeping a lid on things. They hosted our military bases and cooperated with us on counterterrorism efforts. And, o
f course, they did lots of business with U.S. companies. Much of our national security apparatus in the region depended on their cooperation and in many instances had become thoroughly entangled with theirs. Every so often, a report would surface from the Pentagon or Langley, recommending that U.S. policy pay more attention to human rights and governance issues when dealing with our Middle East partners. But then the Saudis would deliver a vital tip that kept an explosive device from being loaded onto U.S.-bound cargo planes or our naval base in Bahrain would prove critical in managing a flare-up with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, and those reports would be relegated to the bottom of a drawer. Across the U.S. government, the possibility that some sort of populist uprising might bring down one of our allies had historically been met with resignation: Sure, it was likely to happen, the same way a bad hurricane will hit the Gulf Coast or the Big One will hit California; but since we couldn’t say exactly when or where, and since we didn’t have the means to stop it anyway, the best thing to do was prepare contingency plans and get ready to manage the aftershocks.

  I liked to think that my administration resisted such fatalism. Building upon my Cairo speech, I had used interviews and public remarks to urge the governments of the Middle East to heed the voices of citizens calling for reform. In meetings with Arab leaders, my team often put human rights issues on the agenda. The State Department worked diligently behind the scenes to protect journalists, free political dissidents, and widen the space for civic engagement.

  And yet only rarely did the United States scold allies like Egypt or Saudi Arabia publicly for their human rights violations. Given our concerns over Iraq, al-Qaeda, and Iran, not to mention Israel’s security needs, the stakes felt too high to risk rupturing our relationships. Accepting this type of realism, I told myself, was part of the job. Except that every so often, the story of a women’s rights activist being arrested in Riyadh would reach my desk, or I’d read about a local employee of an international human rights organization languishing in a Cairo jail, and I’d feel haunted. I knew that my administration would never be able to transform the Middle East into an oasis of democracy, but I believed we could and should be doing a hell of a lot more to encourage progress toward it.

  It was during one of those moods that I set aside time for lunch with Samantha Power.

  I’d met Samantha while I was in the Senate, after I read her Pulitzer Prize–winning book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide—a moving, tightly reasoned discussion of America’s lackluster response to genocide and the need for stronger global leadership in preventing mass atrocities. She was teaching at Harvard at the time, and when I reached out, she jumped at my suggestion that we share ideas over dinner the next time she was in D.C. She turned out to be younger than I’d expected, in her mid-thirties, tall and gangly, with red hair, freckles, and big, thickly lashed, almost sorrowful eyes that crinkled at the corners when she laughed. She was also intense. She and her Irish mother had immigrated to the States when she was nine; she’d played basketball in high school, graduated from Yale, and worked as a freelance journalist covering the Bosnian war. Her experiences there—bearing witness to slaughter and ethnic cleansing—had inspired her to get a law degree, hoping it would give her the tools to cure some part of the world’s madness. That evening, after she’d run me through an exhaustive list of U.S. foreign policy errors that she insisted needed correcting, I suggested she might want to get out of the ivory tower and work with me for a spell.

  The conversation that started over dinner that night continued on and off for the next several years. Samantha joined my Senate staff as a foreign policy fellow, advising on issues like the genocide then taking place in Darfur. She worked on my presidential campaign, where she met her future husband, my friend and eventual regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, and became one of our top foreign policy surrogates. (I did have to put her in the penalty box, removing her from the campaign, when, during what she thought was an off-the-record moment with a reporter, she called Hillary “a monster.”) Following the election, I hired her for a senior position at the NSC, where she did excellent work, mainly out of the limelight, including designing a broad global initiative to increase government transparency and reduce corruption in countries around the world.

  Samantha was one of my closest friends in the White House. Much like Ben, she evoked my own youthful idealism, the part of me still untouched by cynicism, cold calculation, or caution dressed up as wisdom. And I suspect it was precisely because she knew that side of me, and understood which heartstrings to pull, that at times she drove me nuts. I didn’t actually see her much from day to day, and that was part of the problem; whenever Samantha got time on my calendar, she felt obliged to remind me of every wrong I hadn’t yet righted. (“So, what ideals have we betrayed lately?” I’d ask.) She was shattered, for example, when on Armenian Remembrance Day I failed to explicitly acknowledge the early-twentieth-century genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Turks (the need to name genocide unequivocally was a central thesis of her book). I had good reason for not making a statement at the time—the Turks were deeply touchy about the issue, and I was in delicate negotiations with President Erdogan on managing America’s withdrawal from Iraq—but still, she made me feel like a heel. But as exasperating as Samantha’s insistence could be, every so often I needed a dose of her passion and integrity, both as a temperature check on my conscience and because she often had specific, creative suggestions for how to deal with messy problems that no one in the administration was spending enough time thinking about.

  Our lunch in May 2010 was a case in point. Samantha showed up that day ready to talk about the Middle East—in particular, the fact that the United States hadn’t lodged an official protest of the Egyptian government’s recent two-year extension of a state of “emergency law” that had been in place continuously since Mubarak’s election in 1981. The extension codified his dictatorial power by suspending the constitutional rights of Egyptians. “I understand there are strategic considerations when it comes to Egypt,” Samantha said, “but does anybody stop to ask whether it’s good strategy?”

  I told her that, actually, I had. I wasn’t a big fan of Mubarak, but I’d concluded that a one-off statement criticizing a law that had been in place for almost thirty years wouldn’t be all that useful. “The U.S. government’s an ocean liner,” I said. “Not a speedboat. If we want to change our approach to the region, then we need a strategy that builds over time. We’d have to get buy-in from the Pentagon and the intel folks. We’d have to calibrate the strategy to give allies in the region time to adjust.”

  “Is anybody doing that?” Samantha said. “Coming up with that strategy, I mean?”

  I smiled, seeing the wheels turning in her head.

  Not long afterward, Samantha and three NSC colleagues—Dennis Ross, Gayle Smith, and Jeremy Weinstein—presented me with the blueprint for a Presidential Study Directive stating that U.S. interests in stability across the Middle East and North Africa were adversely affected by the United States’ uncritical support of authoritarian regimes. In August I used that directive to instruct the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, and other government agencies to examine ways the United States could encourage meaningful political and economic reforms in the region to nudge those nations closer to the principles of open government, so that they might avoid the destabilizing uprisings, violence, chaos, and unpredictable outcomes that so often accompanied sudden change. The NSC team set about conducting biweekly meetings with Middle East experts from across government to develop specific ideas for reorienting U.S. policy.

  Many of the veteran diplomats and experts they talked to were predictably skeptical of the need for any change to U.S. policy, arguing that as unsavory as some of our Arab allies might be, the status quo served America’s core interests—something that wasn’t guaranteed if more populist governments took their place. Over time, though, the team was able to arrive at a coheren
t set of principles to guide a shift in strategy. Under the emerging plan, U.S. officials across agencies would be expected to deliver a consistent and coordinated message on the need for reform; they would develop specific recommendations for liberalizing political and civic life in various countries and offer a range of new incentives to encourage their adoption. By mid-December, the documents laying out the strategy were just about ready for my approval, and although I realized that it wouldn’t change the Middle East overnight, I was heartened by the fact that we were starting to steer America’s foreign policy machinery in the right direction.

  If only our timing had been a bit better.

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  THE SAME MONTH, in the North African nation of Tunisia, an impoverished fruit vendor set himself on fire outside a local government building. It was an act of protest, born of desperation: one citizen’s furious response to a government he knew to be corrupt and indifferent to his needs. By all accounts, the man, twenty-six-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi, was not an activist, nor was he especially concerned with politics. He belonged to a generation of Tunisians raised in a stagnant economy and under the thumb of a repressive dictator named Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. And after being repeatedly harassed by municipal inspectors and denied a hearing in front of a judge, he was simply fed up. According to a bystander, at the moment of his self-immolation, Bouazizi shouted—to nobody in particular and to everyone at once—“How do you expect me to make a living?”