The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  Tom had served in every Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter, and he would be elevated to National Security Advisor later that year. He often dispensed wisdom on how government worked, and told me I should not have waited until a high-level meeting had ended to make my point.

  “Listen,” he said firmly. “If you hear nothing else, hear this. You work at the White House. There is no other room where a bunch of really smart people of sound judgment are getting together and figuring out what to do. It will be the scariest moment of your life when you fully internalize this: There is no other meeting. You’re in the meeting. You are the meeting. If you have a concern, raise it.”

  PRESIDENT OBAMA INVITED ME to “catch up” over lunch in May of 2010, a few months after US troops had safely returned from Haiti and six months before the so-called Arab Spring would begin.

  Obama walked me into his small private study off the Oval, where he and Vice President Biden held their weekly one-on-one lunch. As we entered, I saw a pair of Muhammad Ali’s red boxing gloves that I remembered Obama had also kept on display in his Senate office. On the walls were a nineteenth-century oil painting of Abraham Lincoln strategizing with his generals about how to end the Civil War and a seascape of Cape Cod that reminded me of the beach outside the window of my old apartment in Winthrop. Obama told me he had praised the painting when he had seen it hanging in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy, who had painted it himself, then surprised Obama by giving it to him.

  “I don’t talk to you enough,” Obama said as we sat down. “I thought it would be useful to hear what you think we are doing right, what we are doing wrong, what ideals we have betrayed lately.”

  For someone in his position, Obama remained refreshingly aware of how sequestered he was. Even in private, he seemed to inhabit a sphere of his own. His place had been set at the head of a table that could have seated six people, while mine was laid at the opposite end. Although we were in a small room, he felt far away.

  Our conversation quickly turned to the Middle East, where the Egyptian government had just enacted a two-year extension of its harsh emergency law. I lamented the fact that the United States rarely protested how our autocratic allies in the region acted, even when they repressed their people in self-defeating ways. We got to talking about how such draconian measures could have destabilizing effects that would end up harming US interests. Obama grew animated talking about the sclerotic and out-of-touch governments ruling much of the Arab world.

  “If these guys don’t address the demands of young people,” Obama predicted, “something’s gonna give.” He was clearly interested in what this combustible situation foretold for the people of the Middle East and North Africa, and in turn for US foreign policy.

  Soon after our lunch, three of my NSC colleagues and I collaborated on a memo to Obama that addressed the urgent need for political and economic reforms. Working alongside Dennis Ross, the Senior Director responsible for the Middle East; Gayle Smith, the Senior Director for Development and Democracy; and Jeremy Weinstein, a political scientist who worked under Gayle, we proposed looking afresh at US policy in the broader Middle East.

  While Gayle, Jeremy, and I brought expertise on democratization, Dennis had decades of regional experience that we lacked. He had been a key player on Mideast policy in multiple presidential administrations and had served as President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton’s lead envoy on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Jeremy, who had taken leave from Stanford to work at the NSC, was the heart of our team. I was already working with him on a major global anti-corruption effort, known as the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which he had conceived of, and Gayle and I would spearhead in parallel to our efforts on Middle East reform.* We viewed the initiatives in tandem, as OGP called on governments to be more transparent, which in turn empowered citizens to hold political leaders accountable for their failure to deliver. Befitting his professorial background, Jeremy preferred making aruments for which he could demonstrate empirical support. “Here is what we know,” he would say whenever we tried to drill down on some seemingly unanswerable dilemma. He would then cite academic research that spoke to the precise issues at hand.

  Our memo to President Obama warned that people in the Middle East and North Africa were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their governments. We asked him to issue a “Presidential Directive” instructing US government agencies to examine how the United States could get ahead of these brewing grievances by advancing the cause of reform.

  Obama read our memo, and in August of 2010 he issued the formal directive we recommended. Using the language we had suggested, he told government agency heads that America’s interest in political and economic stability was harmed by blindly supporting authoritarian Middle Eastern governments and frequently ignoring how they treated their citizens. The President instructed the heads of his cabinet agencies to identify leverage we could use to encourage governments in the region to be more open and responsive to the needs of their people.

  The logic behind President Obama’s guidance was that the United States needed to act while we still had time to support political evolution in the Middle East. Otherwise, we would find ourselves figuring out how to respond to revolution. Or, as I put it when we gathered US officials in the EEOB to brief them on the directive, “President Obama believes that if we are willing to bear more pain now, there will be less pain later.”

  With Jeremy sitting behind us in a large, secure conference room, Dennis, Gayle, and I began chairing biweekly meetings with Middle East experts from State, Defense, Treasury, the intelligence community, and other parts of the government. Jeremy and other NSC officials led additional meetings to develop a set of detailed plans on how to engage specific countries. We used these meetings to generate ideas for how to revamp long-standing US policies in the region, most of which had changed very little over preceding administrations.

  Many of the US government’s Middle East experts who attended our meetings argued that the political status quo in the region served US interests. Therefore, they warned that the types of reforms we were discussing could invite negative consequences. Despite Obama’s explicit request for detailed proposals, they balked at coming up with ways to encourage Middle Eastern governments to change.

  This reaction was not entirely surprising. American diplomats were our primary eyes and ears on the ground in the Middle East, and while some were entrepreneurial, managing to explore the societies in which they lived, others were out of touch with what was referred to as “the street”: students and young adults, people who lived outside of major cities, and those with lower socioeconomic status. The security regulations put in place after the September 11th attacks compounded the disconnect, as diplomats were sometimes also restricted in their movements. These factors meant that they tended to over-rely on governmental and elite sources to inform their thinking. As a result, the US government heard little from citizens who were growing angry with the inequality, corruption, and repressiveness of life in outwardly stable countries like Tunisia and Egypt.

  During my early days at the NSC, Richard Holbrooke had warned me that I should get used to feeling dependent on other governments for information. “US officials wearing badges around their necks run around the world trying to find foreign officials who wear badges around their necks. And they call it diplomacy,” he said. “This is why we know so little about what is actually going on anywhere.”

  I was not a Middle East expert, and the regional specialists’ fears about altering the status quo were credible. However, many of their arguments appeared not to have been stress-tested in decades. As a baseline, many seemed to reflexively assume that the status quo could be maintained. Conversely, Dennis, Gayle, Jeremy, and I argued that regimes that consistently failed to deliver for their people would come under growing pressure. And when citizens contested the ways they were being governed, long-standing leaders could soon find themselves backed into a corner, resorting to e
ver-more incendiary means to cling to power.

  Polling already showed that the more repressive governments became in trying to keep a lid on brewing discontent, the less legitimacy they had with their people. When we took into account key trends—like mass unemployment, a population predominantly made up of young people, technology that increased the average person’s ability to see elites’ standard of living and to organize—we concluded that change was coming. Or, as Obama had forecast during our lunch, “something’s gonna give.”

  We made the case for building US policy in the region on a foundation of principles rather than continuing to rely on particular leaders. To get our point across, we started using the biweekly sessions to challenge traditional assumptions. We reminded participants that Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was seventy-four years old, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was eighty-two, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was eighty-six. Since authoritarian leaders would not live forever, we asked our colleagues what would come after these men exited the scene.

  Mubarak, for example, planned to hand over power to his son Gamal. This bothered many Egyptians, who saw Gamal as corrupt and wanted to have a say in who would run their country. Yet US officials had not pushed for fair elections, fearing that doing so would jeopardize the Egyptian government’s support for peace with Israel and counterterrorism cooperation with the United States. However, when we discussed what motivated the Egyptian government, we managed to secure relative agreement around the table that the country’s leaders were looking out for their own security interests. Even if we challenged them on issues of governance, they had ample reasons for pursuing the policies on Israel and terrorism that we wanted to see continue.

  After four months of meetings, many of the most skeptical participants seemed to embrace the need to pursue incremental but meaningful change. Together, we arrived at a set of core principles that provided the foundation for a modified approach to the region. US officials would start speaking more in public about issues that we knew resonated with frustrated citizens. Even the Pentagon would be expected to deliver the President’s message on the importance of reform. And different US government agencies would bring to bear a variety of carrots and sticks to try to convince governments in the Middle East and North Africa to respond positively to our recommendations. We also developed granular reform proposals for a number of specific countries.

  Once the President blessed the new strategy, which we expected he would do within a few days of receiving the plans, we would still face many hurdles. The dictators in the region would naturally resist liberalizing, and some US officials would be unenthusiastic about implementing the President’s guidance. Still, the existence of a US government reform agenda for the broader Middle East represented a shift.

  On December 17th, 2010, just as we were sending this large package of material to President Obama for his approval, a Tunisian fruit vendor lit himself on fire.

  Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act of protest against corruption and humiliation set in motion a cascade of revolts that would reorder huge swaths of the Arab world. These uprisings would end up impacting the course of Obama’s presidency more than any other geopolitical development during his eight years in office.

  The revolution had begun.

  NEARLY TWO MONTHS AFTER THE TUNISIAN UPRISING started and four days after Mubarak, the seemingly permanent ruler of Egypt, stepped aside, the protests reached Libya. In the eastern city of Benghazi on February 15th, 2011, Libya’s internal security service arrested Fathi Terbil, a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer who had spent years advocating on behalf of the victims of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. That night, hundreds of people gathered to demand Terbil’s release, and over the next two days, Libyans in other towns took to the streets.

  In response, the Libyan regime’s forces began shooting civilians. These attacks prompted more demonstrations—and more violence. After four days of protests, 233 people were reported dead, and Libyan Americans were frantically dialing the White House switchboard, pleading for help.

  Before the Arab Spring, Qaddafi seemed like such a cartoonish character that one could sometimes lose sight of his ferocity. My only in-person exposure to him had come in 2009, when I helped organize Obama’s first trip to the UN as President. Qaddafi spoke to the General Assembly immediately after Obama, rambling on for one hundred minutes and at one point theatrically throwing a copy of the UN Charter over his shoulder.

  Yet alongside his flashy antics, during his forty-two years in power, Qaddafi had turned Libya into one of the most repressive states in the world. He had made it illegal to hold demonstrations or criticize the government. His regime’s criminal code had made capital offenses out of various forms of political opposition, and the judiciary had once handed down a death sentence to someone for starting an NGO. Libya’s security forces had become notorious for persecution, torture, and summary executions of those who defied Qaddafi’s rule. Over the course of twenty-four hours in 1996, they had killed 1,270 inmates in the Tripoli prison that housed many political prisoners. The secret police, state-backed militia, and other armed elements had complete impunity to terrorize the Libyan people.

  When the Qaddafi regime turned its guns on peaceful demonstrators, Obama publicly condemned the crackdown. In Tunisia and Egypt, pressure from the US President and other world leaders played a role in ultimately convincing the militaries in those countries to allow protests to continue. But with Libya, the United States had just restored full diplomatic relations in 2006.13 With only shallow ties between the two governments, senior American officials could not call up their counterparts in the hopes of influencing the decisions being made by Qaddafi and his inner circle.

  The Libyan dictator was highly unlikely to have listened anyway. Rather than show signs of relenting, he promised—and delivered—more violence. After protests spread from Benghazi, the country’s second largest city, to the capital of Tripoli, Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, addressed the nation. He described the “rivers of blood” that would flow if demonstrations continued. Roughly ten days after the first major street protests, the UN reported that more than 1,000 people had already been killed.

  President Obama had seen enough, and on February 26th, he called on Qaddafi to step down.

  In these still-early days of the Arab Spring, Ben Rhodes pointed out to me that events in the Middle East had become “watercooler issues.” Americans who did not generally follow current events were captivated by the mass protests and closely tracked what Obama was doing in response. The President had been reticent when Iran’s “Green Revolution” erupted in 2009, fearing that offering his vocal support would allow the Iranian government to caricature protesters as American-backed agents. With Libya, however, Obama was forceful. To convince Qaddafi that he should negotiate his political exit, he directed Donilon to get US government agencies to identify sources of leverage over the Libyan leader.

  Everything we knew about Qaddafi’s personality suggested that he cared passionately about his worldly possessions. If he believed his wealth was endangered, we thought, he might stop the violence and step aside, following in the footsteps of the Tunisian and Egyptian leaders. Moving quickly, we froze $37 billion of Qaddafi’s assets in the United States, while our NATO allies froze an additional $30 billion.

  We then rallied the world to take steps to pressure the Libyan regime. The Arab League—the main regional organization for Arab nations—suspended Libya as a member, even though it was then serving as its chair. The UN General Assembly also suspended Libya from the Human Rights Council (where it should never have been elected a member in the first place), and called an emergency session to establish a commission that would investigate Libyan war crimes. The fifty-seven-country Organization of Islamic Cooperation likewise condemned Qaddafi’s “excessive use of force” for creating “a humanitarian disaster.”

  A powerful voice during this period was Libya’s own ambassador to the UN, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgham. A longtime re
gime loyalist, Shalgham defected to join the opposition because he was horrified by Qaddafi’s brutality. In an extraordinary scene, while sitting behind Libya’s UN placard, he pleaded with the world to stop his president.

  “Please, United Nations, save Libya,” he begged. “No to bloodshed. No to the killing of innocents.” Libya’s deputy ambassador, who had defected several days before Shalgham, sat behind his boss in tears.

  Less than two weeks after the protests had begun, the United States led a unanimous Security Council in imposing an arms embargo and economic sanctions on the Qaddafi regime. The Council also referred the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed in Libya to the ICC. I had worked with Susan and her team in New York to refine the elements of the far-reaching resolution. When it passed in such record speed, I thought it was probably the best example in history of governments hastily using a vast array of “tools in the toolbox” to try to deter atrocities. The resolution was also notable for uniting countries like China, Russia, Germany, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States on a complex issue of international security—a rarity in geopolitics.

  The overall solidarity among nations reflected sincere horror at Qaddafi’s murderous crackdown, but it also highlighted the Libyan leader’s international isolation, which predated the Arab Spring. Qaddafi had funded insurgencies and supported terrorism in innumerable countries. He had also lied to or insulted a remarkably large number of heads of state. He was unique in having virtually no friends who would stand up for him. Not China. Not Russia. Not his fellow autocrats in the Arab world.

  We hoped that in light of this global unity, Qaddafi would reconsider his bloody endgame and elect to negotiate an end to the crisis.* But at no point did the Libyan leader take genuine steps toward a peaceful resolution.