The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  On the other hand, President Obama knew that the American people were exhausted from a decade of war.17 Although Republicans were denouncing him as weak for not stopping Qaddafi, they seemed likely to oppose whatever he did.

  He had to weigh this context—and a set of unknowable reactions—against the risks of protracted siege warfare and possible slaughter.

  “I want real options,” Obama said, wrapping up. “If we are in for a dime, we are in for a dollar. I’m not going to do some half-assed no-fly zone. To me, that’s the worst option. Either we go in heavy and fast or we should not pretend we are serious about stopping Qaddafi.”

  He asked a smaller group—mainly his cabinet and not including backbenchers like me—to reassemble later that evening, when he would choose among those real options.

  SUSAN CALLED ME AROUND ELEVEN P.M. that night. President Obama had decided to try to prevent the fall of Benghazi and other opposition-held towns. He had instructed her to see whether she could get a resolution through the Security Council to license coercive steps to protect civilians. If she could not achieve this, he made clear that the United States would not intervene militarily.

  I worked into the early morning with Susan and her team. They drafted new provisions to supplement what the British and the French were already proposing, and I ran the new language by my colleagues and bosses at the NSC. The next day, Susan formally circulated an American draft resolution to the Council with the US revisions clearly marked on the British-French draft in Track Changes. The new American language would “authorize Member States . . . to take all necessary measures . . . to protect civilians and civilian populated areas.”

  Susan made sure her fellow ambassadors understood what this meant. “This is an authorization to use force not only against airplanes attacking civilians,” she stressed. “It is also an authorization to use military force against ground forces targeting civilians.”

  The text of our resolution was not original—similar provisions had been used to set up the UN-declared no-fly zone in Bosnia back in 1993 and to authorize the use of force in Afghanistan in 2001. Some of the countries that would vote in favor of, or abstain on, this “all necessary measures” resolution would later claim that they were surprised and even outraged to see the US-led military coalition go beyond imposing a no-fly zone. But they were either lying to the world or to themselves.

  The entire US government mobilized to urge countries with seats on the Security Council to support the revised text, which was sponsored not only by the United States, the UK, and France, but also by Lebanon on behalf of the Arab League. Still, we all knew that Russia’s vote would be decisive.* A Russian abstention would allow the resolution to go forward, but Moscow had never been enthusiastic about licensing Western countries to use military force for ostensibly humanitarian purposes.

  Meanwhile, even as it became apparent that the Security Council was seriously considering authorizing military action to protect civilians, Qaddafi announced that his forces were preparing to seize Benghazi. In the hours before the UN vote was scheduled, with his troops and militia massing just ninety miles south of the city, the Libyan leader took to the radio with a warning to residents: “It is over; the decision has been made. We are coming.” To the opposition fighters, he said, “We will find you in your closets. We will have no mercy and no pity.”

  Around midnight in Libya—six p.m. New York time—on March 17th, thousands of Libyans gathered in Benghazi’s main square, gazing up at jumbo video screens tuned to live coverage of the Security Council’s vote. People were focused so intently on the UN session that when I visited Libya with Susan months later, many of those we met could recall the lime green outfit she had been wearing in the Council chamber. As one Libyan described it to me, for the crowd in the square, the question being posed to the international community was: “Raise your hand if you want to prevent the massacre of Libyans.”

  When ten of the fifteen hands on the Security Council were lifted in favor of the resolution, the people packed into the square erupted into loud applause. When five countries—Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Russia—abstained immediately thereafter, people jeered and threw their shoes at the screens. But once they understood that no country had vetoed and thus the resolution had passed, the crowd again began cheering wildly. The celebrations lasted deep into the night, as people honked their car horns and waved Libya’s flag from the pre-Qaddafi era.

  On March 19th, the United States, France, and the UK began striking Libyan military targets, acting under the umbrella of NATO, in a coalition that included Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar. Benghazi and other opposition-held towns in Libya would not be allowed to fall into regime hands.

  The week after the Security Council approved the resolution, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin began publicly blaming President Dmitry Medvedev for Russia’s abstention.* Medvedev, however, had almost certainly coordinated with Putin before sending instructions not to veto to the Russian Ambassador at the UN. In truth, the world was broadly united in taking military action to protect Libyan civilians. As Medvedev himself told journalists just after Putin criticized him, “the consequences of this decision [to abstain] were obvious. It would be wrong for us to start flapping about now and say that we didn’t know what we were doing . . . everything that is happening in Libya is a result of the Libyan leadership’s absolutely intolerable behavior and the crimes that they have committed against their own people.”

  On March 28th, President Obama delivered a prime-time address to explain US military action in Libya. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries,” he said. “The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

  The United States had helped orchestrate the fastest and broadest international response to an impending human rights crisis in history.

  BECAUSE OF MY JOURNALISTIC CAREER, and my resignation from the Obama campaign, I had a modest public profile before I went to work at the NSC. However, knowing which side of the government’s “work horse/show horse” divide I wanted to fall on, I had kept my head down. In my days before government, Eddie had responded to lukewarm reviews of my books with the old saying, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.” My view about serving at the White House was that there was no such thing as good publicity. I wanted to stay below the public radar and focus on doing my job.

  Unfortunately, after Obama decided to use force to protect Libyan civilians, the New York Times offered a bizarre rendition of the key March 15th meeting in the Situation Room. The Times effectively attributed Obama’s decision to “three women”: Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, both cabinet members, and me—a backbencher. The article failed to mention the fact that a far larger number of men than women argued for using force, and it depicted Obama as a mere vessel for his female advisers’ designs.

  Times columnist Maureen Dowd drew on her paper’s news story for an opinion piece titled “Fight of the Valkyries,” which began: “They are called the Amazon Warriors, the Lady Hawks, the Valkyries, the Durgas. There is something positively mythological about a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war.” Conservative commentators had a field day, with Rush Limbaugh mocking the President and the men in the room as “sissies.” Because of this coverage, journalists began writing profiles of me, making me want to disappear under the flowerbeds of the Rose Garden.

  Even though I had been one of the people who recommended the course of action President Obama had ultimately chosen, I was conflicted about American military involvement. I was relieved beyond measure that Libyans had been granted a reprieve from Qaddafi’s wrath. But I was simultaneously anxious about the many ways the military operation could go wrong, and I hoped that Obama would not regret his decision.

  Five years before, during one of our many talks in his Senat
e office, Obama had noted: “You’re not nearly as hawkish as people think you are.” This was true. I had favored the use of American air power when I lived in Bosnia, and opposed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. As an NSC official, I participated in hundreds of policy debates about countless countries and global problems, and I almost never recommended using US military force.

  I had seen the good that the US air campaign had done in Bosnia, effectively ending a horrific conflict. But I also knew the history of the Vietnam and Iraq wars and was familiar with how little US government officials sometimes knew about the foreign places and peoples whose fates their decisions would impact. As a young foreign service officer in Vietnam, Richard Holbrooke had clipped and shared a Peanuts cartoon strip showing a disconsolate Charlie Brown after his baseball team was thumped 184-0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”18 I used to muse over the fact that American political consultants who were paid millions of dollars to predict the behavior of the American electorate still frequently got their forecasts wrong—and they spoke English, talked to voters, and knew our history. Whatever our sincerity, we could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own.

  It was especially hard to know what dormant tendencies lay buried in a society where, for decades, the “Brother Leader” had sought to control even the thoughts of citizens. The Libyan opposition spoke of creating a constitution and an open society, but even if Qaddafi left power, who would maintain order going forward? Since Qaddafi had demolished Libya’s institutions, how would the country function without a strongman at the top?

  Despite these considerations, neither at the time nor presently do I see how we could have rejected the appeals of our closest European allies, the Arab League, and a large number of Libyans, including the Libyan ambassador to the UN, and stood by as Qaddafi followed through on his pledge to retake Benghazi and “cleanse” people, house by house. Still, every day of the spring and then summer of 2011 that the conflict dragged on, I worried about how the Libyan transitional authorities would manage the future.

  ASSESSMENTS OF PRESIDENT OBAMA’S ACTIONS in Libya often assume that, had he made a different set of choices and not intervened, Qaddafi could have returned the country to more or less the way it had functioned before the protests and crackdown. What this view fails to take into account is the fact that Libyans had minds of their own.

  Unlike in Egypt, where students played a leading role in toppling the Mubarak government, former government officials and defectors from Libya’s security and armed forces helped drive the opposition movement in Libya. They were a determined, heterogeneous network that held territory and established transitional governments in towns that came under their control. Additionally, countries in the region flooded Libya with weapons and military equipment in support of various opposition factions, making them even harder for Qaddafi to snuff out. Although the Libyan regime had decisive military advantages over the opposition, the seeds for a long-term insurgency had been planted before the UN Security Council authorized the use of force to protect civilians.

  Had the United States taken no further action beyond the sanctions, arms embargo, and other nonmilitary measures initially approved by the Security Council, no one can say with confidence what would have happened. Qaddafi seemed almost certain to commence an assault on Benghazi and enter into a long fight to retake and hold other areas. He probably would have retained power without regaining complete control of his vast country, which is roughly four times the size of California. At the same time, some opposition forces could have teamed up with extremist financiers and arms suppliers outside Libya, deepening the chaos. This very scenario would soon unfold in Syria.

  Had this occurred, many US intelligence analysts predicted that, since Qaddafi viewed Western governments’ call for his departure as a betrayal, he would return to sponsoring terrorism as he had in the past. US counterterrorism experts therefore worried both about who would come after Qaddafi if he fell and about a bloody insurgency and a surge in terrorism if he remained.

  In other words, from their vantage point, Libya was unlikely to become stable anytime soon.

  Subsequent criticisms of President Obama’s decision-making during this period that fail to grapple with these dynamics do not present a realistic picture of the factors driving his thinking. What transpired in Libya in February and March of 2011 had fundamentally changed the country. Once the revolution spread, the real question became how to use the tools at our disposal to bring about the best possible—or the least bad—outcome.

  OVER THE NEXT SEVEN MONTHS, the joint NATO-Arab coalition did what it could from the air to protect Libyan civilians. Unfortunately, instead of ceasing their attacks, Qaddafi and his forces hung on, continuing to bombard populated areas. Most alarmingly, despite efforts by the UN, the African Union, and the White House itself (which sent a diplomatic delegation to meet with Qaddafi’s key advisers), the Libyan leader did not credibly engage in discussions aimed at ending the war.19

  The most consoling voice I heard during this period was that of Chris Stevens, a senior US diplomat whom Clinton had posted in Benghazi as a liaison to the Libyan opposition. Chris spoke Arabic and had served in Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. From 2007 to 2009, he had been the second in command at the US embassy in Libya.

  Chris and a small team of aides arrived in Libya on a Greek cargo ship not long after NATO began bombing. They fanned out, meeting with everyone from former Qaddafi-era officials who had defected, to lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, and volunteer soldiers. Chris reported that Libyans were exuberant about building a new, free country. He sent emails and cables back to Washington about the opposition radio and television stations and the human rights and women’s rights organizations that were sprouting up all over “liberated” territory. These dispatches practically crackled with the energy and optimism of those enjoying freedom for the first time.

  When I met Chris on his occasional visits to Washington, I was struck by how special his brand of diplomacy was. A native Californian and former Peace Corps volunteer with a toothy smile, he gave off the feeling of someone who knew that he could learn more from backpacking through an area than meeting with dignitaries. Libya seemed to be not just a country where Chris had been posted; it was a place that he was making his home. He was also refreshingly willing to admit all that he didn’t know—that none of us could know—about what went on in the minds of Libyans who had been locked under repressive rule for generations.

  On August 20th, 2011, Libyans in Tripoli rose up against Qaddafi, breaking a months-long military stalemate and marking the overthrow of the repressive government.20 I was at home with Declan, who was nearly two and a half years old. “Qaddafi is gone!” I told him, somewhat amazed.

  My young son began marching around our apartment, shouting, “No more coffee! Coffee is gone!”

  IN JULY OF 2012, Libya successfully held its first democratic election in nearly fifty years, with many Libyans enthusiastically flashing their ink-stained fingers in victory signs and embracing the election as a marker of the new country they hoped to build. Nonetheless, the post-Qaddafi political transition was already turning chaotic, and the country’s regional, tribal, and religious* divisions were becoming more pronounced. Qaddafi himself had been brutally executed by a group of rebels near his hometown of Sirte two months after Tripoli fell to the opposition, and this proved a harbinger of the lawlessness and violence that would follow.

  During our calls and meetings over many months, Chris’s main focus was always on the need for Libyans to establish physical security. But police who had served in the Qaddafi government were largely vacating their posts, and local militias were filling the vacuum. Chris threw US support behind a nascent Libyan opposition council that tried to bring those fragmented forces under central control. But countries in the region that had supported various oppositio
n factions during the rebellion against Qaddafi went on funneling arms into the country, urging their proxies to fight for more power.

  When President Obama had decided to use military force to protect civilians in Libya, he stressed that he did not want US involvement to morph into an open-ended commitment akin to what had happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because the United States had spearheaded and led the military coalition, he expected our European allies to take the lead on helping Libyans manage the aftermath. In communicating this, Obama sent an unintentional signal to his senior national security team that he felt the United States had already done its share.

  Perhaps no amount of outside engagement during this period could have counteracted Libya’s centrifugal forces. However, once it became clear that European efforts to shore up the transition were falling short, the US government could have exerted more aggressive, high-level pressure on Libya’s neighbors to back a unified political structure and cease their support for the competing opposition factions.*

  Instead, in September of 2012, after terrorists attacked US facilities in Benghazi, our administration shrank further from engagement in Libya. The attacks killed Chris, whom I had so admired, along with Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods (two security officers working for the CIA), and the State Department’s Sean Smith. Following their deaths, Libyans flooded the streets in solidarity, carrying signs with messages like CHRIS STEVENS WAS A FRIEND TO ALL LIBYANS, WE’RE SORRY, and THUGS AND KILLERS DON’T REPRESENT BENGHAZI OR ISLAM. But President Obama’s political opponents reacted not by rallying behind the pursuit of the perpetrators, but by politicizing the attack.

  And in Libya, despite the severe downturn in security, citizens seemed able to agree on just one thing: there should be no international military or police presence in their country. Libyans should determine the country’s future, they all said. And for better and worse, in the coming months and years, they would.