The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  Putin went further, rejecting the overwhelming evidence linking Assad’s regime to the attack, which he called “utter nonsense.” I brought US intelligence experts to the US Mission to share what we had gathered with other countries so they could judge for themselves. I invited ambassadors from key countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa to hear the grisly, voluminous details.

  To those prepared to review the facts—a practice that had already begun its sharp decline around the world—Assad’s regime was clearly responsible. The Syrian government was widely known to have a sophisticated chemical weapons program. Only professionals had the know-how to mix the chemical agents, fill the munitions, and strike so many opposition neighborhoods in such quick succession. The rockets used in the Damascus gas attack were used regularly by the regime and had never been seen in the possession of the Syrian opposition. Tracers from the rockets indicated that they had been launched from regime territory. Our intercepted communications revealed a senior Syrian official discussing the regime’s responsibility for the attack.28 And, of course, not a single person in regime-held territory appeared to have been injured or killed.

  Put another way, a ragtag opposition would have had to acquire the chemical agents, the mixing expertise, and the surface-to-surface rockets capable of carrying sarin gas; then these opposition fighters would have had to move all of this across an impenetrable front line into regime territory so as to target their neighbors and family members back in the areas where they lived.

  Despite the plethora of hard evidence, most foreign ambassadors ducked the question of who had used chemical weapons. Exasperated, I argued at a closed meeting of the Security Council, “I know the Earth is round, not flat, but I haven’t personally traveled to the edge of the Earth to see if it ends abruptly. At a certain point, unless you have a reason for wanting not to believe—because you are a patron of the perpetrators or because you don’t want to get in the bad books of President Putin—you would accept the overwhelming evidence.”

  At one point, after listening to the lead UN inspector talking clinically about the “tissue samples” his team had gathered around Damascus, I tried to bring the Council back into reality. “A sample is part of a human being,” I said, by now beyond furious at the refusal of countries to take a stand.

  “If we can’t come together over this,” I asked, struggling to keep a steady voice, “what will move us?”

  I took to railing against those who condemned the sarin attack in the passive voice. “For a crime of this magnitude,” I argued before representatives of the other 192 countries in the General Assembly, “it is not enough to say ‘chemical weapons were used’—any more than it would have been enough to say that ‘machetes were used’ in Rwanda in 1994. We must condemn the user.”

  Yet to this day, most countries have avoided pointing the finger at the Syrian regime.

  LIKE THE PRESIDENT’S ENTIRE SENIOR TEAM, I was given a list of senators and representatives to call as part of the effort to whip votes on the Hill.

  Democrats wanted to support Obama personally, but they were afraid that voters would not back even a limited mission in Syria. Many began our calls by expressing remorse over the vote they had taken in 2002 to authorize the Iraq War. One Democratic House member informed me that she had received 2,400 constituent calls against air strikes in Syria, and just 60 in support. Tellingly, several Democrats plaintively asked, “Why did the President come to us?”

  Because Congress was on recess, many representatives were in their districts, hearing directly from constituents. I connected with Democratic senator Al Franken, who told me that “the first, second, and third questions” he was getting from Minnesotans were all on Syria. “People are really frightened of another war,” Franken reported.

  When I spoke to John Boozman, a Republican senator from Arkansas, he said, “I understand the problem with the gas and all that, and we are a hawkish state.” But he added, “I can’t find anyone in Arkansas supportive of this, and I have been all over.”

  The White House was hearing these same concerns and growing alarmed about the prospects for securing congressional approval. Seeking to shore up support among Democrats, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough asked me to make the progressive case for Obama’s plan at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. Carried live on multiple networks, I knew the speech would be the most watched that I had ever delivered.

  I discarded the draft remarks that the White House provided, writing feverishly through the night before I was scheduled to speak. To the degree that I had always had a principle at the heart of my advocacy, it was simple: meet people where they are. As an administration, we had to directly address the very reasonable concerns Americans were raising and not simply talk about children frothing at the mouth, as if their suffering in and of itself should trigger military action.

  I did not view America’s responsibilities in the world in such simplistic terms. Like President Obama, I cared above all about consequences. I believed that the most important part of decision-making was not the justness of one’s intentions but the effectiveness of one’s actions. We had to have very strict criteria for employing military force—but in this circumstance, I felt that the criteria had been met.

  In my remarks, I addressed the ambivalence that I knew people felt:

  On the one hand, we Americans share a desire, after two wars, which have taken 6,700 American lives and cost over $1 trillion, to invest taxpayer dollars in American schools and infrastructure. Yet on the other hand, Americans have heard the President’s commitment that this will not be Iraq, this will not be Afghanistan, this will not be Libya. Any use of force will be limited and tailored narrowly to the chemical weapons threat.

  On the one hand, we share an abhorrence for the brutal, murderous tactics of Bashar al-Assad. Yet on the other hand, we are worried about the violent extremists who, while opposed to Assad, have themselves carried out atrocities.

  On the one hand, we share the deep conviction that chemical weapons are barbaric, that we should never again see children killed in their beds, lost to a world that they never had a chance to try to change. Yet on the other hand, some are wondering why—given the flagrant violation of an international norm—it is incumbent on the United States to lead, since we cannot and should not be the world’s policeman.

  I closed by stating as plainly as possible what was at stake:

  We all have a choice to make. Whether we are Republicans or Democrats, whether we have supported past military interventions or opposed them, whether we have argued for or against such action in Syria prior to this point, we should agree that there are lines in this world that cannot be crossed, and limits on murderous behavior, especially with weapons of mass destruction, that must be enforced.

  By taking skeptics’ arguments seriously, my speech made a strong case for Obama’s plan. But I convinced few people.

  For some, like Arizona senator John McCain, Obama’s proposed action was too mild to deter Assad. “How can military strikes be limited and enough?” he wanted to know.

  But his was a minority view. While Syrian Americans tried to rally support for Obama’s initiative, most other Americans wanted no part of Syria. The student activists, civic groups, churches, mosques, and synagogues that had come out en masse to demand help for the people of Darfur were largely silent.

  With each passing day, outrage faded over the images of Syria’s dead. In its place, domestic and international concerns about the potential fallout from US military action increased. On September 5th, the Washington Post published a whip count that found “more than four times as many opponents of military action in the House as supporters.”

  Based on all the available evidence, President Obama realized there was no point in going forward with a congressional vote to authorize strikes. We were clearly going to lose in the House, perhaps by a sizable margin, and we would possibly lose in the Senate as well.* Yet the Commander in Chief of the world�
�s largest superpower had told the world that Assad’s egregious slaughter of civilians demanded a forceful response.

  With no Plan B, we were in deep trouble.

  ON SEPTEMBER 6TH, a boxed-in Obama met with Putin on the sidelines of a large global gathering in St. Petersburg. During their private talk, Obama raised the possibility of the US and Russia working together to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons program.

  Putin appeared receptive to the idea, but most of us thought he was feigning interest. While our non-proliferation experts had held technical talks with Russian specialists on what the US and Russian governments could do to prevent terrorists from seizing Assad’s chemical weapons, Moscow had shown no appetite for dismantling the program itself. Now, Putin and his advisers knew from both the US media and their own diplomatic reporting that Congress was not going to authorize bombing. They could have achieved their objective of forestalling American military action by just letting US domestic politics play out to their inevitable conclusion.

  On September 9th, John Kerry gave voice to this skepticism about the prospects for destroying Syria’s chemical weapons. At a press conference in London, a reporter asked him whether Assad could do anything to avert US bombing. “Sure,” Kerry ad-libbed, still clinging to the hope that Obama might order the strikes. “[Assad] could turn over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay . . . But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

  Yet just a few hours later, to Kerry’s great surprise, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov called him. Having heard the Secretary of State’s public comments, Putin had asked Lavrov to follow up to say he was, in fact, willing to work with Obama to rid Assad of his chemical weapons. Within four days, Kerry and Lavrov had negotiated the contours of a framework for how the chemical weapons program could be dismantled.

  I was then handed the task of negotiating a UN Security Council resolution with Russia’s Ambassador to the UN. We had to map out a massive, unprecedented operation and get the world on board.

  WHEN I MET WITH SUSAN before taking on my new role in New York, she had conveyed one message more firmly than any other: my relationship with Russia’s UN representative would be pivotal to my success.

  “Invest in Churkin,” she advised. “He will drive you crazy, but you will need each other.”

  Vitaly Churkin, then sixty-one, with a tuft of white hair and a hearty laugh, had already been permanent representative at the UN for seven years. He knew the organization’s rules and procedures better than anyone—and he was famous among UN diplomats for using that mastery to Russia’s advantage.

  For two weeks following the Kerry–Lavrov agreement, Vitaly and I spoke or met multiple times a day about the chemical weapons resolution—at the US Mission, at the Russian Mission, and on neutral ground. Our negotiations were being so closely watched that reporters and cameras hounded us wherever we went, looking for signs of a collapse in talks that could somehow result in Obama going ahead with military strikes.

  I knew all that could go wrong and all that depended on these negotiations. I expected the bats to descend. But they never came.

  I felt confident. I was representing my country on an essential issue. Although I had never negotiated with Vitaly before, as an NSC staffer I had carefully tracked Susan’s clashes and compromises with him. I was backed by incredibly experienced US non-proliferation officials and lawyers who were available to answer my every operational and Syria-specific question. And Susan and Kerry were just a phone call away.

  I knew that in spite of the twists and turns of my first month, we still had a chance to exact a penalty for the Assad regime’s monstrous war crime and perhaps prevent similar attacks in the future. I regretted that our administration had not ascertained whether we had the votes before the President announced he was going to Congress. Had he known he would fail, I did not believe he would have chosen the path he did. But we were where we were: if we could rid Assad of one especially deadly weapon, I thought, maybe it would dent his confidence and make him more amenable to political negotiations.

  As Vitaly and I sized each other up, we also had to navigate our respective systems. Since Putin’s primary objective was preventing US military intervention, I knew that Moscow was carefully vetting every provision I put forward, fearing the US government would later stretch the meaning of the UN resolution’s language to claim an international legal basis for using force.

  For our part, we remained deeply distrustful of Moscow’s intentions. How could we possibly end up with a reliable agreement when Russian officials continued to push the preposterous claim that the opposition had carried out the chemical attacks? Wouldn’t the Syrian government, which had just gassed 1,400 people without remorse, cheat on whatever we agreed to—and do so with Russia’s assistance?

  The negotiations were painstaking, with both of us laboriously insisting on word changes to close loopholes that one of us saw and the other insisted did not exist. The mutual suspicions ran so deep that I was reminded of a story about the contentious talks during the nineteenth-century Congress of Vienna. After the Austrian diplomat Metternich was awakened with news that an ambassador he had been sparring with had died in the night, Metternich reportedly asked, “What can have been his motive?”

  Sometimes, when one of us refused to budge or seemed not to be taking the concerns of the other seriously, our conversations grew heated. On several occasions, Vitaly dramatically slammed shut his leather briefcase and stormed out of our negotiation, muttering what I assume were Russian swear words. Once, he returned sheepishly after a few minutes, saying, “Well, now that I got that out of my system, how about a drink?” A member of his staff then appeared with a large bottle of Black Label whiskey. I wondered whether Vitaly was employing some time-tested Russian tactic where the same negotiator played both the good and bad cop.

  We suffered many setbacks. One day when I arrived at the Russian Mission, Vitaly told me he had “good news and bad news.” The good news was that, after a delay, he had finally received instructions from Moscow on how to respond to the provisions I had proposed. The bad news, he said, was that “if I follow my instructions, you will never talk to me again.”

  Meanwhile, I went from being barely available to my family to disappearing entirely during the two weeks of negotiations. As I tried to sneak out of the Waldorf early one Sunday morning for a standoff with Vitaly, Declan grabbed me before I made it out the door. “Más,” he said, using the Spanish he had learned from María to indicate he needed “more.”

  “Mommy, people don’t work on Sundays,” he insisted.

  I told him I was going to try to stop people from doing bad things. He seemed satisfied, asking “Will you come back after you stop them?”

  I nodded, but on the short, quiet drive to the US Mission, I shuddered at the inadequacy of the effort to which I was devoting every ounce of my being.

  “If we do everything right, Assad will have one less weapon,” I thought.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described the importance of being able “to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,” while still retaining “the ability to function.” I was quickly becoming practiced at this discomfiting balance. I wanted desperately to get chemical weapons out of Assad’s hands and to uphold the norm against their use. Yet I knew that accomplishing this would not be a “victory” for most Syrians.

  DURING THESE NEGOTIATIONS, I had the chance to work closely with John Kerry for the first time. He had already represented Massachusetts in the US Senate for ten years by the time I moved to the Boston area for law school, and I had crossed paths with him at Harvard events and Red Sox games over the years. I had also watched him in action when I worked in Obama’s Senate office, as they both served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But I could never have predicted the warmth he would show me as his colleague.

  The relationship between UN ambassadors and secretari
es of state is often quite tense. Strain inevitably arises from the fact that a UN ambassador’s cabinet role technically gives him or her a vote equal to the Secretary of State’s on matters of national security, despite the fact that the Secretary manages 276 diplomatic posts around the world and more than 70,000 personnel, while the UN ambassador runs the equivalent of one small embassy in New York.29

  Fortunately, Kerry had one overriding objective in his role as Secretary of State: get as much done as humanly possible to prevent and end wars. He would later call his memoir Every Day Is Extra, quoting a phrase he and his buddies who survived the war in Vietnam used to say to one another. He acted as if each day in his job could be the last, and he seemed to see me as an ally with a similar mind-set. Once he had latched onto something, getting him to let go was almost impossible. This relentlessness was an enormous asset.

  Since he had negotiated the initial chemical weapons framework with Lavrov, Kerry was hugely invested in my discussions with Vitaly. He called half a dozen times a day, usually asking “What’s up?” before I detailed the state of play and we strategized about next steps.

  At one important juncture, he became livid when I explained that Russia was playing a self-serving game of diplomatic telephone, with Vitaly quoting Lavrov saying that Kerry had agreed that our resolution would not be binding under international law.

  “That’s utter horseshit, Sam!” he boomed over the phone, “and I’m happy to call Sergey and give him hell.”

  I said I knew it was rubbish and that there was no need for him to engage. But Kerry being Kerry, he called back fifteen minutes later, informing me “I just read Sergey the riot act.”

  Between his first call and unexpected second call, I had begun nursing Rían, and she was an audible eater.

  “What’s that noise?” Kerry asked suddenly.

  My cheeks flushed. Even though he couldn’t see me, I felt as though he could, and it was not a pretty picture. The receiver on the secure phone was jammed under my right ear, Rían was draped across my bare chest, and I had a pen in hand.