The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  As we got closer to the date of the speech, the lobbying grew more intense. I was asked to sit down with Lee Rosenberg, one of the leaders of AIPAC, who had been a fundraiser for Obama’s campaign. Rosy, as he was called, wanted to make sure we weren’t breaking new ground in our support for the Palestinians, or indicating that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the root of all problems in the Middle East. He then implored me to call on the Muslim world to recognize Israel “as a Jewish state.” This was a formal position that the United States had not yet taken, as it would be a signal that millions of Palestinian refugees will not have the right to return to Israel as part of a peace agreement. I sat there and took his request on board, assuring him that we were breaking no new ground in our support for the Palestinians. The Israelis were by far the stronger party in the conflict, but we were acting as if it was the reverse.

  One final decision was whether Obama should travel to Israel after going to Cairo. Given the concern about not wanting the speech to be seen solely through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we decided not to go. Ironically, we would be criticized for years by Netanyahu’s supporters for that decision, even though it was responsive to their concerns. Indeed, this established a pattern—a post facto criticism of Obama for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, which ignored the fact that he wasn’t doing anything tangible for the Palestinians and which absolved Israel’s own government for its failure to take any meaningful steps toward peace.

  By the time we took off for Saudi Arabia, the stop that came before Cairo, Obama had given me a speech draft that was covered in handwritten edits—in the margins, on the backs of pages, on torn-off pages from a legal pad. He was frustrated by the flood of edits that watered down points he wanted to make. “I’m not going to fly all the way to Cairo to give this speech and then whiff,” he told me tersely. Axe worried that the speech didn’t have a headline and was too theoretical for an American audience. While my colleagues slept all around me on the overnight flight, I stayed up, the glow from my laptop illuminating the small handwriting on Obama’s marked-up pages in front of me. The anxiety I felt at working on a speech that would be carefully parsed around the world was eclipsed by a confidence that Obama was making the speech better, and that his heavy editing could serve as a justification to ignore the stream of notes that continued to flood my in-box.

  When we landed, we went to one of the many compounds owned by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah. It was laid out like an Arizona subdivision, complete with golf carts that transported you to identical housing units amid the rolling desert. When I opened the door to my unit, I found a large suitcase. Inside were jewels. In my sleep-deprived state, I thought that maybe this gift represented some kind of bribe to the person writing the Cairo speech, until I heard from others who had received the same suitcase. You’re not allowed to keep these gifts unless you are willing to reimburse their cost, which ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. I took a nap while Obama met with the king. Later that night, I joined him as he recapped the day. He was irritated. The Saudis had let him down, refusing to take Gitmo detainees and holding back on a peace gesture with Israel. He passed me some more edits to the speech and I stayed up late working through them in a staff office that was in a large, ornate room with heavy curtains and thronelike chairs. Obama came in shortly before midnight to talk through a few sections with me and Denis McDonough.

  “There’s a lot of discomfort with using the word ‘occupation,’ ” I said, referring to the edits to the Israel section that continued to come through.

  “What else are we supposed to call it?” he asked.

  We ended up affirming our “unbreakable” bond with Israel, calling Holocaust denial “baseless, ignorant, and hateful,” and declaring that “threatening Israel with destruction—or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews—is deeply wrong.” We tried to balance this with language that spoke to “the daily humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation,” and saying “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.”

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  —

  THE NEXT MORNING WE flew into Cairo, descending over a sprawl of low-rise housing and empty roads. On the way in from the airport, Egyptian security forces stood with their backs to the motorcade, uniformed men only a few paces from each other for miles. There were no people on the street in one of the most crowded cities in the world. Thousands of uniformed personnel had been ordered to face away from the cars, looking out into the distance, searching for anyone who might pose a threat.

  The speech was being given at Cairo University, and I waited with Obama in a nondescript hold room as the audience was seated. “This speech is going to raise expectations,” he said.

  “I think we were pretty careful in saying that a speech isn’t going to solve all these problems,” I replied.

  “Yes.” He paused. “You know, Bush’s second inaugural is a great speech, but you can’t just promise to ‘end tyranny’ in the world.” He let the thought hang in the air; he’d just met with Mubarak, a tyrant who had ruled Egypt for decades. “The language is great,” he added. “It’s probably Bush’s best speech.”

  “I think we landed in a good place,” I said.

  “I hope nobody throws a shoe at me,” he said.

  I felt imprisoned in my chair, which was on a balcony along the wall. But as soon as Obama opened with “Assalamu alaikum,” the audience erupted in cheers, and I felt the tension recede. We had selected a crowd that mixed secular activists, intellectuals, political leaders, clerics, women’s rights activists, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. All of the factions who would fight it out in the streets of Cairo a few years later were represented in one room, cheering for the parts of the speech they liked—the clerics applauding Obama’s defense of a woman’s right to wear a hijab in the United States; activists yelling “We love you” when he spoke about democracy; women cheering when he talked about a society needing to unleash the potential of its girls.

  After the speech was over, we flew by helicopter to the Pyramids. “I think that went okay,” Obama told me. For an hour, we got a private tour of the ancient monuments that dot the desert on the outskirts of Cairo’s sprawl—crawling through small chambers, squinting at ancient words chiseled into the walls, looking at the sarcophagi of pharaohs. As we posed for pictures, we had a remarkable sense of privacy; there were no other people in sight. Mubarak had set a broad security perimeter, a gesture that spoke to his power—one authoritarian leader inviting his American patron to tour the tombs of his long-dead authoritarian predecessors, structures with far more permanence than words.

  In the years to come, I’d get asked again and again how I felt about the Cairo speech, especially as Islam and the West—and Islam and modernity—continued to be in tension. Touring the Pyramids that day, though, I knew that it wasn’t the kind of speech that could be measured against the state of the world at any one particular moment. It expressed what Obama believed and where he wanted to go, the world that should be. In writing the speech, and over the course of the trip, we’d seen the forces aligned against that outcome: the contradictions of American foreign policy; the corruption of Saudi Arabia; the repression in Egypt; the extremist forces lurking just out of sight; the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  Years later, after Obama left office, I ran into a Palestinian-born woman whom I knew casually. She said she’d never forgotten the Cairo speech, which she connected to the initial protests of the Arab Spring. I said that that was assigning too much responsibility to a speech. “It wasn’t the speech,” she said. “It was him. The young people saw him, a black man as president of America, someone who looked like them. And they thought, why not me?”

  CHAPTER 6

  OBAMA’S WAR

  When Obama took office, we had been at war in Afghanistan for seven years—longer than our engagement in the Revolution, the Civil War, World War I
, or World War II. And yet, because he had supported the war in Afghanistan and called for “two additional combat brigades” during the campaign, the media started calling Afghanistan “Obama’s War” shortly after he became president. The phrase always bothered me. It struck me as a prime example of how Washington looked at something as morally consequential as a war and turned it into a political drama.

  During his first year in office, there was an inexorable demand for Obama to pour more troops into Afghanistan. The stage had been set during the transition. The commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, had requested more than ten thousand additional troops in order to blunt the growing momentum of the Taliban insurgency—a request that the Bush administration left for Obama to fulfill. Obama approved McKiernan’s request in February, effectively fulfilling his campaign commitment. He had also ordered an initial review of our policy, resulting in the March 27 announcement, which emphasized that Afghanistan and Pakistan needed to be approached with a common strategy so that we could root out the terrorist sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border. But that review deferred a decision about whether to embrace a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, one that would require many more U.S. troops for a much longer time.

  Within the government—and the group of people who think, write, and talk about foreign policy—the debate about what to do in Afghanistan was becoming a proxy for a debate about what had gone wrong in Iraq. To Obama, the failure of the Iraq War was the decision to invade in the first place. To some supporters of the war, the results generated by a counterinsurgency strategy that involved putting more U.S. troops into the fight to secure the Iraqi population demonstrated that the problem in Iraq had been the strategy for fighting the war, not the war itself. But while dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq allowed Obama to become president, during his first year in office, our Afghanistan policy would be shaped in large part by people who embraced the indispensability of COIN.

  Bob Gates was exactly the right mix of competent, diligent, calculating, and occasionally hypocritical to thrive in Washington for decades. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he held a series of high-level positions at the CIA and on the NSC. When I worked with him on the Iraq Study Group, he was comfortably installed as president of Texas A&M University, home to the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, which had been significantly funded by wealthy Saudis and Kuwaitis grateful for America’s help during the Gulf War. In his trips to Washington, Gates arrived nearly thirty minutes early for each meeting—a habit that sent a message about his discipline. He would draw a cup of coffee into a Styrofoam cup, sit at an empty table, and flip through documents as he waited.

  As secretary of defense for the last two years of the Bush administration, Gates succeeded as an effective manager of the massive Pentagon apparatus. He also forged a close partnership with the commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who became a rock star within the Republican Party because of his willingness to be the public face of the war at a time when George W. Bush was an increasingly unpopular figure. Obama got along well with Gates, whose calm demeanor and clinical manner of speaking earned him the nickname Yoda. Obama felt he needed continuity at the Pentagon at a time when he was going to remove 150,000 American troops from Iraq and spend much of his early presidency averting a Great Depression. He also kept Petraeus, who had been promoted to head of Central Command (CENTCOM), the sprawling military region that included the Middle East and South Asia.

  Petraeus was a smart man who chose his words carefully. In 2009, he was at the height of his influence over the thinking that guided the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was so popular in some circles that he was mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate, though he volunteered to me more than once on the sidelines of Situation Room meetings that he had no interest in politics. In demeanor, he came across more as an academic than a politician, with carefully parted brown hair and a habit of delivering his advice in studious paragraphs that created word clouds around the PowerPoint slides in front of him.

  Hillary Clinton proved to be an effective manager of the State Department, combining tenacious support for her Foreign Service officers with an alert political antenna. She made a point of demonstrating her preparedness for meetings, showing up with thick binders of briefing materials that she would page through intermittently during discussions. Her curiosity led her in eclectic directions—on our first foreign trip together, she started a lengthy discussion with me about the need for the United States to pursue a more nuanced foreign policy toward the Arctic region, describing how thawing ice caps were initiating a competition for resources and affecting the movement of ships. On the wars, she often sided with the military—throughout 2009, she rarely took a position in an internal discussion about Iraq or Afghanistan that differed from Gates’s.

  Within the State Department, Richard Holbrooke had been named her Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP)—a position she created just for him. Holbrooke was a towering figure in the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment. He had forged a heroic narrative around his diplomatic prowess over three decades—from his time as a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam to his negotiation of the Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. While SRAP wasn’t the level of appointment he sought—he harbored a lifelong ambition to be secretary of state—he turned the office into an empire within the State Department, hiring a mix of accomplished academics and talented young acolytes who served as a deeply loyal cohort and kind of mini think tank.

  Having reached the pinnacle of his power in the 1990s—a high-water mark for American influence in the world—Holbrooke retained a persistent belief in the ability of the United States to shape events abroad, even in a region as war-torn, complex, and foreign as Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also reveled in the theater of being a leading diplomat. After one meeting, he guided me out of the State Department by the arm and—as if on cue—the mayor of Karachi stepped out of a car and the three of us huddled conspiratorially, Holbrooke reciting statistics about the city’s water supply as if it held the key to success in the AfPak region.

  The only senior official who consistently opposed sending more troops to Afghanistan was Joe Biden. As vice president, Biden floated in a unique space, somewhere above everyone else and below Obama, but without an agency like State or Defense to give him an independent power base in the government. At sixty-six, he was two decades older than Obama, and also embraced a more old-fashioned brand of politics—he’d walk through the hallways of the West Wing, stopping to talk to people, gripping your forearm and holding on to it while he spoke. Obama liked that Biden had an instinct for this brand of politics, and came to love him with the almost protective sense of devotion to an older family member.

  In the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile. Whereas Gates was stealthy in his bureaucratic maneuvering, Biden would go on long discourses about why it was foolish to think we could do anything more than kill terrorists in Afghanistan, and he solicited military advice outside the chain of command that prepared requests for more troops that would work their way up to Gates and, ultimately, Obama. He would pepper his comments with anecdotes from his long career in the Senate, repeatedly declaring that experience had taught him that “all foreign policy is an extension of personal relationships.” He learned the names of all the grandsons of the Iraqi Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani. He detested Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, and thought the U.S. military was jamming Obama.

  Amid this outsized cast of characters, the man who did the most to frame Obama’s Afghanistan decision in 2009 was General Stanley McChrystal, whom Gates installed as the war’s top general that May. The fifty-four-year-old McChrystal had a mythical reputation in the military. He helped to build America’s Special Operations capability in Iraq and Afghanistan—the elite troops who kicked down doors, captured or killed terrorists, and mapped insurgencies like doctors tracing the
spread of cancer within a patient’s body. He was surrounded by a tight cohort of loyal officers, including General Michael Flynn, who were more comfortable in the distant headquarters of a war zone than in Washington. If Petraeus was the polished, intellectual architect of a strategy that sought to secure Iraqi and Afghan neighborhoods, McChrystal was the fit field soldier who unwound by drinking Bud Light Lime and had spent years sharpening the tip of the spear.

  On September 21, 2009, I woke up to a Washington Post story by Bob Woodward that began, “The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year, and bluntly states that without them the eight-year conflict ‘will likely result in failure,’ according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by the Washington Post.” A flurry of other leaks revealed that McChrystal was seeking forty thousand to eighty thousand additional U.S. troops. All of us in the White House, including Obama, read about these things in the newspaper before the recommendations reached his desk. The brazen nature of the leaks left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. They were boxing Obama into sending troops into Afghanistan and setting him up to take the blame for any bad outcomes that followed if he didn’t—even though those outcomes were likely to happen anyway.

  Over the past several weeks, the pressure on Obama had already been building. The troops he’d sent into Afghanistan hadn’t made much difference, and the August elections led to credible allegations of massive voter fraud by the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai. Influential Republicans like John McCain were already calling for more resources to replicate the success of the surge in Iraq. A cult of personality was emerging around McChrystal, who had received a series of glowing profiles after his appointment—he was the savior who was going to salvage Afghanistan, just as Petraeus had done in Iraq. The stage was set for a Washington drama: Would the young antiwar president back or buck the advice of these wise and experienced advisors?