The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

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  IN THE EARLY MONTHS of 2012, there was real concern that there was going to be a war between Israel and Iran. The Iranian nuclear program continued to advance, the threats out of Israel were becoming more bellicose, and there were signs that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities could be imminent. A steady stream of U.S. officials traveled to Jerusalem to counsel against an attack. In the White House, we prepared for scenarios in which a strike took place and the United States was drawn into a wider regional war with Iran—a country much larger, more sophisticated, and more powerful than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

  To obtain leverage on Iran, we were steadily expanding sanctions. This required the cooperation of other countries, which needed to help us reduce the revenue that Iran could get from selling oil. Throughout 2011 and 2012, in meetings with China, Japan, South Korea, India, and European countries, Iran sanctions topped the agenda, as Obama convinced leaders to do something against their own economic interest. But still Netanyahu complained he wasn’t doing enough.

  When Netanyahu visited Washington to address AIPAC in early March, I spent several days leading a public campaign to make the case that there was time: time to let tougher sanctions sink in, time to test whether diplomacy could make a difference. We prepared a set of talking points that rebutted the arguments for war. We had meetings with groups of prominent columnists and journalists to make our case. We held briefings for members of Congress who were nervous about being out of step with Israel. Obama sat down for a lengthy interview in which he made it clear that he would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities if he thought it necessary to do so, but that we were not yet at that point. He gave a speech restating those positions, and he said the same things to Netanyahu in private. At some point that spring, Netanyahu blinked, and we were spared the consequences of another war.

  But on many issues, it felt as if the looming election sidelined more ambitious foreign policy initiatives; that politics was crowding out any capacity for risk. I worried that we were becoming so conservative that we were losing touch with what we had set out to do. We had done a lengthy review of the cuts that we could make to the U.S. nuclear arsenal after the conclusion of the New START treaty, a key pillar of the affirmative agenda that Obama announced in Prague. We settled for the most modest option.

  On Egypt, I’d grown frustrated at how our government had largely reverted to deference to the Egyptian military, which was playing a double game—mouthing words of support for democracy while taking steps to undermine civil society at home. I’d raise this, but Obama would lose patience. “Our priority has to be stability and supporting the SCAF [Egyptian Military Council],” he snapped at me. “Even if we get criticized. I’m not interested in the crowd in Tahrir Square and Nick Kristof,” he said, referring to a columnist who’d been critical of our Egypt policy. He rationalized this because the military had to ensure that elections took place, but he also seemed to be talking himself into the rightness of more incremental change. Burdened by a reelection campaign, buffeted by the stridency of his opposition at home, divisions among his own team, and a sense that he lacked good partners abroad, Obama seemed at times to be using his powerful mind to find justifications for more modest ambitions. Another time, at a meeting on what he was aiming to accomplish in his first term, I pointed to the potential for a democratic opening in Burma. “Ben,” he said, “no one cares about Burma in Ohio.”

  These comments stuck with me. For the first time, I felt out of step with my boss. In the quiet of my empty apartment, I began to wrestle with bigger questions. How would I see myself in five years if I couldn’t remember what I was like five years ago? How do you establish your own voice when your entire reputation is founded on someone else’s? How much can you compromise your own positions in service of a larger good before you sacrifice them? I felt we had gradually trimmed our sails and lowered our sights—a year after the heady days of the Libya intervention and bin Laden operation, it felt as if we were becoming technocratic, competent managers of things amid a world roiling with change. Drone strikes to take out terrorists. Reducing the population at Gitmo but unable to close it. Averting a war with Iran while imposing sanctions.

  I was advocating proposals that weren’t expedient or politically popular. More pressure on the Egyptian military. More action in Syria. More time spent on places like Burma. And yet I also saw how little those issues mattered in the campaign that was taking place. We needed to designate one White House official who worked on national security to be able to coordinate with the reelection campaign on messaging. I was the only option. I’d been responsible for the public messaging around Obama’s national security policies for five years. I’d have to shift—from being an employee of the NSC to an employee of the White House—a small bureaucratic move that seemed designed to protect those institutions more than me.

  I looked, increasingly, for smaller things that I could work on—if I had outlets on issues where I could make a difference, it could add a layer to my experience at work separate from the grind of politics and the intractability of some of the larger issues on our agenda. One issue was education in Libya. With the country struggling to put itself back together, there were plans for the United States to help Libyans restore a system of higher education.

  Late that spring, I met with our ambassador, Chris Stevens, who had served in Benghazi throughout the revolution. He had a reputation for being the kind of envoy who worked with people as well as governments—knowing the language, the food, the culture of the place he was posted. He had a calm demeanor, sandy brown hair, and an easy smile. “We already have the attention of the government on this, and we need areas where we can cooperate,” he said. “It’d be great if you could give this a push out of here.”

  We talked about where to find money in the budget; what partners to enlist; how this fit into the broader picture of our Libya policy. “I think we can get the diaspora involved in this,” I said, referring to a number of the Libyans I’d met.

  “They already are,” Stevens said. A number had returned to the country.

  As we wrapped up, I said, “I’d like to visit.”

  “That would be great,” he said. I thought I’d go sometime after the election.

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  THAT AUGUST, MY FATHER-IN-LAW took a turn for the worse and I flew out to California again. When I arrived, he had just come home from the hospital. He was frail, his body weakening, as he hadn’t been responding to treatment and couldn’t really eat. He thanked me for coming, as if it was an inconvenience. The next day, he slipped into a different place, unable to speak, and a twenty-four-hour hospice nurse was dispatched to the house. Ann and I slept upstairs in the room where she lived as a child as her father lay dying in the living room downstairs. People took turns saying goodbye. Ann’s twelve-year-old niece, Emma, played the piano. She had become the center of Roger’s life.

  He died two days later, surrounded by family, in the house where he raised seven children. Making myself useful, I took Emma to In-N-Out Burger. In the blur of days that followed, funeral arrangements were made, stories were told, friends of Roger’s came and went. He was the type of person who had quietly made a larger impact on people’s lives than anyone knew.

  In the days leading up to the funeral, we went through some of Roger’s old things—the small amount of stuff that he’d saved or put aside. I found a folder stashed away in the closet filled with newspaper clippings that traced some key moments in my career—an article in the Los Angeles Times about my role in the Cairo speech, yellowing just a bit around the edges, a flattering piece about the young group of Obama White House aides trying to find a different way to communicate with the Muslim world. He had never told anyone about this habit of his, nor asked me much about my work. Whenever it came up, he seemed to keep a respectful distance, not wanting to probe. I tried to picture him, alone with a scissors,
cutting up his morning paper with an engineer’s precision and putting the clippings away neatly in the closet to be found later, at another time, by another person.

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  ON THE AFTERNOON OF TUESDAY, September 11, 2012, we started to get alarming reports out of Cairo. Hundreds of chanting protesters had gathered at the walls of our embassy. Apparently, a video entitled Innocence of Muslims, a crude and seemingly obscure movie intended to humiliate the Prophet Muhammad, had generated this backlash. A fourteen-minute trailer had been posted on YouTube earlier in the summer. An Egyptian Coptic Christian who lived in California was promoting the video, and it started to get picked up in Egypt. Part of it was then dubbed into Arabic, and a short segment was shown on Egyptian TV. Islamist clerics condemned the movie, fueling a sense of grievance that brought thousands of Egyptians into the streets.

  The immediate concern was security at our embassy. In an effort to calm the protests, our embassy spokesman had put out a statement saying “the Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” I sat at my desk watching the video—a low-budget Internet movie that portrayed Muhammad as a decadent character, the protagonist in a knock-off of bad late-night Cinemax. Meanwhile, as the day turned into evening in Cairo, the crowd scaled the walls of our compound and raised a black flag used by militants across the Middle East, with an insignia that read, in Arabic, THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS PROPHET. I spent much of the afternoon in meetings about what needed to be done to secure our embassy and stanch the swelling uproar.

  Late in the afternoon, as I sat in Denis McDonough’s office recapping our public messaging plan, I learned that the crisis wasn’t limited to Cairo—something had also happened at our diplomatic compound in Benghazi. In a meeting with his secretary of defense, Obama had directed that the military do what was necessary to secure U.S. facilities in Libya and across the region. There was a sense of crisis escalating.

  Unlike Cairo, there was not a large contingent of American journalists in Benghazi, so there were no TV cameras and little reliable information about what was happening. Information trickled in. Chris Stevens was apparently at the compound when it came under attack, and he was unaccounted for. I thought about the man who had just recently sat in my office, earnestly discussing how to improve higher education in Libya, and hoped he wasn’t hurt. At one point, there was a positive report—Stevens’s cellphone had called a senior State Department official. But over the course of the evening, the reports grew darker—the call had been placed from a hospital; Stevens was badly injured; and, then, as evening settled in Washington, the word came: Stevens was dead. Another American was also reportedly killed. Suddenly we were faced with this terrible news, the thing you fear the most, the death of Americans overseas.

  I sat in my office, feeling numb, remembering when the genial, dogged, and optimistic Stevens had sat—full of life—across from my desk a few months ago. It is a reality of twenty-first-century communications that you have to address totally different audiences at the same time, because anything you say will be consumed by the entire world. We now had several pressing communications challenges. First, the United States government had to confirm the death of Chris Stevens and another American, a thirty-four-year-old named Sean Smith; to condemn the violence that killed them; and to mourn their loss. Second, U.S. embassies in the Middle East, worried about further protests, were asking for statements that distanced the U.S. government from this video and condemned its attacks on the Prophet Muhammad. Third, we needed to deal with a right-wing American media that had already started to attack the statement put out by the U.S. embassy in Cairo for blaming the violence on the video rather than the protesters.

  Given that an ambassador had been killed and diplomatic facilities were under assault, our initial statement would come from Clinton. Jake Sullivan took the lead on it, and I reviewed different drafts and signed off for the White House. The language was straightforward—“I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi….We are heartbroken by this terrible loss.” Later in the statement, we addressed the concerns expressed by our embassies overseas without suggesting that any violence was justified: “The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others….But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.” More than three years later, I’d have to go over the language of this statement in careful detail before a congressional committee.

  I stayed at work until there was nothing left to do. Around nine or ten, I walked home, feeling a mix of sadness and anger. Egypt and Libya—the two places that, a year ago, had represented so much hope, were now roiling with protests by people who had nothing to offer except hate. Two Americans were dead.

  When I got home, I poured a large glass of Scotch and opened up my laptop to see if there was any other news. Around midnight, I saw a statement that had been put out by Mitt Romney: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn the attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

  I stood in my bedroom processing the words as waves of anger washed over me. For a moment, I couldn’t even understand which statement Romney meant; then I realized that he was referring to the statement that the embassy in Cairo put out earlier in the day, before anything had happened in Benghazi. I had grown accustomed to ugly Republican attacks, but this felt different. Some threshold had been crossed. They were slamming us in the crudest possible way in the middle of a crisis. They were attacking career Foreign Service people who had issued a statement while their embassy was under siege. They were ignoring the fact that the video was offensive. They were making it harder for us to say things that could help protect American lives abroad. They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism.

  We were now in some new, uglier reality. I could never have guessed just how ugly it would become: that for the next four years, “Benghazi” would be transformed from the name of a city in Libya where American intervention had saved tens of thousands of lives into something entirely different: a word that represented the sentiment in that statement of Romney’s, an expression of an ugly conspiracy theory to delegitimize Obama and Clinton, destroy any concern for facts that didn’t fit the theory, and dehumanize a small group of people, including me. Benghazi.

  The next morning, I woke in the predawn hours to learn that two more Americans had been killed overnight in some kind of firefight. The details were sparse. I got to the White House early, where there was a meeting to review security measures for our embassies across the Middle East. I locked myself in my office to write a statement that Obama would give just a couple of hours later in the Rose Garden, working off situation reports from the State Department and some limited biographical information on the men who died, and suggesting language to distance ourselves from the video. I wrote many statements like this, locked in my office with the door closed, acutely aware that a lot of people—including the president of the United States—were waiting for me to get the thing done. Ben Fishman, the Libya staffer on the NSC who had been close to Ambassador Stevens, came by to ask that we add something to the remarks about how much Stevens meant to young people across the government. Fishman looked like hell.

  Obama ended up giving the statement a little before eleven, with Clinton by his side. He condemned the “outrageous and shocking attack” and pledged “to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.” He echoed Hillary’s words from the night before: “There is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None.” He paid tribute to Stevens, noting that he was a “role model to all who worked for him.” Then, in the type of language we’d always include after a terrorist attack, he said, “No acts of
terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation.” After the statement, he lingered in the area outside the Oval Office, where a bank of television screens showed the different cable television networks responding to what he’d said. He watched for a minute or so while the commentators focused on what Romney had said the night before. “That should be disqualifying,” he said, shaking his head.

  The rest of the week, protests over the offensive video continued to grow in dozens of cities around the world—from Islamabad to Sana’a to Tunis. The overwhelming fear was that Friday would be a bloodbath, Fridays being the biggest protest days in Muslim communities, as it’s the weekend and people attend Friday prayers, where imams can stir up a crowd and extremists can take advantage of the chaos. A crisis response team started meeting regularly about what we could do to mitigate the situation. We reached out to all alumni of U.S. exchange programs in the Middle East, hoping to draw from whatever reservoir of goodwill had been built up. We contacted Google and YouTube to try to get the offensive video taken down. We disseminated talking points condemning the denigration of Islam in the video while affirming that there is never any justification for violence. While we were doing this, other parts of the government were ramping up security at embassies, consulates, and military facilities across the Arab world.

  At home, the right-wing outrage about our criticism of the Internet video continued to build as Republicans worked hard to make Benghazi into a political problem for Obama. It was as though I was inhabiting two entirely different worlds: I’d spend most of my day trying to convey messages to people outside the United States who were offended by the video; then I’d spend an hour or two helping Jay Carney prepare for questions about whether we were apologizing for the video, or whether Obama’s foreign policy was a failure. When I focused on the audience outside the United States, I opened myself up to criticism for being tone-deaf, politically correct; when I focused on figuring out how to respond to Republican critics, I opened myself up to criticism for being political. It was like dealing with mirror images of insanity.