The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  We’ve made progress, but this is still a country with many problems, Suu Kyi said. The young people have very high expectations, and of course we don’t want to let them down. She spoke at great length without interruption, winding around points, describing relatively obscure parliamentary maneuvers. Hillary had told us that she takes pride in being a politician now, and that was clear. Obama rested his cheek on his hand and listened. While offering support to the democratic opening, he asked her about the troubling situation facing the Rohingya people in Rakhine State, an ethnic minority that was confined in part to displaced persons camps. This will be very difficult, she said, referring to efforts to improve conditions there. Of course we believe the human rights of all people in Burma must be respected.

  Later that day, Obama gave a speech at the University of Yangon. The university, once a center of opposition to the military junta, had seen scores of students beaten and killed in the protests that followed Suu Kyi’s victory in the 1990 elections, which were annulled. The school had been shut down for many years and was being reopened for the speech. While Obama spoke, I roamed the corridors, examining the dilapidated building. Inside, the crowd, unaccustomed to watching political speeches, sat in silence until some tentative applause started to build at certain points toward the end, when Obama talked about the need for reconciliation. Obama also affirmed the dignity of the Rohingya, a name that was rarely spoken aloud in a country where a large majority of people denied that the Muslim ethnic group even existed.

  Afterward, as the flight to Cambodia gained altitude, Obama came to see me. “That was worth doing,” he said. He looked out the window. “It’s interesting how the place feels frozen in time. It reminds me of what Jakarta looked like when I lived there. Now it’s just high-rises. They’d be smart to preserve some of what makes this part of the world different.”

  Our time in Cambodia would be dominated by the Middle East. For the second time in the immediate aftermath of an Obama election, Israel was at war in Gaza, and we were working to secure a cease-fire. I had to pull Obama from a gala dinner in Phnom Penh so that he could talk to Mohamed Morsi, the recently elected Egyptian president. Morsi was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had close ties to Hamas. Obama was pressing him to use his influence to get Hamas to stop firing rockets into Israel, and Morsi was eager to show that he could deliver. Back at the hotel, before going to bed, Obama told us that we should wake him if Morsi wanted to talk again. The Situation Room called me after midnight to say that Morsi was asking to speak to Obama. Tom Donilon was asleep, so for the first time, I had to go into Obama’s suite to wake him up. Wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, he gave me a strong shove on the way to the phone, feigning anger. He sat there cradling the phone, taking notes and coaching Morsi through the assurances that were necessary from Hamas in order to get a cease-fire. When he hung up, he asked me to set up a meeting with Hillary first thing the next morning—he was going to send her to Israel and Egypt to conclude a cease-fire.

  It was after two. I went to my room and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I was entering a new role as one of the only constants in the second term, the kind of person who could wake him up to take a call from the Egyptian president. The trip to Burma represented the opportunity to make our own priorities, and yet, because of my communications responsibilities, I would always find myself pulled, as if by gravity, to crises. Could I really handle two or four more years of this storm chasing? I closed my eyes to find a little sleep but kept getting woken up by the whine of a mosquito flying in circles around me. I swatted at the air as the minutes turned into hours, drifting into and out of a fitful sleep, not remembering whether Morsi had called, whether I’d have to get up again to do something—what, I could not remember—until I woke at the first light of dawn to find the mosquito exploded in a pool of my own blood on the pillow next to me.

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  —

  ON THE FLIGHT HOME, Obama was calling different aides up to the front of the plane to talk about what they wanted to do in a second term. Samantha, who would become ambassador to the United Nations. Mike Froman, who would become U.S. trade representative. White House colleagues who were poised to become cabinet members. Obama was in his office, having changed into casual clothes, and asked me to sit next to him on the couch.

  “So, have you thought at all about the second term?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Is there anything else you want to do?”

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t want to be miserable in the job I have.” I didn’t know if I was referring to the frustration with the lack of ambition in our policies, or the sense of fatigue at the mix of responsibilities—some large, some mundane—that I carried with me: planning the schedule, writing the speeches, briefing the press on the worst event happening in the world.

  The white noise of the plane hummed in the background. “I feel like we’re just too afraid of our own shadow sometimes,” I said.

  “We have to be.” Referring to Donilon, he said, “Tom has to worry about a car bomb going off in Times Square or an ambassador getting killed.”

  I started to complain about the process. We weren’t pressing an affirmative agenda, taking on issues like Cuba that I knew Obama wanted to get to. It began to feel as though I was complaining about Donilon and McDonough, which wasn’t my point. “I’m tired of just being the guy who defends drones.”

  Obama read me quickly. “So, more Cuba, less killing,” he said. “Look, I feel you. We’ve got four more years now. We’ve got a lot to get done. Why don’t you think about a couple of projects you’d like to take on, issues where you can take the lead?”

  “That sounds good,” I said.

  “We can keep talking about this. But I’d like you to stay where you are.” He paused. “You’re not just an advisor, you’re a friend.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure what to say. He started to talk about other staff changes that he was mulling, how to replace Favreau and a few other key people, and then he went back to the conference room to play cards. I returned to my seat and closed my eyes. Back when I worked for Lee Hamilton, one of his longtime staffers had warned me always to remember: In Washington, when you work for someone, you’re staff, no matter how close you get to your boss. I had begun to drift asleep when a hand shook me awake—Obama had spoken to Morsi again and I’d have to brief the press at the back of the plane. Even friends, after all, are staff.

  CHAPTER 16

  YOUNG MEN WAGE WAR, OLD MEN MAKE PEACE

  In the fall of 2012, a proposal made its way to Obama recommending that he provide military support to the Syrian opposition. In the years that followed, this proposal would take on mythical status as a road not taken that could have led to a different outcome. The reality is that it was a small-scale recommendation to engage a portion of the opposition, providing them with a fraction of the support that Russia and Iran were providing to the Assad regime. David Petraeus, by that time the director of the CIA, pushed for it. He was also honest about what it was and wasn’t: This won’t change the direction of the war, he’d say; it will allow us to build relationships with the opposition.

  I was ambivalent. Over the course of the fall, I’d fought a losing battle against those who wanted to designate part of the Syrian opposition—al Nusrah—as a terrorist organization. Al Nusrah was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition, and while there were extremist elements in the group, it was also clear that the more moderate opposition was fighting side by side with al Nusrah. I argued that labeling al Nusrah as terrorists would alienate the same people we wanted to help, while giving al Nusrah less incentive to avoid extremist affiliations. It spoke to the schizophrenia in American foreign policy that we were simultaneously debating whether to designate the Syrian opposition as terrorists and whether to provide military support to the Syrian opposition. And it spoke to the hubris in Am
erican foreign policy to think that we could engineer the Syrian opposition whom we barely knew—and who were fighting for their lives—through terrorist designations and some modest military support.

  I also argued that if we were going to intervene in Syria’s civil war, we should do so with our own military. From Central America to Afghanistan, America didn’t have a great track record with arming proxies. If we thought it was worth tipping the balance against Assad, we should be debating whether to strike his regime directly. I pressed this point in a few meetings in late 2012 and early 2013, but I was usually the only person doing so other than Jake and Samantha.

  In one meeting early in the second term, Obama went around the room as he normally did when he wanted to test the status quo of his policies. Jake and I were sitting together on the back bench, and when it got to us, we made versions of the same argument. If things keep deteriorating, I said, we should “consider bombing Assad’s runways” or we should “consider limited strikes against some regime infrastructure.”

  I spoke the words, but they felt hollow. Obama seemed to listen passively, not making eye contact, rubbing his forehead as I spoke. It was wrenching to read about the brutality of Assad every morning, to see images of family homes reduced to rubble. I felt we had to do something in Syria. I’d aligned myself, in 2011, with a bet on the people in the streets—from Tunis to Cairo, from Tripoli to Damascus. But by early 2013, I felt I was playing a part, the advocate for action, and couldn’t muster the same passion that I had during the Libya debate. What difference would it make to bomb runways? That was a point I’d picked up from other advocates for action, but I couldn’t answer the question Obama posed in response. “And what happens after we bomb the runways and Russia, Iran, and Assad rebuild them?” After the meeting, McDonough took to calling Jake and me Cheney and Rumsfeld.

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  ONE MORNING EARLY IN the second term, Obama sat in the Roosevelt Room to meet with a small group of journalists that I’d assembled. It is not unusual to invite a handful of columnists or commentators in to meet the president, usually off the record. This time, though, was different, as I invited a handful of people who weren’t usually included in these sessions—people who spent most of their time reporting in the Middle East and who were largely sympathetic to the protesters who were pushing for change. Instead of aiming to influence them, I was hoping their stories could have some impact on Obama, pressing him to be more assertive in Syria and across the region.

  One after another, they offered an unvarnished view of the chaos engulfing the region, and Syria in particular. The trends were not good—opposition movements were becoming more extremist, Iran was doubling down on its support for Assad in Syria, Gulf countries were funding groups in Syria and Libya that were more militant than the United States wanted. Most of them argued that the United States was failing to shape events, though I noticed that the most senior correspondent lacked any hope that events could be shaped. Obama listened intently, asking questions as much as he offered his own opinions. When the session was over, I followed him into the Oval Office, where I quickly realized that the session had had the opposite of the effect I intended—where I heard a call to action, Obama had heard a cautionary tale. How could the United States fix a part of the world that was that broken, and that decades of U.S. foreign policy had helped to break?

  Sensing my unease, he asked me what I thought. “We’re sixty percent pregnant across the region,” I said, and ticked off a list of complaints that I’d been keeping in my head over the last year. “We’re half in on Middle East peace, on Syria, on Egypt, on the pursuit of a nuclear agreement with Iran. We have to go big.”

  He asked me to follow him back to his private dining room, where we could continue the conversation while he ate lunch. There on the wall was a painting of Lincoln, deep in thought, consulting Grant at the height of the Civil War; a photo of Obama meeting Nelson Mandela; a pair of boxing gloves used by Muhammad Ali. Obama sat at the table while I remained standing. I worried that I was overstepping my bounds.

  On Middle East peace, he told me, he had tried repeatedly, but Bibi wouldn’t make a deal. On Syria, he kept asking for them, but there were no good options. “And on Iran,” he said, “what do you want me to do? Give a speech offering to recognize their right to enrich [uranium]” in return for easing sanctions?

  “It’s not so much one thing,” I said. “We just need to be more opportunistic, to go big when we can.” I reminded him of the limo ride back from the Libya speech, when he’d said he wished he had the bandwidth to focus on the Arab Spring. “What would we do with that bandwidth?” I asked. “Sir,” I continued, with unusual formality, “this is a seismic geopolitical shift and social movement. It’s taking place up here”—I held my hand up by my head—“but our actions are down here.” I lowered my hand to my waist.

  “Maybe that’s right,” he said, “but we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that we can fix the Middle East.” He paused, chewing. “I love that you care this much. But what’s the line from Lawrence of Arabia?” he said. It was a movie we frequently quoted to each other. “ ‘Young men make wars….Then old men make the peace.’ ”

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  DESPITE HIS MISGIVINGS, OBAMA decided that the first foreign trip of his second term would be to Israel and Jordan. Throughout his first term, we had waited to make our first visit to Israel, thinking that we would go when there was an opening in the peace process. Four years in, it was clear that an opening might never come. Obama had been criticized repeatedly throughout the election for not having visited Israel. Now, he decided, it was time to go.

  I spent weeks preparing an itinerary, one that might encompass the full breadth of Israeli history—the Israel Museum, to demonstrate the historical Jewish connection to the land; Herzl’s tomb, to pay tribute to Zionism; Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum; Rabin’s grave, to honor Israel’s martyred peacemaker; an exposition on entrepreneurship, to showcase Israel’s burgeoning start-up culture. I worked on the schedule with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, who had been a harsh critic of Obama but wanted the visit to go well and seemed reconciled to four more years of a Democratic White House. In multiple conversations, he encouraged me to have Obama visit a village of Ethiopian Jews. I demurred, a little put off by this persistent suggestion that Obama would want to see black Jews more than others.

  In the receiving line in front of Air Force One, Bibi told Obama that he was familiar with me from “cables.” Obama told him that my brother ran CBS News. “Ben has a proud Jewish mother,” he said.

  Bibi chose to focus on my connection to CBS, not Judaism. “Sounds incestuous,” he said.

  “Not if you watch CBS News,” Obama replied.

  For me, the trip was filled with conflicting emotions. Working on Obama’s speech, I felt a bit like a bystander, aware of my own half heritage, neither full Jew nor non-Jew. Israel’s history is in no way normal, and its security concerns are rooted in a history of anti-Semitism that continues to the current day. At the same time, I had to confront the intractability of the Palestinian predicament as I wrote the latest appeal for peace, knowing it would likely fall on deaf ears.

  The morning of the speech, we flew by helicopter to Ramallah to meet with Mahmoud Abbas. I looked out at rolling hills and could see where Israeli settlements were splitting the West Bank in two. We were in the air for less than ten minutes, but the contrast could not have been starker: Israel from the air resembles southern Europe; the settlements looked like subdivisions in the Nevada desert; the Palestinian towns looked shabby and choked off.

  After a long meeting with Abbas, Obama met with a group of young Palestinians in a small classroom. Each took turns speaking and had a wrenching story of occupation. I noticed one boy, about eighteen, who looked the most agitated throughout the meeting, staring at his hands while the others spo
ke. He was last to speak, and when his turn came he told similar stories of friends imprisoned, freedom of movement restricted. Finally, he built up to a line that he had clearly practiced. “Mr. President, we are treated the same way the black people were treated in your country. Here, in this century.” He paused, and let a pregnant silence hang over the table. “Funded by your government, Mr. President.”

  Obama looked drained. He had no good answer for the kid, so he didn’t bother faking it. He talked about how much promise they had, how he hoped young Palestinians could get a higher profile in the United States. He defended Israel, saying that the Jewish people had a right to be concerned about their security. He ended on the most optimistic note he could find—how young people gave him hope, how they reminded him of his own daughters, how Israeli mothers should be able to see them and hear their stories because they would understand. Often, when Obama was frustrated by governments, he’d talk about their people.

  We took the helicopter back to Jerusalem and I sent the final draft of the speech to the teleprompter from my BlackBerry. Backstage at the convention center, he started talking about how tough the meeting had been.

  “That last kid seemed like he got his courage up,” I said.

  “Yes,” Obama said. “It took a lot of guts for him to do that.” He told me a story that the former Palestinian prime minister Salman Fayad had told him, about how the Israelis parked a car in front of his office every few days and sat there, watching him. “It’s not about security,” Fayad had said. “It’s about power.”