by Ben Rhodes
We had a somewhat forced discussion about terrorism—Cuba wasn’t exactly an al Qaeda target, and Cuban security services weren’t exactly lax. Then the history lesson began, as Alejandro offered a review of “U.S.-based terrorism” against Cuba. In a methodical tone—almost matter-of-fact, as if it was a common dinner table topic in Cuba—we heard a detailed review of the last sixty years: the Bay of Pigs invasion; the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel (more than six hundred, by their count); rumors of Cuban American complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy; how Luis Posada Carilles, Cuban-born and CIA-trained, had bombed a Cuban airplane, killing seventy-three people, and was now living freely in the United States (“He is Cuba’s bin Laden”); Iran-Contra and Central American death squads; how Cuban exiles in the United States planned bombings in Cuba, and on and on.
I sat calmly listening to this recitation for well over an hour, gazing neutrally at Alejandro while he spoke in a Spanish that I barely understood, waiting for translation. I knew I could respond with a similar list of Cuban transgressions. Ricardo, who sat next to me silently, had warned that something like this was coming. I looked down at my talking points, which did not cover this expanse of history. I realized that my relative youth could be an advantage.
“I understand that this history is important to you,” I said when he was finished. “But I wasn’t even born when a lot of this happened.” I folded my hands in front of me and looked at Alejandro while the words were translated. “President Obama wasn’t even born when the Bay of Pigs invasion took place. He sent me here to look forward, and that’s what I want to do.” I talked about how we’d recently opened relations with Burma, how we’d worked to move beyond history in the Americas. “You mentioned Iran-Contra,” I said. “President Obama just recently shared a dinner table with Danny Ortega [the Sandinista leader whom the U.S.-backed Contras had fought against]. So we can overcome the past, all of us, even if it’s important to us.”
During the lunch break, we broke from our roles. I went downstairs for a few minutes to gather my thoughts, and when I came back up, standing over a tray of sandwich wraps and sodas, Ricardo was talking about fishing in the waters off Cuba and the Florida Keys.
“It’s sad,” I said, “that Cuba is only ninety miles from Florida, yet so few Americans have been able to travel there.”
“Jay-Z and Beyoncé just visited,” Alejandro said.
“People-to-people exchange,” I joked.
Alejandro laughed loudly, holding a sandwich in one hand. Then he turned serious. “The Cuban people,” he said, “were very respectful of them. They admired how they carried themselves with dignity and humility.”
“At least they were able to go,” I said. “But it didn’t make our lives easier in the White House.”
“I am surprised,” he said, “at how you treat us here with respect. We can tell that you are treating us as equals.” We stood chewing our food, pondering this observation.
The rest of the day we circled around our agenda. There was the occasional tense moment—when they attacked our democracy programs, and when we defended the right of people in Cuba to protest. But just the fact that we sat there for six hours talking, back and forth, without descending into argument felt like an achievement. We’d accomplished our minimal objectives for the meeting—establishing a channel, building a relationship, agreeing that we would meet again in a few weeks.
At the airport, Ricardo and I settled in at the bar, which looked like just about every airport bar I’ve ever been to in my life, just two guys grabbing a couple of beers before catching a flight back to Dulles. Ricardo made careful notes about next steps, yet we both knew that the real achievement was the meeting itself. The right Cubans had shown up, and they seemed determined to build a relationship that could lead somewhere. Ricardo closed his notebook and settled into his beer. He was the kind of guy who seemed to indulge in any small privilege that life offered up—the song that comes on the radio; the view of a lake from the house where we’d met the Cubans; the memory of some fishing spot off the coast of Cuba. He’d spent nearly fifteen years working on Cuba, which meant he’d spent nearly fifteen years being frustrated.
“I think these guys are serious,” he said as we stared at a television on mute. “This could be the real deal.”
* * *
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SOUTHEAST ASIA BECAME THE other region I took on, as it pulled together the different threads of what interested me the most in our foreign policy: the burden of history, and the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; the strategic importance of a region that was increasingly important to our position vis-à-vis China; an essential part of any effort to combat climate change; a sprawling place populated by people of different religions and ethnicities. A place of opportunity.
Burma was at the beginning of what was going to be a long and uncertain transition. Aung San Suu Kyi was now a member of parliament, leading her National League for Democracy (NLD), the largest opposition party to the military. Political prisoners who had spent decades in jail were being released. Generals were trying to reinvent themselves as politicians. Western corporations were debating whether to invest. Ethnic insurgencies continued to rage in the periphery. In Rakhine State, along Burma’s border with Bangladesh, a Rohingya Muslim minority was persecuted by the Burmese military and a Buddhist majority.
In July, I set off to Burma for the first time without Obama. Our envoy there was Derek Mitchell, an expert on Asia and democracy who had helped design our Burma policy. He was, as far as I could tell, one of the busiest men in the country. “The Burmese are drowning in work,” he told me as we drove into Naypyidaw, Burma’s planned capital city, on an empty ten-lane highway. He explained that a main driver of reform was the success of other Southeast Asian countries: Burma’s generals had gotten tired of traveling to places like Singapore and feeling left behind. Another was China: The corruption that came with living under Chinese influence was sparking a backlash among the people. Finally, there was Suu Kyi, an icon popular enough to hold together a potent opposition but struggling to adapt to life as a politician. “She’s focused almost entirely on reforming the constitution,” he said.
“So she can become president?” I asked.
“Yes, but she’d say also to end military rule.” The military still operated without any civilian control and had a prescribed block of seats in the parliament.
“But if they’re opening up, doesn’t that ultimately lead to her being president?” I asked.
“Probably,” he said. “Everyone knows that there’s only one end to the story, but no one knows how to get there.”
Over the course of the day, in giant government buildings, I would sit at the far end of rooms as large as football fields opposite a Burmese official. It seemed as if there were three types of public figures in Burma—dissidents turned politicians, who had no experience governing; military men who had turned into reformers but didn’t know how to operate in a democracy; and hard-liners resisting change. The one meeting that was different was with the president’s chief of staff, an older man named U Soe Thein. Instead of a ceremonial room, we met in his small, working office. His desk was piled with papers, and he greeted us as if taking a break from nonstop work. He spoke English, and every time I raised an issue he squinted and nodded, a slightly pained look on his face, as if to say I know, but we can go only so fast. “We have the citizenship action plan,” he said about the Rohingya. “Already, we are granting citizenship cards for those who apply.”
“But only if they don’t identify themselves as Rohingya,” Derek interjected. The Burmese denied that the Rohingya were a distinct ethnic group, referring to them as Bengalis—illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. For the next three and a half years, we’d have to constantly press the government, often working with other countries, to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control.
“
The situation is very complicated,” Soe Thein said. “We aren’t going to change the views of the local Rakhine or the people in Burma. But we are moving forward.” He lamented that he was so busy, saying that he’d prefer the life of a writer. He kept ticking off to-do lists, giving the appearance of doing everything at once.
Aung San Suu Kyi greeted me at the entrance of the parliament building and guided me to a corner of a room, where we sat on couches. She seemed different outside her Yangon home, where she had the air of an icon, sitting under her framed portrait of Gandhi. There, she was the hero who’d spent a huge chunk of her life sacrificing in principled opposition to autocracy, missing the death of her husband and the lives of her children who remained in England. Here, she was a politician, taking a break from parliamentary maneuvers. The only nod to her icon status was the characteristic flower in her hair.
I handed her a letter from Obama and said that he wanted me to check in with her. “Well, what is it you want to say?” she asked. She seemed curt, distracted. I expressed our support for Burma’s transition to democracy, falling into the points that had been prepared for me. I encouraged her to support efforts to promote reconciliation with Burma’s ethnic groups and better conditions for the Rohingya. “We will get to those things,” she said. “But first must come constitutional reform. The military could change the constitution in a moment.” Everything she said indicated that she cared mostly about the upcoming 2015 election, in which she was barred from seeking the presidency by a provision that disqualified people with foreign-born children—known informally as the Aung San Suu Kyi provision. “It won’t be a free and fair election without constitutional reform.”
Every time I returned to different issues, she kept turning the conversation back to the election and the constitution. “Of course we care about human rights,” she said, “for all our people. But we cannot have human rights without democracy.” She’d spent decades imprisoned and could now envision actually becoming president of the nation her father had founded before he was assassinated. I’m so close, her body language seemed to suggest.
* * *
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THAT NIGHT, ON THE BALCONY of my hotel room in Yangon, I watched as feral dogs circled each other down below, darting through short bursts of traffic. Parking attendants, newly employed at this luxury hotel, shouted instructions at cars as they maneuvered through an undersized lot. I thought about the distance from the street scene to the cartoonish capital where decisions were made, and the even greater distances to places like Washington and Beijing that set the course for the wider world.
The next day, Derek arranged for me to see a sampling of the many different facets of Yangon society adapting to change. Former political prisoners ate sparingly at a luncheon and spoke with single-minded focus about their efforts to free the remaining prisoners. One writer told me in a matter-of-fact way that she had nearly died in prison because she shrank to under eighty pounds. Rohingya brought me large volumes of documentation proving that they had lived in Burma for generations, as if I were the one who would judge this fact. Rakhine Buddhists were unabashed in their bigotry, speaking of the “Bengalis” as illegal immigrants who needed to be deported. At the Myanmar Peace Center, we talked to a small group of men trying to negotiate a cease-fire with more than a dozen ethnic armed groups. I was surprised to see pamphlets that translated the Cairo speech into Burmese. I asked why the speech was of interest to people here. “The people admire Obama,” one man said. “We use this speech to teach them how to be tolerant of people from different religions.”
At a roundtable with me, representatives from America’s business community were full of complaints about doing business in a country with no experience of it. “I agreed to a contract at a ministry only to find that the terms had changed by the time I got home,” one said. Derek told me about the government cronies who still control huge chunks of the economy. One of them offered a several-thousand-dollar bottle of wine at a dinner in his house, which is near a street where people beg for food. The people who were sanctioned by the United States seemed to be doing just fine; it was the rest of the country that was suffering.
Derek was determined to give me a feel for the city, and my last night there we walked out on darkened streets with few lights. We were joined by three young women—one Burmese, one American, one French—who led an NGO dedicated to preserving the old city. We walked into dilapidated buildings, smelling of urine with trash filling the hallways, wires hanging from the ceilings, squatters in the empty apartments. The women took out flashlights and pointed them down to the floors where, under layers of dust, you could see Art Deco tiles from the 1920s.
The tour ended at an old movie theater. We entered by walking across wooden doors that covered open sewage drains, then climbed a flight of musty stairs. A kitschy soap-opera-style Burmese film was playing on an enormous curved screen. A handful of people were sitting in the darkness. The women lit their flashlights to reveal an impossible glamour—balcony seats like an aged opera house, empty of human beings. It was like standing in some forgotten past. Then we headed outside, back across the wooden doorway, into an uncertain future.
Burma, in the minds of Americans like me, was a place where Aung San Suu Kyi suffered imprisonment to promote democracy—a recognizable concept, a commendable struggle. Years of U.S. sanctions had been put in place to support her struggle. But the actual country was a mystery that eluded easy understanding, with a cosmopolitan capital ready for change, a sprawling countryside where people’s lives unfolded out of sight, and a violent periphery where the government held little writ. The only thing that united all of these elements was Suu Kyi herself, an icon of democracy, the daughter of the national hero, a politician who did not control the levers of power.
CHAPTER 18
RED LINE
On Wednesday, August 21, 2013, Ann and I were sitting on a flight waiting to take off when I saw a news story on my BlackBerry reporting a potentially catastrophic chemical weapons attack in Syria. The plane took off and I had several hours without Internet. We were going to spend a few days with Ann’s family in Portland, Oregon, before heading down to Orange County to her mother’s house. It was her sister’s fiftieth birthday and the anniversary of her father’s death. It was my first vacation in more than a year.
On the plane, I thought about the news. Chemical weapons had been a concern in Syria for the last year. In July 2012, we received reports that the regime was preparing to use them against the opposition or transfer them to the terrorist organization Hizbollah. Assad had huge stockpiles of sarin gas. There were concerns in Israel that any sarin passed to Hizbollah could be used against Israelis. As soon as we received those initial reports in July 2012, McDonough convened a task force that developed a plan to issue private warnings to Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government. We prepared some carefully worded language that Obama used in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on July 23, 2012: “Given the regime’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad and those around him that the world is watching, and that they will be held accountable by the international community and the United States should they make the tragic mistake of using those weapons.”
At first, it seemed that the warnings worked. Weeks and months went by with no sign of chemical attacks. In August 2012, Obama was asked about what could lead him to use military force in Syria: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime,” he said, “that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”
In the course of a presidency, a U.S. president says millions of words in public. You never know which of those words end up cementing a certain impression. For Obama, one of those phrases would be “red line.”
Late in 2012, we received reports of small-scale chemical weapons use. These reports were difficult to verify in a place as chaotic as Syria, w
here many horrifying weapons were being used against civilians, from tear gas to napalm to barrel bombs. The U.S. intelligence community was resistant to snap judgments, particularly after the experience of the inaccurate statements made about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion. So it took a period of months before the intelligence community formally determined that the Assad regime had in fact used chemical weapons. When this assessment was released in April 2013, the question became what we were going to do about it. To show Assad and the world that there would be consequences, Obama decided to publicize a decision to provide military support to the Syrian opposition—the latest iteration of the plan that Petraeus had first presented in 2012.
It was an unsatisfying response, and there weren’t any volunteers to announce the plan publicly. Almost by default, the responsibility fell to me. Even though I had misgivings about our Syria policy, I was glad that we were doing something. I had also internalized a certain ethos: If there was an issue that no one wanted to talk about publicly, I would do it. I thought it was a form of leadership, given my responsibility for communications across the government. I thought it was part of my job, as Obama deserved to have someone willing to defend him. I sensed, though, that it would cost me, allowing me to be blamed for decisions I didn’t make but that others didn’t want to defend.
