by Ben Rhodes
“So, when can you come to Cuba?” were Alejandro’s first words to me.
“Not yet,” I answered. “First we have to go to Rome.”
We talked over a process whereby we would draft papers that memorialized our agreements and share them with the Vatican at a secret meeting in Rome—neither side could go back once their commitment had been deposited with the pope. The Cubans also insisted that we draft papers describing where each side continued to have differences, which was an interesting way to protect our political flanks—they wanted to note their opposition to the embargo, the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, and other American policies; we could note our continued support for human rights and reforms in Cuba.
The conversation gradually drifted to other things—baseball, Hemingway, Cuban music. Ricardo went into the other room, where we had left our phones for security reasons, and came back with his iPhone playing his favorite Cuban songs. The Cubans reacted excitedly, dancing in place at the table. Politics felt far away. Benghazi felt far away. In that moment, sitting there with five other human beings, eating Mexican food at a cheap airport hotel in Canada, listening to Cuban music playing on an iPhone, I felt a sense of grace.
CHAPTER 23
PERMANENT WAR
Obama wanted to extricate the United States from the permanent war that had begun on 9/11. On the day he took office, there were roughly 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By late 2014, the number of troops in Afghanistan was down to 15,000. All U.S. troops were out of Iraq. These were meaningful achievements; they saved American lives, as casualty numbers fell from nearly a hundred Americans killed each month to nearly zero, and the cost of war shrank by tens of billions of dollars. Most controversially, he had kept the U.S. military out of Syria.
By 2014, just about every negative force in the Middle East had converged in Syria: a murderous autocrat backed by Russia and Iran; al Qaeda–affiliated extremists; sectarian conflict and a Saudi-Iranian proxy war; and ISIL, the rebranded version of al Qaeda in Iraq. As Iraq’s Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, isolated Iraq’s Sunnis—and as the civil war in Syria left huge swaths of territory across Iraq’s western border ungovernable—ISIL had turned into a mix of terrorist group, insurgency, and local government. In January, ISIL declared the Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital and started a steady advance eastward, back into Iraq. In June, it took over Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities, overrunning the Iraqi Security Forces who had been trained and armed by the United States. It then announced it was establishing a new caliphate, and changed its name to the more ominously universal Islamic State.
It was becoming apparent that we would have to intervene again in Iraq to stop ISIL’s advance. The tipping point came in early August, when ISIL took control of a dam near Mosul that, if breached, could have flooded huge swaths of Iraq. The Kurdish capital of Erbil, normally an island of calm, was under threat from ISIL. And most immediately, ISIL had driven tens of thousands of Yazidis onto Mount Sinjar. The Yazidis were a sect inside Iraq who believed in an ancient brand of monotheism, with roots in Zoroastrianism, and had preserved their tradition for well over a thousand years. Yet ISIL saw them as infidels, and in early August they started to massacre Yazidi men and enslave the women, and declared their intent to wipe the Yazidis from the face of the earth.
For a couple of days, a sense of crisis enveloped the White House. Obama was angry that he didn’t have good information. “We didn’t get a warning that the Iraqis were going to melt away” in Mosul, he complained to a group of us. “And now we can’t even get a read on how many Peshmerga”—the Kurdish security forces—“are in Erbil. I’m not happy with the information I’m getting.” It was quiet for a moment. “I’m aggravated,” he added, for emphasis.
I was again in a chorus of advisors arguing for air strikes. Obama agreed, though he told us he would impose limits on how aggressively we’d go after ISIL until Maliki was replaced by a less sectarian leader. So on August 7, he announced that we would begin dropping food, water, and other supplies to the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, and targeted air strikes would break the siege at the base of the mountain.
The next day, I met in the Roosevelt Room with a group of Yazidis who had come to Washington to plead for military action to save their community from extermination. Many had recently emigrated to America; some had been interpreters for the U.S. military during the Iraq War. They were not the polished diaspora representatives I was accustomed to meeting. Many wore T-shirts and jeans. One after another, they told me of dashed hopes after the U.S. invasion in 2003, of having to flee their communities after helping the U.S. military, and now of ISIL’s campaign of terror. A patriarch with a white handlebar mustache sat across from me at the middle of the table, a huge painting of an idyllic American West behind him. When it was his turn to talk, he spoke in Arabic. He described women being taken from their homes and raped, family members being killed. Tears began to roll down his face. “No one will help us!” he shouted. “Not Maliki. Not Barzani. Only you, the most powerful nation in the world, can help us.”
Once everyone had spoken, they sat and waited for my response. I urged them to share information with our government about what the needs were on Mount Sinjar, and where ISIL was so that we could target them effectively. I began to tear up. “The Yazidi people are a resilient people,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous but certain of what I was saying. “You have endured for thousands of years, and you will endure this.” I walked down to my office and collapsed into my chair.
* * *
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THE NEXT DAY, I was drafted to go with Obama on his two-week vacation to Martha’s Vineyard. Ann was now a senior advisor at the State Department working on global women’s issues. She was also five months pregnant and coming with me. These trips could go either way—a paid vacation with the president, or a nightmare of nonstop work with a skeleton staff. On the Saturday that we boarded Air Force One for the Vineyard, the United States began air strikes on ISIL targets, and a young African American named Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. This was not going to be a vacation.
Obama was staying at a large rental house on the other side of the island, an hour’s drive from the staff. When we got to our hotel, Ann and I were shown to a small, dark room on the ground floor with twin beds. “I’m not staying here,” she said. She didn’t even sit down. I tried to block off time we could spend together, hoping to schedule something of a vacation within the confines of my job, but I had to spend hours sitting in a dark NSC office, wearing headphones, patched into meetings by secure videoconference so that I could update Obama. I had to draft statements on ISIL and Ferguson. I had to brief the press. When I didn’t, reporters would wait in the lobby to intercept me coming and going.
For the first few days, Ann veered between being patient and disappointed, but after seeing the direction things were going, she decided to go home. As in the previous summer, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted her to stay, but I knew that I’d only be working. So I drove my pregnant wife to the airport so she could fly home to D.C., ending our last attempt at a vacation before becoming parents.
I slogged through the days. Driving to the nearby school, where our press was camped out, to answer questions about ISIL. Driving out to Obama’s rental to staff phone calls, give him updates, or draft statements. He tried to cluster his work in the morning so that he could play golf or relax in the afternoon, and when I showed up, he always seemed a little annoyed—as if I were the stand-in for a world that was ruining his vacation. Nights, I drove to a cheap Chinese takeout place and returned to my room. There I’d sit on the couch, eating lo mein out of a plastic container and watching cable news split-screen the unraveling of two of the loftier aspirations of the 2008 campaign—an end to the permanent war, and a bridging of the racial divide.
We flew back to D.C. for a couple of days in the middle of the vacation. Sho
rtly after we took off for the flight back to the Vineyard for week two, Lisa Monaco called me. “Do you have a few minutes?” she asked.
Lisa is a hypercompetent lawyer who had steadily worked herself up the ladder through a series of positions: congressional staffer, prosecutor, chief of staff to Bob Mueller at the FBI, head of the National Security Division at the Justice Department, and now Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor. She sat across the hall from me in John Brennan’s old office, which she had renamed the Lady Cave. She met repeatedly with the families of Americans held hostage abroad, including the four Americans held by ISIL in Syria. One of those Americans was a forty-year-old journalist named Jim Foley, who had been taken in northwestern Syria in late 2012.
As I sat on the plane with a phone pressed to my ear, Lisa’s voice kept cutting in and out. Finally, as the plane reached higher altitude, she came through clearly. There was emotion in her voice: “ISIL has posted a video of Jim Foley,” she said.
“A video?”
“On YouTube. I’m watching it. Jim’s kneeling in an orange jumpsuit. There’s a guy reading a statement behind him.” She started to give snippets from the statement. “ ‘This is a message to America. This is a message to President Obama.’ ” She described the man holding “a small knife.”
It was quiet for a moment, then I heard her voice crack. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.” Then she started to cry. I sat there staring at the beige wall in front of me.
“Was he beheaded?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’ll go tell POTUS.”
I walked into Obama’s office at the front of the plane. He was sitting behind his desk, and Malia was on the couch reading something. I leaned over the desk and he saw the look on my face and his eyes opened wider with concern. He asked Malia to give us a minute.
“They’ve released a video,” I said.
“Foley?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s been beheaded.” I started to explain what I knew about the video. I hesitated a moment before saying, “They described it as a message to America and to you, in response to the bombing.”
Obama chose not to react to that part. “Foley the journalist?” He seemed to want to ground this human being in a vocation, not in his violent end.
“Yeah,” I said. “The stringer who was taken in 2012.”
“I should call his family,” Obama said. “And make some kind of statement.” I looked at the clock. It was a short flight to the Vineyard; we’d be landing soon, so I’d have to draft something. “Are we trying to take the video down?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think our media will cooperate, but they’ll find some ways to get it around.”
He left to go find Malia, and I went back to my seat and got on a conference call.
When we landed, I rode in the motorcade to Obama’s place instead of the staff hotel. The house had an enormous, high-ceilinged living room that was larger than my entire apartment. The Obamas went into an adjacent room to eat dinner with a small group of friends, and I went into an office where there were a couple of laptops and a printer. It was the kind of house where the sound system played in every room at the same volume. I sat there mustering every ounce of outrage to write a statement that would channel our national disgust toward ISIL, learning as much as I could about Jim Foley so I could compose a tribute to his life. I was sitting in a home that someone else had rented, listening to R&B that was playing for people in other rooms. I felt I could step out of myself and see myself sitting there—the effort it took to inhabit an awful moment like this, the absurdity of the setting, the question in my head that Ann would ask: Why does it always have to be you?
By the time I was done and Obama had finished dinner, a collective judgment had been reached to make the statement in the morning—it was getting late, and we’d know more tomorrow. Before I left for the car ride back to the hotel, I met briefly with Obama. I called Denis McDonough and put the phone on speaker on the coffee table in front of us. Clearly, whatever conversation had taken place at dinner included a discussion of whether Obama was entitled to a break. “What difference does it make whether I deliver the statement or we just put it out on paper tonight?” he asked.
“People need to hear from you on this one, Mr. President,” Denis said.
Obama looked at me. “They do,” I added. “It’s a big moment.”
Obama paused. He knew as well as we did that he needed to deliver the statement, but he felt his own—more pronounced—version of the exhaustion I was feeling. It also went against his instinct to not inflate a terrorist group. “Okay,” he said, standing up. “But I think this just elevates ISIL.”
“We understand, sir,” McDonough said.
The next morning, I heard nothing from Obama, but he showed up at the school where the press was assembled. Jen Palmieri had come up for the second week, and we spent a minute with him in an anteroom. He complained again about having to give the statement, a feeling that seemed to have hardened overnight. “It just elevates ISIL,” he said. “It’s exactly what they want.” Still, he delivered the statement forcefully, but would end up being heavily criticized for playing golf that same afternoon.
* * *
—
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW I could keep this up for two more years. By the end of 2014, I would have a new baby, and we would be done with our Cuba negotiation. It’d be a natural point to leave. I just didn’t know if I could convince myself to go through with it. I told Ann, but despite all the sacrifices she’d made, she surprised me by encouraging me to stay. “If you leave,” she said, “you’ll regret it.”
My father had just undergone knee replacement surgery, and I took the train up to see him one day at the outpatient rehabilitation center where he was staying in White Plains. The place had the appearance of an early-twentieth-century retreat—a stately campus of red brick buildings with an internal courtyard. We sat there making small talk, eating sandwiches. My dad told me about the steps he was planning to take to improve his diet and exercise. He was sixty-eight years old when I went to work for Obama; he was now seventy-four and figuring out what the rest of his life would look like. I could tell he had missed seeing me—his first question when we were together was usually about the next time I could visit. But he also always asked, with pride in his voice, “How’s Barack?”
On the train back to New York City, I took out my BlackBerry and saw a series of email chains debating whether Obama should hold a press conference that day. Some of the communications staff thought it was premature—we lacked good answers on ISIL or Ukraine—but McDonough and Palmieri were in a mode where they felt it was always better for him to be out there. Fresh off his vacation, he showed up in the White House briefing room wearing a tan suit, looking like a dapper game show host, which caused a stir. Peppered with questions about ISIL, he responded to one by saying, “We don’t have a strategy yet”—the kind of honest answer that gets a president into trouble. Six years into my job, I didn’t need to read the cycle of criticism popping up on my BlackBerry to know what it said.
As if to rediscover some part of myself from an earlier time, when I read novels and wanted to write one, I was reading a new book by Haruki Murakami. The main character was exactly my age—thirty-six. In the book, he finds himself paralyzed in his own life and looking to his past for answers. I thought about this short trip I was on: the setting was familiar, the New York streets, trying to make plans with old friends, sleeping in my old bedroom. But everything else was different—the things that I was thinking about, the world coming to me through my BlackBerry, the fact that my father was in a rehab center talking about aging. I could see myself in the present circumstance of the narrator, but not in any rediscovery of the past that I didn’t know how to find. I was in the middle of a different story, and if I left my job, I wouldn’t see it through to the end.
/> * * *
—
A FEW DAYS LATER, we flew to Estonia in an effort to show Russia that we would stand up for our easternmost NATO allies. When we landed in the early morning hours, I took a walk through the old part of Tallinn. The streets were empty—just the occasional person going to work, biking, selling flowers. Nestled on the Baltic Sea, Tallinn is a hybrid, with neatly arranged streets and an orderly lifestyle, but with hints of its giant neighbor evident in the Russian orthodox churches that looked like mini-Kremlins. There was a lingering unease, a palpable sense that the place was under threat.
In a meeting, the Estonian president, Toomas Ilves, insisted to Obama that we had to take Putin at his word if he said he would take Kiev. Ilves had an academic manner, and he described methodically how Russia was using fake news and disinformation to turn Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority against Europe. Speaking in paragraphs, he tied together Putin, the emergence of right-wing political parties in Europe, and ISIL. These are people, he said, who fundamentally reject the legitimacy of the liberal order. They are looking for another form of legitimacy—one that is counter to our notion of progress.
After the meeting, I joined Obama for lunch and told him I thought Ilves did the best job I’d heard of tying these disparate threads together, explaining a theory of the forces at work in the world without having to rely on a construct that roots them all in American foreign policy. Without missing a beat, Obama said, “That’s the same dynamic as with the Tea Party. I know those forces because my presidency has bumped up against them.” He paused. “It’s obviously manifest in different ways, but people always look to tear down an ‘other’ when they need legitimacy—immigrants, gays, minorities, other countries.”
