by Ben Rhodes
Obama made a point of being the chief salesman himself. He had the entire Democratic caucus to the White House. He did interviews and made speeches. Toward the end of July, he went on The Daily Show to reach the younger audience that we’d need to buck up Democrats. “If people are engaged, eventually the political system responds,” Obama said. “Despite the money, despite the lobbyists, it still responds.” Later, on a conference call with antiwar activists, he noted that the same people who supported the Iraq War were now opposing the Iran deal. That’s when things began to take an ugly turn.
These were anodyne and accurate statements. Yet some deal opponents started to make a new charge: that Obama and his team were anti-Semites, conjuring up stereotypes of moneyed Jewish interests propelling us into a war. This put us into an impossible position. Even to acknowledge the fact that AIPAC was spending tens of millions to defeat the Iran deal was anti-Semitic. To observe that the same people who supported the war in Iraq also opposed the Iran deal was similarly off limits. It was an offensive way for people to avoid accountability for their own positions.
Obama wasn’t going to be intimidated. In a short meeting with a group of us before he spoke to American Jewish community leaders in early August, I explained that people were accusing him of using anti-Semitic dog whistles.
“Dog whistles?” he asked. “How, exactly?”
“By saying that the same people who got us into the war in Iraq want to take us to war with Iran.”
“How is that a dog whistle?” He was incredulous, and—as was often the case when I was the messenger for this type of thing—he talked to me as if I was the one making the criticism.
“They’re saying that’s us calling Jews warmongers.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “John Bolton wants to bomb Iran, right?”
“Yes,” I said. Bolton had written an op-ed for The New York Times entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
“Is he Jewish?”
“No.”
“Dick Cheney?”
“No.”
“I’m black,” he said. “I think I know when folks are using dog whistles. I hear them all the time.” His voice was raised a bit, which almost never happened. “Come on.” He paused, returning to his even temperament. “This is aggravating.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m the self-hating Jew. Or half self-hating.”
He laughed, then turned more serious. “This isn’t about anti-Semitism,” he said. “They’re trying to take away our best argument, that it’s this or war.”
Before going on his own August vacation, he gave a speech at American University. In it he made a case for the deal that he wanted Democrats to take home with them over recess. “I know it’s easy to play on people’s fears, to magnify threats, to compare any attempt at diplomacy to Munich, but none of these arguments hold up,” he said. “They didn’t back in 2002, in 2003, they shouldn’t now. That same mindset, in many cases offered by the same people, who seem to have no compunction about being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have done in the decades before or since.”
The reaction was fierce. In one of the harsher responses, an editorial in Tablet magazine lamented, “The use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives.” I cringed when I read these things. Support for Israel had been central to my own sense of identity as I was coming of age, a way for a child of mixed religious background to find an anchor in culture and history. Now that kind of attachment was being cynically manipulated to discredit a profoundly unbiased president, destroy a diplomatic agreement, and once again avoid any reckoning with the actual legacy of Iraq.
* * *
—
I SPENT MY AUGUST vacation calling senators and comparing vote counts with Dick Durbin, who was leading the effort in the Senate and reporting every shred of gossip to Obama. Unlike the previous year, Obama relished working in Martha’s Vineyard, calling more than thirty members of Congress from his vacation home. After each call, he’d send me a note about something we could do to help a Democrat get to yes—a letter from him, a surrogate in their district, a particular argument that needed to be made.
Gradually, things started to break our way. People other than us started to shoot down the anti-Semitism charge. Twenty-nine leading physicists came out for the deal. European ambassadors lobbied on behalf of the agreement. Retired national security officials and ambassadors to Israel wrote letters of support. Dozens of retired Israeli generals signed a petition contradicting Netanyahu and supporting the deal; so did the former head of Mossad. Three hundred forty rabbis wrote an open letter. Several dozen Iranian dissidents signed a letter indicating that supporters of human rights in Iran supported the deal. A majority of American Jews supported the deal in public opinion surveys, a higher percentage than in the broader public. A steady drumbeat of Democrats started to come out in support.
As Congress came back to town, it was clear we’d have enough support in the House and Senate to uphold a presidential veto if Congress voted to reject the deal. Our efforts narrowed to a handful of Democratic senators who could get us to the forty-one votes necessary to prevent Congress from even passing a rejection of the deal. We also wanted to secure a healthy majority of Jewish Democrats in the House so the deal would be less polarizing. The key vote remained Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the congresswoman from Florida—and head of the Democratic National Committee—whom I had spent many hours talking to about Iran over the years.
I was up in New York City when she called and said she needed to speak to Obama. Around the same time, a reporter emailed me to say he’d heard Debbie was coming out against the deal. All day, I was in a bad mood, worried that the head of the DNC was announcing her opposition. Obama couldn’t call her until late at night, and so it was midnight when I got a note that they’d connected. When Debbie finally called me, my mother was speaking in Yiddish in the background, saying she’d go down to Debbie’s district to give a piece of her mind to any of the meshugganahs who gave her grief. Debbie told me she was a yes, and we both ended up in tears. “Tell your mother she’s welcome down here anytime!” she said.
By the time Congress voted on the deal, we had logged more than twelve hundred engagements with members of Congress. For many of them, the decision was wrenching, politically and personally. But in the end, nearly all of the final votes broke our way. Forty-two senators supported the deal, ensuring that Congress would not be able to express disapproval.
On the day that we secured our final votes, Dick Cheney gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, the heart of neoconservatism, which he’d scheduled before our success was a foregone conclusion. We watched gleefully from the Antiwar Room as Cheney reinforced our contention that the same people who got us into war in Iraq wanted to do the same thing in Iran. One moment in particular seemed to encapsulate all that had happened over two months: Antiwar protesters disrupted the speech, shouting, “He was wrong on Iraq, he is wrong on Iran,” which prompted an older white guy to get up and try to rip a sign from a young woman’s hand; after a few awkward moments, he gave up and fell back into his chair.
I took Chad up to the Oval Office. Obama smiled. “That was actually kind of fun,” he told us.
“I’ll never do anything like that again in government,” Chad said.
CHAPTER 27
BOMBS AND CHILDREN
About fifteen of us boarded a weathered, canopied motorboat from Luang Prabang, the ancient Buddhist capital of Laos, for a ninety-minute ride up the Mekong River. The water was brown and slow-moving, and as the wooden hotels and temples faded in the distance, the riverbank became overwhelmed by thick, green forest at the base of rolling hill
s. The boat was filled with embassy staff and some local Lao contacts who chatted leisurely and kept a slight distance from me. I had the sense that they were all trying to figure out what I was doing there.
We arrived at a beach where several dozen young children were assembled under a tarp tied to some wooden poles, singing songs. Our boat was full of school supplies. The kids were arranged into rows for some kind of performance while I stood in front of them next to our ambassador, Dan Clune. I noticed a particularly sassy girl of about five in the front row, wearing an oversized T-shirt decorated with a huge picture of Elsa from Frozen. After the kids danced and sang a couple of songs, Dan, my assistant, Rumana Ahmed, and I climbed into a Toyota Land Cruiser with a large stamp on it stamped FROM THE GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN for a short drive to a clearance site for unexploded ordnance. “They’ll give you a briefing,” Dan said, “and then there will be a demonstration.”
Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world. From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail and try to stanch a Communist insurgency—more than was dropped on all of Germany and Japan during World War II. There were 580,000 bombing missions, which averages out to one every eight minutes for nine years. Sometimes, U.S. planes returning to Thailand from missions over Vietnam indiscriminately dropped their remaining bombs on Laos. More than 270 million cluster munitions—“bombies”—were used, and 80 million of them failed to detonate. In the four decades since the end of the war, only 1 percent have been cleared. More than fifty thousand people have been killed or injured in UXO accidents; over the last decade, nearly half of those casualties have been children.
We stopped and got out of the Land Cruiser. A white tent was set up on a hill overlooking a field, where a team of women wearing khaki uniforms had been searching for bombies with rudimentary metal detectors in the tall grass of a rice paddy. Under the tent, a briefing space was set up where a group of men huddled around U.S. military maps from the war that showed the location of bombing runs. This was an eclectic group of briefers: a man from UXO Lao—the agency responsible for clearance efforts; a Laotian in a drab military uniform who looked old enough to have fought in the war; an excited French contractor; a farmer who had found the ordnance in the adjacent field. He smiled when they gestured to him, showing only a couple of teeth.
“With additional resources,” said the man from UXO Lao, “we can conduct a survey of the whole country. Then we can clear areas needed for farming. UXO is not just a humanitarian issue. For us, it’s also development.”
The man paused, measuring my reaction. Everyone seemed a bit on edge, as if I represented their best shot at securing an infusion of funding. There was no mention of the fact that I represented the government that had dropped hundreds of millions of cluster munitions on this country for no reason that could possibly be rationalized.
“This is actually one of the most heavily bombed areas,” he said to me, gesturing at the hills in the distance. “The Plain of Jars.”
We crossed over the field to where a woman with a smiling face showed me how the metal detectors work, leading me over to where they’d found a bombie earlier that day. We stood in a circle around it, looking down. It resembled a metallic baseball.
“The children, they see it,” said the head of UXO Lao. “They think it’s a toy and pick it up and then…” he broke off into the sound of an explosion.
We moved back across the field. They had tied a long wire to this bombie and attached it to an orange device under our tent. I thought of the time and effort that went into finding and exploding this single bombie, with eighty million still buried out there in the vast country. They asked me to turn a handle several times to blow it up. I expected something akin to a large firecracker; instead, an enormous blast shook the ground underneath my feet, echoing across the river valley, sending a towering plume of smoke into the air. It was possible, in that moment, to envision the river valley filled with explosions, smoke covering the Mekong, planes overhead.
In one of my meetings with the Lao government that day, I had pressed for more cooperation in identifying the remains of American servicemen who’d gone missing in Laos. To date, we had found the remains of 273 Americans. Extraordinary efforts were put into finding even the most minimal traces of life—a tooth, for instance. It was hard to square the extent to which we admirably valued every American life with the bombs that we’d dropped. The briefing team stood waiting for me to say something. “Every morning,” I had said, “I meet with President Obama. We want to do everything that we can to help. When I get home, I will tell him about the work that you are doing here.” Tears welled up in the eyes of one of the men, even though he was much more hardened by life than I am.
We drove back to where the children were, less than a mile away. I stood at the front of a line, handing out books, pencils, and M&M’s that Rumana had brought in her luggage. Rumana, a Muslim American covered in a hijab, smiled and played with one of the girls, who shook the box of M&M’s, thinking it was a rattle. An embassy staffer next to me asked how the UXO demonstration had gone. “It was a much bigger explosion than I expected,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “None of the kids even looked up.”
* * *
—
I KNOW HOW THIS is going to sound, but Anthony Bourdain was the one who hooked me on Laos. Over the previous year, I had slipped further into insomnia—the accumulated effect of Benghazi stress and a hungry newborn keeping me awake for long stretches of each night. I’d fill that time lying on my couch in a darkened living room plowing through every episode of Bourdain’s various travel shows, over and over. I felt a sense of recognition in this guy wandering around the world, trying to find some temporary connection with other human beings living within their own histories. I’d been vaguely familiar with the story of Laos. Hillary had visited in 2012, and I remembered that we cobbled together some money for UXO clearance—a few numbers on a budget sheet. But the Bourdain episode that showed human beings on a television screen in the middle of the night, struggling in a place that was still a war zone, forty years after a war that I’d never learned about in school, woke my interest. I added two items to the bucket list for my final year in the job: Get more money for Laos, and get Obama to tape an episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.
Obama was scheduled to visit Laos in the fall of 2016 for a summit, so I had resolved to go myself, a year in advance, to create the basis to come back to Washington and find more money to clean up bombs. Now, here I was, in a hotel in Luang Prabang, having just seen one of those bombs with my own eyes.
I lay in bed, replaying the day’s events in my head. We’d boarded the boat for the ride back to the city, heading back down the river as the light drew down to near complete darkness, and I’d thought about what it’d be like to leave the world behind to run some small hotel on the riverbank, catering to backpackers and European tourists. At dinner that night with Dan Clune, I had talked about how the longer I served in government, the more war of any kind made less sense to me, rife as it was with unintended consequences. We were in our fifteenth year of war in Afghanistan, and it was hard to see what positive difference we were making. A rounding error of the money we spent each year in Afghanistan could alter the trajectory of a country like Laos—feeding children, sending them to school, cleaning up the bombs that they stumbled upon.
As I finally started to drift to sleep, a loud group of people returned to the hotel room next to me, laughing drunkenly and playing music. I gave up on sleep, and my efforts to shut down my thoughts. My mind ran over the six weeks that had passed since we secured the Iran deal. There had been the United Nations General Assembly in September, where Putin seized the spotlight by escalating Russia’s military intervention in Syria and beginning to bomb Assad’s opposition. As usual, the issue had been framed as a showdown between Putin a
nd Obama. As usual, Obama’s case depended upon a much longer view of history. Ultimately, he argued, the bill would come due for Putin’s interventions—the money spent on wars abroad, the impact of sanctions on his economy, the rot of a corrupt system in which Putin and his cronies ran Russia as a cartel. But in the reality of politics in 2015, Putin was better than Obama at putting himself at the center of events that captured attention. We ended up looking as if we were reacting to Putin, and not the other way around.
I couldn’t escape a gnawing sense of futility about our ability to change things in Syria. More civilians were being killed and displaced. Refugees were streaming into Europe. A brutal dictator, backed by brutal regimes in Iran and Russia, was winning the war, even if it was hard to see how what he was doing amounted to victory. At the same time, I couldn’t summon the optimism I’d had in 2011 and 2012, the belief that America could make things better in the Middle East.
It was far easier for me to see how the war in Syria was in part an unintended consequence of other American wars, no matter how well-meaning they might have been. The toppling of Saddam Hussein had strengthened Iran, provoked Putin, opened up a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict that now raged in Iraq and Syria, and led to an insurgency that had given birth to ISIL. The toppling of Muammar Gaddafi had made plain to dictators that you either cling to power or end up dead in a sewer. Syria looked more and more like a moral morass—a place where our inaction was a tragedy, and our intervention would only compound the tragedy. Obama kept probing for options that could make a positive difference, finding none.
