Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  It was exactly the scenario that had most worried us in the U.S. government. A few months before, the U.S. experts had determined the regime was likely using the nerve agent sarin in small-scale, isolated actions. It precipitated my first trip to Moscow as secretary in May 2013. President Obama wanted me to make clear to President Putin that we knew definitively what Assad was doing. It was in Putin’s interests to rein in his proxy. We didn’t specify what would happen if he did not. My meeting with Putin was instructive. He lamented America’s response to the Arab Awakening, particularly our “abandonment” of “reliable” authoritarians in Egypt and Libya. Growing extremism in post-Gaddafi Libya, Putin warned, was evidence of what happens when strong rulers fall without knowing who will replace them.

  I argued to President Putin that in Syria the world had a chance to galvanize an orderly transition now. Assad’s dangerous acts of desperation underscored the urgency. Putin was mercurial. He said he feared both the implosion of the Syrian state and Assad’s penchant for miscalculation, but added that this was no time for “social engineering” in sovereign countries. He made clear that if there was a dangerous moment—institutions of the state collapsing and stockpiles of the world’s worst weapons unsecured—we might work together to seek their safe removal.

  I warned the Russians that we would take action in response to the regime’s chemical weapons misdeeds, however isolated. Not long afterward, the White House announced we would increase the scope and scale of support to Assad’s opposition.

  Now it was late August and Assad had made a clear and criminal statement to the world about how far he would go to preserve his regime. It was imperative that we respond rapidly to reinforce the red line. We needed to hold the war criminal accountable before the world, and we simultaneously needed to send a message to Moscow and Tehran that our word meant something. The phone calls and meetings started right away, as the national security team tried to shape the most effective response.

  I believed President Obama would decide he had to strike and that, therefore, Assad had made a huge miscalculation. He had invited the world to put him on his heels. I believed that military strikes could achieve a number of goals. They would send an unequivocal message that the United States stood by the red line and would enforce it with or without our allies. They would signal that international norms regarding the use of weapons of mass destruction were ironclad and that we would defend them, an important message for a number of regimes, including Iran, to hear loud and clear. And I believed they might finally give us leverage to change Assad’s calculation, beginning by making it plain to him just how badly he’d misjudged the world’s tolerance for his barbarity. I also thought that these strikes could create a diplomatic opening and bring countries together around an endgame that could lead to a post-Assad Syria with the institutions of the state preserved. Assad’s protectors in Iran and Russia would learn there were limits to Assad’s freedom of action and ability to gain advantage on the ground. I knew Assad had acted out of weakness, not strength. There was no military solution to the war, but the opposition was doing well enough to worry him.

  I believed that if Russia’s calculation changed, they might encourage either a negotiated exit for Assad and the creation of a transition government (more acceptable regime elements alongside secular opposition representatives) or an election in which the people of Syria would select their future leader. Most of all, Assad might see that he couldn’t gas his way out of a civil war. A targeted, surgical military response was proportional to Assad’s atrocity, but I believed its bigger potential value was in initiating diplomacy.

  I conveyed all this to my colleagues in conversations that afternoon and the next day, during a three-and-a-half-hour meeting in the White House Situation Room. Susan Rice, who had recently started as the president’s national security advisor, led the meeting. There was broad agreement around the table that a military response was appropriate. I was encouraged because, prior to this event, the military leadership had been reluctant to get more engaged in Syria. Now there seemed to be unanimity that we had to respond forcefully, even with uncertainty about the next step. The question was what and when.

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel both expressed their support for limited military action. It was the first time since I had arrived in February that they did so. The president’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, was wary, concerned it was not in our strategic interest to get pulled into Syria. He and the team’s veterans of the first term all bore the scars of having seen Libya descend into chaos after a humanitarian no-fly zone simultaneously neutered a dictator’s military advantage, led to his death at the hands of his own people and plunged the country into tribal chaos. Some worried we might wind up sending more refugees into neighboring countries already struggling to keep up with the steady stream of displaced families. In fairness, no argument on either side was illogical. It was a question of weighing difficult options, all of which promised uncertain outcomes. That’s exactly what the National Security Council is there for—to air different perspectives, each of which informs the president, the ultimate decider.

  What I could not predict as easily, because I had not been part of the administration the year before, was where the president’s thinking would fall. He had declared a Syria red line in 2012, but I’d seen in my first months on the job that the president was careful and methodical. He based judgments on current information. He always demanded comprehensive analysis of potential unintended consequences. I admired his thoughtful approach. Over the years, America had lost a lot more service members as a result of a president’s rash, ideological decision than it ever had to carefully considered, fact-based ones.

  Likewise, in my six months on the job, I had experienced some teachable moments. Earlier that spring, as we sat around the same conference room table and debated how to support the Syrian opposition, I had inadvertently walked into a small hornet’s nest. I argued that, since the administration had declared in 2012 that “Assad must go,” and repeated it many times since, we risked looking weak if we didn’t increase support to the opposition. Saying Assad must go and doing little to help those trying to make it happen would seem feckless. My remark was not intended as an insult to anyone; it was the obvious backdrop to whatever decisions we recommended.

  I hit a nerve with Denis McDonough. “If you’re saying the president looks weak, I take umbrage at that,” Denis said tensely. That was not what I said. But I did believe that if you said you were going to do something, it was important to follow through. There was a clear distinction. I tried to smooth over the tension with Denis. Deputy Secretary Bill Burns explained to me that there was a long history: many in the White House believed that past administrations’ worries about looking “weak” had sometimes become excuses for bad decisions that weren’t in America’s interests, especially in the Middle East.

  I had lived more than my share of that history; presidents had driven us deeper into Vietnam for fear that correcting course would look weak at home and overseas. But in my judgment, we weren’t debating a deep military entanglement. We weren’t on the brink of a quagmire. Nothing anyone was proposing would have put us on a slippery slope. We were merely discussing ways to back up the policy the president had set a year before. We were also enforcing a globally accepted norm for behavior in conflict. I wondered if scar tissue remained from the way in which the Arab Spring had morphed into an autocratic winter, or if the murder of our diplomats in Benghazi the year before had taken a toll on how the White House now looked at deepening our engagement elsewhere. There was a lot of internal history preceding my arrival at the Situation Room table.

  Still, as we met in August in the aftermath of the chemical weapons atrocities, I thought military action was inevitable and that it was better to act quickly—for many reasons, including denying Assad time to place innocent civilians into key targets to deter us from hitting them. Surprise and speed were a
ssets, I figured.

  It became quickly clear neither was on the agenda.

  Martin Dempsey talked us through various military options, including launching Tomahawk missiles from destroyers already deployed in the Mediterranean. A contingency target list had been assembled by the Pentagon weeks beforehand, including military facilities and government-owned buildings.

  We reconvened the next day with the president. The conversation focused on how—not whether—we would strike. The military options were relatively straightforward; we debated whether we would be on solid legal ground. Russia would veto any meaningful response at the UN Security Council. After all, in a remarkable display of churlish contrarianism and propagandist posturing, Russia was still claiming Assad had not even carried out the attack. It seemed they treated everything as a game, but their veto at the UN gave them a strong hand to play.

  Our internal discussions bogged down over legal precedent. There are three basic legal green lights for a nation’s use of force: one, you are acting in self-defense; two, you are acting pursuant to an invitation from the legitimate government of a nation; and three, you are acting pursuant to a UN Security Council resolution. Those are essentially uncontestable. Then there is action within the “color” of law—something that may, depending on the circumstances, be arguable but if sufficiently compelling will most likely get by. In the late 1990s, President Clinton and our NATO allies used military force to stop Slobodan Milošević’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Clinton knew he would not receive UN Security Council support, given that Russia supported Milošević. Instead, the administration justified its actions based on the “legitimacy” of action.

  What Assad had done to those innocent, sleeping children was without question a humanitarian emergency with far broader security consequences for the region and beyond. I believed it would be a dangerous precedent for international law if any government could gas its citizens with impunity, with Putin holding final veto over what was legal and what wasn’t. There were other multilateral organizations that could lend their imprimatur to action, including, as it had on Libya, the Arab League and possibly NATO.

  President Obama raised the question of engaging Congress. Vice President Biden, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and I—three former senators—were in favor of consulting Congress. We knew everything would be easier with the Hill on our side. But I argued that sudden, surgical military action, rather than months of bombing, shouldn’t require the time to wait for formal authorization from Congress, particularly since it was scheduled to be on recess until September 9. Swift action was imperative.

  In between our internal deliberations and domestic outreach, I was on the phone with foreign counterparts. There was reluctance among some Europeans based on questions of legality. They feared acting without UN approval. But Jordan pushed for action, noting that the attack had been mere miles from the Jordanian border. Saudi Arabia warned that our credibility was on the line.

  Russia, as expected, was a through-the-looking-glass conversation. Sergei Lavrov balked at the idea that the Assad regime was to blame. He told me we couldn’t rule out the possibility the rebels somehow amassed the chemicals without our knowledge and used them on their own communities in an attempt to rally international sympathy. If Assad had nothing to hide, I told Sergei, he should let UN inspectors come examine the site in question immediately, while the evidence was fresh. Rather than welcoming the inspectors with open arms, Assad continued to shell the rebel-held areas where the attacks transpired, destroying evidence by the hour and making any eventual findings increasingly less credible.

  With each succeeding day, the Russians joined the Syrians in sowing public doubt. One Russian member of parliament told reporters that the United States was “ ‘convinced’ that Assad used chemical weapons, and earlier they were ‘convinced’ that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It’s the same old story.”

  Susan Rice and I thought the absurd Russian propaganda effort demanded a response. You don’t let charges go unanswered. We had lived my 2004 campaign together—Susan was a senior leader of the general election effort. Neither of us thought Assad or Russia should be allowed to rewrite history with impunity. So, on Monday morning, August 26, at the president’s direction, I went to the press briefing room on the second floor of the State Department to respond to the Russians. I told the reporters that based on the evidence we had gathered already, including open-sourced information like the number and location of the victims, the symptoms of those killed or injured and the firsthand accounts of the humanitarian organizations on the ground, there was no doubt that Assad was responsible and that the regime was actively working to cover it up. It was beyond debate.

  The president hadn’t shared a final, formal decision, but the discussions inside the Situation Room left me confident we were a few days, not weeks, away from air strikes.

  Because Congress was still out of session, Susan Rice, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper and I held a conference call to brief members on both sides of the aisle on the evidence and why the administration believed a response was warranted. We were getting our ducks in a row. The chairs and ranking members of the relevant national security committees seemed supportive. I got the sense that the Senate leaders actually preferred we act without more than this congressional consultation, because they had a busy legislative schedule that fall. But several members did ask if we planned to come to them for authorization.

  The only note of concern I heard was from Republican representative Hal Rogers of Kentucky, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He was supportive of strikes against Assad but wary of the global politics. “If Russia’s not with you, and the UN isn’t with you, aren’t you better off if the Congress is with you?” It was sincerely constructive advice. But it probably assumed a functional Congress that no longer existed. Rogers was one powerful member of the House; but his colleague, the junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, was already prone to describing American support for the Syrian opposition as “arming al-Qaeda.” Politics hadn’t stopped at the water’s edge in a long time. Still, Rogers’s words stuck in my mind.

  I bounced back and forth between talking to Capitol Hill and talking to our allies. Already we were working hand in glove with Chuck Hagel and his military counterparts in key Arab countries to build a broad coalition representative of the region, not just the West. We were also mindful of avoiding the appearance that it was the Sunni world ganging up against a Shia government.

  Foreign Secretary William Hague from the United Kingdom, among the foreign ministers most frequently on my speed dial, reiterated Prime Minister David Cameron’s commitment to act in lockstep with the United States. Cameron had cut short his vacation and returned to London. But suddenly there was a wrinkle: without any prior notice to us, Cameron announced he would seek Parliament’s approval before moving forward. Cameron was confident he’d win the vote, and in a parliamentary system that’s usually the case. But this time, Cameron had miscalculated—badly. On August 29, the vote failed in Parliament. The shadow of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s buddy routine with George W. Bush on the misadventure of Iraq still poisoned politics in Great Britain. Cameron, chastened, conceded that he would respect the verdict of Parliament.

  I was on the phone almost immediately to Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France. He confirmed that President François Hollande remained committed, with or without the United Kingdom. For France, perhaps, there might even be some bragging rights in carrying the banner for an always competitive Europe.

  Nonetheless, I worried we were losing momentum. Time was passing. It had been eight days since the attacks, and we learned Assad was taking countermeasures that put civilian lives at risk.

  The vote in London sent shock waves through our politics at home. It revived overnight memories of the Iraq War. The Russians were also laying a trap, publicly arguing that no military steps be taken before completion of a UN investigation. They were just trying to run out the
clock and hope that the sense of urgency evaporated: the UN investigation was charged only with concluding whether chemical weapons had been used, not who used them. And, of course, at the end of any investigation a Russian veto awaited in the Security Council.

  We couldn’t afford to wait. We needed to fight back against efforts to change the subject.

  I’d been pushing for our administration to release a declassified report on the chemical weapons attack, to help the country judge for itself what had happened and to debunk the distortions of Assad’s allies in Moscow. To accompany it, I was asked to make a public statement that was factual but forceful.

  As someone who had lived through the Iraq debate in 2002, I wanted to be certain that my case would stand the test of truth. Secretary Colin Powell’s infamous speech on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction at the UN forever haunted him. I was not going to speak a word I wasn’t sure was accurate. But I also wanted every American watching at home to know the truth: We didn’t suspect, we didn’t surmise. We knew what had happened in the Damascus suburbs.

  Along with my chief of staff and Deputy Secretary Bill Burns, I worked through the night and all morning up to a few minutes before my remarks, trading edits and honing the text. The White House signed off on it. The case I was about to make was precise, down to the last word. I wanted to lay out the facts much as I used to when I was a prosecutor. It seemed very similar to a closing statement in a trial: here’s what we know, and here’s why it matters. I felt a moral clarity about the argument in the same way I had felt moral clarity when I testified to the Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.

  I entered the Treaty Room and began a live television broadcast. After walking through all the evidence, I said, “The primary question is no longer what do we know. The question is what is the free world going to do about it?” I was thinking of a different leader who used gas to murder his own people when I said, “As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the temptations of looking the other way. History is full of leaders who have warned against inaction, indifference and especially against silence when it mattered most.” But this was not simply a case of keeping faith with the 1,459 lives lost days before in Syria; even longer-standing principles were at stake. I reminded the country that “it matters that nearly a hundred years ago, in direct response to the utter horror and inhumanity of World War I, that the civilized world agreed that chemical weapons should never be used again. That was the world’s resolve then. And that began nearly a century of effort to create a clear red line for the international community.” I didn’t want the predictable cable coverage to gloss over the fact that this wasn’t President Obama’s red line alone—it was the world’s red line and it had been drawn nearly a century before.