by Obama Barack
The fruit vendor’s anguish set off weeks of nationwide demonstrations against the Tunisian government, and on January 14, 2011, Ben Ali and his family fled to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, similar protests, made up mostly of young people, were beginning to happen in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and Oman, the first flickers of what became known as the Arab Spring.
As I prepared to give my State of the Union address on January 25, my team debated the extent to which I should comment on the events happening almost at warp speed in the Middle East and North Africa. With public protest having effectively driven a sitting autocrat from power in Tunisia, people across the region seemed galvanized and hopeful about the possibilities for wider change. Still, the complexities were daunting and good outcomes far from guaranteed. In the end, we added a single, straightforward line to my speech:
“Tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”
From the U.S. perspective, the most significant developments were in Egypt, where a coalition of Egyptian youth organizations, activists, left-wing opposition parties, and prominent writers and artists had issued a nationwide call for mass protests against President Mubarak’s regime. On the same day as my State of the Union, close to fifty thousand Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, demanding an end to emergency law, police brutality, and restrictions on political freedom. Thousands of others participated in similar protests across the country. The police were attempting to disperse the crowds using batons, water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas, and Mubarak’s government would not only issue an official ban on protesting but also block Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in an effort to hamper the demonstrators’ ability to organize or connect with the outside world. For days and nights to come, Tahrir Square would resemble a permanent encampment, with legions of Egyptians standing in defiance of their president, calling for “bread, freedom, and dignity.”
This was precisely the scenario my Presidential Study Directive had sought to avoid: the U.S. government suddenly caught between a repressive but reliable ally and a population insistent on change, voicing the democratic aspirations we claimed to stand for. Alarmingly, Mubarak himself seemed oblivious about the uprising taking place around him. I’d spoken to him by phone just a week earlier, and he’d been both helpful and responsive as we’d discussed ways to coax the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table, as well as his government’s call for unity in response to the bombing of a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, carried out by Muslim extremists. But when I’d brought up the possibility that the protests that had begun in Tunisia might spread to his own country, Mubarak had dismissed it, explaining that “Egypt is not Tunisia.” He’d assured me that any protest against his government would quickly die down. Listening to his voice, I’d imagined him sitting in one of the cavernous, ornately decorated rooms inside the presidential palace where we’d first met—the curtains drawn, him looking imperious in a high-backed chair as a few aides took notes or just watched, coiled in readiness to attend to his needs. Insulated as he was, he would see what he wanted to see, I thought, and hear what he wanted to hear—and none of it boded well.
Meanwhile, the news footage from Tahrir Square brought back different memories. The crowds in those first few days appeared to be disproportionately young and secular—not unlike the students and activists who’d been in the audience of my Cairo speech. In interviews, they came off as thoughtful and informed, insisting on their commitment to nonviolence and their desire for democratic pluralism, rule of law, and a modern, innovative economy that could deliver jobs and a better standard of living. In their idealism and courage in challenging an oppressive social order, they appeared no different from the young people who had once helped tear down the Berlin Wall or stood in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. They weren’t so different, either, from the young people who’d helped elect me president.
“If I were an Egyptian in my twenties,” I told Ben, “I’d probably be out there with them.”
Of course, I wasn’t an Egyptian in my twenties. I was president of the United States. And as compelling as these young people were, I had to remind myself that they—along with the university professors, human rights activists, secular opposition party members, and trade unionists also on the front lines of the protests—represented only a fraction of the Egyptian population. If Mubarak stepped down, creating a sudden power vacuum, they weren’t the ones most likely to fill it. One of the tragedies of Mubarak’s dictatorial reign was that it had stunted the development of the institutions and traditions that might help Egypt effectively manage a transition to democracy: strong political parties, an independent judiciary and media, impartial election monitors, broad-based civic associations, an effective civil service, and respect for minority rights. Outside the military, which was deeply entrenched throughout Egyptian society and reportedly had a significant stake in large swaths of the economy, the most powerful and cohesive force in the country was the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni-based Islamist organization whose central objective was to see Egypt—and the entire Arab world—governed by sharia law. Thanks to its grassroots organizing and charitable work on behalf of the poor (and despite the fact that Mubarak had officially banned it), the Brotherhood boasted a substantial membership. It also embraced political participation rather than violence as a way of advancing its goals, and in any fair and free election, the candidates it backed would be odds-on favorites to win. Still, many governments in the region viewed the Brotherhood as a subversive, dangerous threat, and the organization’s fundamentalist philosophy made it both unreliable as a custodian for democratic pluralism and potentially problematic for U.S.-Egyptian relations.
In Tahrir Square, the demonstrations continued to swell, as did violent clashes between protesters and police. Apparently awakened from his slumber, Mubarak went on Egyptian television on January 28 to announce that he was replacing his cabinet, but he offered no signs that he intended to respond to the demands for broader reform. Convinced that the problem wasn’t going away, I consulted my national security team to try to come up with an effective response. The group was divided, almost entirely along generational lines. The older and more senior members of my team—Joe, Hillary, Gates, and Panetta—counseled caution, all of them having known and worked with Mubarak for years. They emphasized the role his government had long played in keeping peace with Israel, fighting terrorism, and partnering with the United States on a host of other regional issues. While they acknowledged the need to press the Egyptian leader on reform, they warned that there was no way of knowing who or what might replace him. Meanwhile, Samantha, Ben, Denis, Susan Rice, and Joe’s national security advisor, Tony Blinken, were convinced that Mubarak had fully and irretrievably lost his legitimacy with the Egyptian people. Rather than keep our wagon hitched to a corrupt authoritarian order on the verge of collapse (and appear to be sanctioning the escalating use of force against protesters), they considered it both strategically prudent and morally right for the U.S. government to align itself with the forces of change.
I shared both the hopes of my younger advisors and the fears of my older ones. Our best bet for a positive outcome, I decided, was to see if we could persuade Mubarak to embrace a series of substantive reforms, including ending the emergency law, restoring political and press freedoms, and setting a date for free and fair national elections. Such an “orderly transition,” as Hillary described it, would give opposition political parties and potential candidates time to build followings and develop serious plans to govern. It would also allow Mubarak to retire as an elder statesman, which might help mitigate perceptions in the region that we were willing to dump longtime allies at the slightest hint of trouble.
It went without saying that trying to convince an aging, embattled despot to ride off into the sunset, even if it was in his own interests, would be a delicate operati
on. After the Situation Room discussion, I phoned Mubarak again, raising the idea of him putting forward a bolder set of reforms. He instantly grew combative, characterizing the protesters as members of the Muslim Brotherhood and insisting once again that the situation would soon return to normal. He did agree, though, to my request to send an envoy—Frank Wisner, who’d been a U.S. ambassador to Egypt in the late 1980s—to Cairo for more extensive private consultations.
Using Wisner to make a direct, face-to-face appeal to the Egyptian president had been Hillary’s idea, and I thought it made sense: Wisner was literally a scion of the American foreign policy establishment, his father having been an iconic leader during the foundational years of the CIA, and he was someone Mubarak knew well and trusted. At the same time, I understood that Wisner’s history with Mubarak and his old-school approach to U.S. diplomacy might make him conservative in evaluating the prospects for change. Before he left, I called him with clear instructions to “be bold”: I wanted him to push Mubarak to announce that he would step down after new elections were held—a gesture I hoped would be dramatic and specific enough to give protesters confidence that change really was coming.
While we awaited the outcome of Wisner’s mission, the media became more focused on my administration’s reaction to the crisis—and, more specifically, whose side we were on. So far, we’d issued little more than generic public statements in an effort to buy ourselves time. But Washington reporters—many of whom clearly found the cause of the young protesters compelling—began pressing Gibbs on why we weren’t unambiguously standing with the forces of democracy. Foreign leaders in the region, meanwhile, wanted to know why we weren’t supporting Mubarak more forcefully. Bibi Netanyahu insisted that maintaining order and stability in Egypt mattered above all else, telling me that otherwise “you will see Iran in there in two seconds.” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was even more alarmed; the spread of protests in the region was an existential threat to a family monarchy that had long squelched any form of internal dissent. He also believed that the Egyptian protesters weren’t in fact speaking for themselves. He ticked off the “four factions” he believed were behind the protests: the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and Hamas.
Neither of these leaders’ analyses stood up to scrutiny. The Sunnis, who made up the vast majority of Egyptians (and all of the Muslim Brotherhood), were hardly susceptible to the influence of Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, and there was absolutely no evidence that al-Qaeda or Hamas was behind the demonstrations in any way. Still, even younger, more reform-minded leaders in the region, including King Abdullah of Jordan, feared the possibility of protests engulfing their countries, and while they used more sophisticated language, they clearly expected the United States to choose, as Bibi had put it, “stability” over “chaos.”
By January 31, Egyptian army tanks were stationed throughout Cairo, the government had shut down internet service across the city, and protesters were planning a nationwide general strike for the next day. Wisner’s readout on his meeting with Mubarak arrived: The Egyptian president would publicly commit not to run for another term but had stopped short of suspending emergency law or agreeing to support a peaceful transfer of power. The report only widened the split within my national security team: The more senior members saw Mubarak’s concession as enough justification to stick with him, while the younger staffers considered the move—much like Mubarak’s sudden decision to appoint his chief of intelligence, Omar Suleiman, as vice president—as no more than a stalling tactic that would fail to placate the demonstrators. Tom Donilon and Denis let me know that staff debates had turned acrimonious and that reporters were picking up on the discrepancy between Joe’s and Hillary’s cautiously anodyne statements and the more strident criticism of Mubarak coming from Gibbs and others in the administration.
Partly to make sure that everyone was singing from the same hymnal while we determined our next steps, I paid an unscheduled visit to a meeting of the NSC Principals Committee in the Situation Room late in the afternoon on February 1. The discussion had barely begun when an aide informed us that Mubarak was addressing the Egyptian people on a nationwide broadcast. We turned on the room’s TV monitor so we could watch it in real time. Dressed in a dark suit and reading from a prepared text, Mubarak appeared to be following through on his pledge to Wisner, saying that he had never intended to nominate himself for another term as president and announcing that he would call on the Egyptian parliament—a parliament he entirely controlled—to discuss speeding up a timeline for new elections. But the terms of an actual transfer of power were so vague that any Egyptian watching would likely conclude that whatever promises Mubarak was now making could and would be reversed the moment the protests died down. In fact, the Egyptian president devoted the bulk of the speech to accusing provocateurs and unnamed political forces of hijacking the protests to undermine the nation’s security and stability. He insisted that he would continue to fulfill his responsibility, as someone who had “never, ever been seeking power,” to protect Egypt from agents of chaos and violence. When he finished the address, someone turned off the monitor, and I leaned back in my chair, stretching my arms behind my head.
“That,” I said, “is not going to cut it.”
I wanted to take one last shot at convincing Mubarak to initiate a real transition. Returning to the Oval Office, I placed a call to him, and I put the phone on speaker mode so that my assembled advisors could hear. I began by complimenting him on his decision not to run again. I could only imagine how difficult it might be for Mubarak, someone who’d first assumed power when I was in college and had outlasted four of my predecessors, to hear what I was about to say.
“Now that you’ve made this historic decision for a transition of power,” I said, “I want to discuss with you how it will work. I say this with the utmost respect…I want to share my honest assessment about what I think will accomplish your goals.” I then cut to the bottom line: If he stayed in office and dragged out the transition process, I believed, the protests would continue and possibly spin out of control. If he wanted to ensure the election of a responsible government that wasn’t dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, then now was the time for him to step down and use his stature behind the scenes to help usher in a new Egyptian government.
Although Mubarak and I normally spoke to each other in English, he chose this time to address me in Arabic. I didn’t need the translator to catch the agitation in his voice. “You don’t understand the culture of the Egyptian people,” he declared, his voice rising. “President Obama, if I go into the transition this way, it will be the most dangerous thing for Egypt.”
I acknowledged that I didn’t know Egyptian culture the way he did, and that he’d been in politics far longer than I had. “But there are moments in history where just because things have been the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be the same way in the future. You’ve served your country well for over thirty years. I want to make sure you seize this historic moment in a way that leaves a great legacy for you.”
We went back and forth like this for several more minutes, with Mubarak insisting on the need for him to remain where he was and repeating that the protests would soon be over. “I know my people,” he said toward the end of the call. “They are emotional people. I will talk to you after a while, Mr. President, and I will tell you that I was right.”
I hung up the phone. For a moment, the room was silent, everyone’s eyes glued on me. I had given Mubarak my best advice. I had offered him a plan for a graceful exit. Any leader who replaced him, I knew, might end up being a worse partner for the United States—and potentially worse for the Egyptian people. And the truth was, I could have lived with any genuine transition plan he might have presented, even if it left much of the regime’s existing network intact. I was enough of a realist to assume that had it not been for the stubborn persistence of those young people in Tahrir Square, I’d have worked with Mubarak f
or the rest of my presidency, despite what he stood for—just as I would continue to work with the rest of the “corrupt, rotting authoritarian order,” as Ben liked to call it, that controlled life in the Middle East and North Africa.
Except those kids were in Tahrir Square. Because of their brash insistence on a better life, others had joined them—mothers and laborers and shoemakers and taxi drivers. Those hundreds of thousands of people had, for a brief moment at least, lost their fear, and they wouldn’t stop demonstrating unless Mubarak restored that fear the only way he knew how: through beatings and gunfire, detentions and torture. Earlier in my presidency, I hadn’t managed to influence the Iranian regime’s vicious crackdown on Green Movement protesters. I might not be able to stop a China or Russia from crushing its own dissidents. But the Mubarak regime had received billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars; we supplied them with weapons, shared information, and helped train their military officers; and for me to allow the recipient of that aid, someone we called an ally, to perpetrate wanton violence on peaceful demonstrators, with all the world watching—that was a line I was unwilling to cross. It would do too much damage, I thought, to the idea of America. It would do too much damage to me.
“Let’s prepare a statement,” I said to my team. “We’re calling on Mubarak to step down now.”
* * *
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CONTRARY TO THE BELIEFS of many in the Arab world (and more than a few American reporters), the United States is not a grand puppet master whimsically pulling the strings of the countries with which it does business. Even governments that rely on our military and economic assistance think first and foremost of their own survival, and the Mubarak regime was no exception. After I publicly announced my conviction that it was time for Egypt to start a quick transition to a new government, Mubarak remained defiant, testing how far he could go in intimidating the protesters. The next day, while the Egyptian army stood idly by, gangs of pro-Mubarak supporters descended on Tahrir Square—some on camels and horses, brandishing whips and clubs, others hurling firebombs and rocks from surrounding rooftops—and began assaulting the demonstrators. Three protesters were killed and six hundred were injured; over the course of several days, authorities detained more than fifty journalists and human rights activists. The violence continued into the next day, along with large-scale counterdemonstrations organized by the government. Pro-Mubarak forces even began roughing up foreign reporters, accusing them of actively inciting the opposition.
