by Obama Barack
My biggest challenge during those tense several days was keeping everybody in my administration on the same page. The message coming out of the White House was clear. When Gibbs was asked what I meant when I said that the transition in Egypt had to begin “now,” he said simply, “Now means yesterday.” We were also successful in getting our European allies to issue a joint statement that mirrored my own. Around the same time, though, Hillary was interviewed at a security conference in Munich and seemed to go out of her way to warn of the dangers in any rapid transition in Egypt. At the same conference, Frank Wisner—who no longer had an official role in the administration and claimed to be speaking only as a private citizen—voiced the opinion that Mubarak should stay in power during any transition period. Hearing this, I told Katie to track down my secretary of state. When I got her on the phone, I didn’t mask my displeasure.
“I understand full well the potential problems with any move away from Mubarak,” I said, “but I’ve made a decision, and I can’t have a bunch of mixed messages out there right now.” Before Hillary could respond, I added, “And tell Wisner I don’t give a damn about what capacity he’s speaking in—he needs to be quiet.”
Despite the occasional frustrations I experienced in dealing with a national security establishment that remained uncomfortable with the prospect of an Egypt without Mubarak, that same establishment—particularly the Pentagon and the intelligence community—probably had more impact on the final outcome in Egypt than any high-minded statements coming from the White House. Once or twice a day, we had Gates, Mullen, Panetta, Brennan, and others quietly reach out to high-ranking officers in the Egyptian military and intelligence services, making clear that a military-sanctioned crackdown on the protesters would have severe consequences on any future U.S.-Egyptian relationship. The implication of this military-to-military outreach was plain: U.S.-Egyptian cooperation, and the aid that came with it, wasn’t dependent on Mubarak’s staying in power, so Egypt’s generals and intelligence chiefs might want to carefully consider which actions best preserved their institutional interests.
Our messaging appeared successful, for by the evening of February 3, Egyptian army troops had positioned themselves to keep the pro-Mubarak forces separate from the protesters. The arrests of Egyptian journalists and human rights activists began to slow. Encouraged by the change in the army’s posture, more demonstrators flowed peacefully into the square. Mubarak would hang on for another week, vowing not to bow to “foreign pressure.” But on February 11, just two and a half weeks after the first major protest in Tahrir Square, a weary-looking Vice President Suleiman appeared on Egyptian television to announce that Mubarak had left office and a caretaker government led by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces would initiate the process for new elections.
In the White House, we watched CNN broadcast footage of the crowd in Tahrir Square erupting in celebration. Many staffers were jubilant. Samantha sent me a message saying how proud she was to be a part of the administration. Walking down the colonnade on our way to my press statement to reporters, Ben couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. “It’s pretty amazing,” he said, “being a part of history like that.” Katie printed out a wire photo and left it on my desk; it showed a group of young protesters in the Egyptian square hoisting a sign that read, YES WE CAN.
I was relieved—and cautiously hopeful. Still, I did find myself occasionally thinking about Mubarak, who just a few months earlier had been my guest in the Old Family Dining Room. Rather than flee the country, the elderly leader had apparently taken up residence in his private compound in Sharm el Sheikh. I pictured him there, sitting in lavish surroundings, a dim light casting shadows across his face, alone with his thoughts.
I knew that for all the celebration and optimism in the air, the transition in Egypt was only the beginning of a struggle for the soul of the Arab world—a struggle whose outcome remained far from certain. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, immediately after I called for Mubarak to step down. Young, sophisticated, close to the Saudis, and perhaps the savviest leader in the Gulf, MBZ, as we called him, hadn’t minced words in describing how the news was being received in the region.
MBZ told me that U.S. statements on Egypt were being watched closely in the Gulf, with increasing alarm. What would happen if protesters in Bahrain called for King Hamad to step down? Would the United States put out that same kind of statement that we had on Egypt?
I had told him I hoped to work with him and others to avoid having to choose between the Muslim Brotherhood and potentially violent clashes between governments and their people.
“The public message does not affect Mubarak, you see, but it affects the region,” MBZ told me. He suggested that if Egypt collapsed and the Muslim Brotherhood took over, there would be eight other Arab leaders who would fall, which is why he was critical of my statement. “It shows,” he said, “that the United States is not a partner we can rely on in the long term.”
His voice was calm and cold. It was less a plea for help, I realized, than a warning. Whatever happened to Mubarak, the old order had no intention of conceding power without a fight.
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IF ANYTHING, ANTI-GOVERNMENT demonstrations in other countries only grew in scope and intensity following Mubarak’s resignation, as more and more people came to believe that change was possible. A handful of regimes successfully managed to make at least symbolic reform in response to protesters’ demands while avoiding significant bloodshed or upheaval: Algeria lifted its nineteen-year-old emergency law, the king of Morocco engineered constitutional reforms that modestly increased the power of the country’s elected parliament, and Jordan’s monarch would soon do the same. But for many Arab rulers, the main lesson out of Egypt was the need to systematically, ruthlessly crush the protests—no matter how much violence that might require and no matter how much international criticism such crackdowns might generate.
Two of the countries that saw the worst violence were Syria and Bahrain, where sectarian divisions ran high and privileged minorities governed large and resentful majorities. In Syria, the March 2011 arrest and torture of fifteen schoolboys who had sprayed anti-government graffiti on city walls set off major protests against the Alawite Shiite–dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad in many of the country’s predominantly Sunni communities. After tear gas, water cannons, beatings, and mass arrests failed to quell the demonstrations, Assad’s security forces went on to launch full-scale military operations across several cities, complete with live fire, tanks, and house-to-house searches. Meanwhile, just as MBZ had predicted, in the small island nation of Bahrain, huge, mostly Shiite demonstrations against the government of King Hamad bin Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa were taking place in the capital city of Manama, and the Bahraini government responded with force, killing scores of protesters and injuring hundreds more. As outrage over police brutality fueled even bigger demonstrations, the beleaguered Hamad went further, taking the unprecedented step of inviting armed divisions of the Saudi and Emirati armies to help suppress his own citizens.
My team and I spent hours wrestling with how the United States could influence events inside Syria and Bahrain. Our options were painfully limited. Syria was a longtime adversary of the United States, historically allied with Russia and Iran, as well as a supporter of Hezbollah. Without the economic, military, or diplomatic leverage we’d had in Egypt, the official condemnations of the Assad regime we made (and our later imposition of a U.S. embargo) had no real effect, and Assad could count on Russia to veto any efforts we might make to impose international sanctions through the U.N. Security Council. With Bahrain, we had the opposite problem: The country was a longtime U.S. ally and hosted the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. That relationship allowed us to privately pressure Hamad and his ministers to partially answer the protesters’ deman
ds and to rein in the police violence. Still, Bahrain’s ruling establishment viewed the protesters as Iranian-influenced enemies who had to be contained. In concert with the Saudis and the Emiratis, the Bahraini regime was going to force us to make a choice, and all were aware that when push came to shove, we couldn’t afford to risk our strategic position in the Middle East by severing relations with three Gulf countries.
In 2011, no one questioned our limited influence in Syria—that would come later. But despite multiple statements from my administration condemning the violence in Bahrain and efforts to broker a dialogue between the government and more moderate Shiite opposition leaders, our failure to break with Hamad—especially in the wake of our posture toward Mubarak—was roundly criticized. I had no elegant way to explain the apparent inconsistency, other than to acknowledge that the world was messy; that in the conduct of foreign policy, I had to constantly balance competing interests, interests shaped by the choices of previous administrations and the contingencies of the moment; and that just because I couldn’t in every instance elevate our human rights agenda over other considerations didn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to do what I could, when I could, to advance what I considered to be America’s highest values. But what if a government starts massacring not hundreds of its citizens but thousands and the United States has the power to stop it? Then what?
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FOR FORTY-TWO YEARS, Muammar Gaddafi had ruled Libya with a viciousness that, even by the standards of his fellow dictators, spilled into madness. Prone to flamboyant gestures, incoherent rants, and odd behavior (in advance of the 2009 UNGA meetings in New York, he’d tried to get approval to erect a massive Bedouin tent in the middle of Central Park for himself and his entourage), he had nevertheless been ruthlessly efficient in stamping out dissent in his country, using a combination of secret police, security forces, and state-sponsored militias to jail, torture, and murder anyone who dared to oppose him. Throughout the 1980s, his government had also been one of the leading state sponsors of terrorism around the world, facilitating such horrific attacks as the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed citizens of twenty-one countries, including 189 Americans. Gaddafi had more recently tried to wrap himself in the cloak of respectability by ending his support for international terrorism and dismantling his nascent nuclear program (which led Western countries, including the United States, to resume diplomatic relations). But inside Libya itself, nothing had changed.
Less than a week after Mubarak left power in Egypt, Gaddafi’s security forces fired into a large group of civilians who’d gathered to protest the arrest of a human rights lawyer. Within days, the protests had spread, and more than a hundred had been killed. A week later, much of the country was in open rebellion, with anti-Gaddafi forces taking control of Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city. Libyan diplomats and former loyalists, including the country’s ambassador to the U.N., began to defect, appealing to the international community to come to the aid of the Libyan people. Accusing the protesters of being fronts for al-Qaeda, Gaddafi unleashed a campaign of terror, declaring, “Everything will burn.” By the beginning of March, the death count had risen to a thousand.
Appalled by the escalating carnage, we quickly did everything we could short of using military force to stop Gaddafi. I called for him to relinquish power, arguing that he had lost the legitimacy to govern. We imposed economic sanctions, froze billions of dollars in assets that belonged to him and his family, and, at the U.N. Security Council, passed an arms embargo and referred the case of Libya to the International Criminal Court, where Gaddafi and others could be tried for committing crimes against humanity. But the Libyan leader was undeterred. Analysts forecasted that once Gaddafi’s forces reached Benghazi, tens of thousands of lives could be lost.
It was around this time that a chorus grew, first among human rights organizations and a handful of columnists, and then members of Congress and much of the media, demanding that the United States take military action to stop Gaddafi. In many ways, I considered this a sign of moral progress. For most of America’s history, the thought of using our combat forces to stop a government from killing its own people would have been a nonstarter—because such state-sponsored violence happened all the time; because U.S. policy makers didn’t consider the death of innocent Cambodians, Argentinians, or Ugandans relevant to our interests; and because many of the perpetrators were our allies in the fight against communism. (This included the reportedly CIA-backed military coup that toppled a Communist government in Indonesia in 1965, two years before my mother and I arrived there, with a bloody aftermath that resulted in between five hundred thousand and a million deaths.) In the 1990s, though, more timely international reporting of such crimes, combined with America’s ascendance as the world’s lone superpower after the Cold War, had led to a reexamination of U.S. inaction and prompted the successful American-led NATO intervention in the Bosnian conflict. Indeed, the obligation of the United States to prioritize the prevention of atrocities in its foreign policy was what Samantha’s book had been all about—one of the reasons I’d brought her into the White House.
And yet, as much as I shared the impulse to save innocent people from tyrants, I was profoundly wary of ordering any kind of military action against Libya, for the same reason that I’d declined Samantha’s suggestion that my Nobel Prize address include an explicit argument for a global “responsibility to protect” civilians against their own governments. Where would the obligation to intervene end? And what were the parameters? How many people would need to have been killed, and how many more would have to be at risk, to trigger a U.S. military response? Why Libya and not the Congo, for example, where a series of civil conflicts had resulted in millions of civilian deaths? Would we intervene only when there was no chance of U.S. casualties? Bill Clinton had thought the risks were low back in 1993, when he sent special operations forces into Somalia to capture members of a warlord’s organization in support of U.S. peacekeeping efforts there. In the incident known as “Black Hawk Down,” eighteen service members were killed and seventy-three more wounded.
The truth is that war is never tidy and always results in unintended consequences, even when launched against seemingly powerless countries on behalf of a righteous cause. When it came to Libya, advocates for U.S. intervention had tried to obfuscate that reality by latching on to the idea of imposing a no-fly zone to ground Gaddafi’s military planes and prevent bombing, which they presented as an antiseptic, risk-free way of saving the Libyan people. (Typical question from a White House reporter at the time: “How many more people have to die before we take this one step?”) What they were missing was the fact that establishing a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace would require us to first fire missiles into Tripoli to destroy Libya’s air defenses—a clear act of war against a country that posed no threat to us. Not only that, but it wasn’t even clear that a no-fly zone would have any effect, since Gaddafi was using ground forces and not air bombardment to attack opposition strongholds.
America was also still knee-deep in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had just ordered U.S. forces in the Pacific to help the Japanese handle the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, brought on by a tsunami that had leveled the city of Fukushima; we were seriously concerned about the potential of radioactive fallout reaching the West Coast. Add in the fact that I was still dealing with a U.S. economy that was barely above water and a Republican Congress that had pledged to undo everything my administration had accomplished in our first two years, and it’s fair to say that I found the idea of waging a new war in a distant country with no strategic importance to the United States to be less than prudent. I wasn’t the only one. Bill Daley, who’d become my chief of staff in January, seemed bewildered that anyone was even entertaining the notion.
“Maybe I’m missing something, Mr. President,” he said during one of our evening wrap-ups, “but I don’t think we got clobbered in the m
idterms because voters don’t think you’re doing enough in the Middle East. Ask ten people on the street and nine of them don’t even know where the heck Libya is.”
And yet, as reports of hospitals filling up with gruesome injuries and young people being unceremoniously executed on the streets continued to trickle out of Libya, support around the world for intervention gathered steam. To the surprise of many, the Arab League voted in support of an international intervention against Gaddafi—a sign not only of how extreme the levels of violence in Libya had become but also of the extent to which the Libyan strongman’s erratic behavior and meddling in the affairs of other countries had isolated him from his fellow Arab leaders. (The vote may also have been a handy way for countries in the region to deflect attention from their own human rights abuses, given that nations like Syria and Bahrain remained members in good standing.) Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy, who’d been criticized mercilessly in France for supporting the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia till the bitter end, suddenly decided to make saving the Libyan people his personal cause. Together with David Cameron, he announced his intention to immediately introduce a resolution in the U.N. Security Council on behalf of France and the United Kingdom, authorizing an international coalition to initiate a no-fly zone over Libya—a resolution on which we’d have to take a position.
