by Brian Abrams
BARBARA LEE
I remember organizing part of the opposition to not go in because, as awful as the use of chemical weapons by Assad was, the use of force would have made things worse . . . That’s why I voted against the 2001 AUMF. I knew then, like I know now, that we’d set the stage for an endless war.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
In Syria, my issue was a little bit of a contradiction. He said there would be a red line. It was clear that this was a people’s uprising, that this was clearly a continuation of the Arab Spring with broad-base support. We should have helped a lot more, a lot quicker to help those forces once we saw them using chemical weapons.
ROB ANDREWS
The articulation of the red line came as sort of an aside in a [2012] press conference the president gave.149 It was not a formal declaration of policy made in a carefully calibrated speech or through the UN. I’m not saying, by the way, that every president’s words aren’t meaningful all the time. They are, but I suspect that’s something they’d want to take back. The way that was formulated, and when, the problem then became Assad clearly crossed the red line and nothing happened.
JONATHAN FINER
Secretary Kerry was asked a question in London on September 9: Is there anything that the Assad regime could do that would make you guys decide not to take military action? This was while military action was being debated in Congress, because the president said he wanted them to authorize any use of force, and Secretary Kerry said, if they agreed to give up “[every single bit of his] chemical weapons” in the next week, that might be something we would consider.
DAN SHAPIRO
That created a diplomatic opportunity.
JONATHAN FINER
Within a few hours, Secretary Kerry was on the flight home from London to Washington and the Russian foreign minister called—“Saw your comment, let’s give this a try”—and, within forty-eight hours, he got back on a plane to Geneva, where we ended up negotiating this deal to remove the weapons. Secretary Kerry, and I thought the president would say the same, knew that there was a chance that this would appeal to the Russians, because the Russians had previously indicated that this might be something we could work on together.
DENNIS ROSS
It’s also clear, from an Israeli standpoint, they felt that getting the removal was a significant accomplishment. The other side of it was, having articulated a red line and then not acting on it sent a message in the region, throughout the world, that you really couldn’t count on American commitments.
DAN SHAPIRO
Israeli officials, military planners, and security professionals understood that we got a better result on chemical weapons than we would have had if we had gone ahead with the strikes. But they worried about the perception among others in the region. At a popular level, even among the Israeli public, you would hear this attitude. Sure, maybe he got rid of the chemical weapons, but now will anybody ever believe he’ll use force? You know, Will the Iranians ever believe it? Will other enemies?
LEON PANETTA
I have to say, in the first four years, I thought the president was much more willing to engage in confronting terrorism, confronting al-Qaeda, dealing with the threats both in Iran and Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere. I had a sense that he knew that the United States had to provide leadership in dealing with those issues. I think his hope was that, ultimately, because of those efforts, we could withdraw not only from Iraq but ultimately from Afghanistan, and that we would not have to be tied down to another Middle East conflict. That was what I believed was his deepest hope. The problem was, the world did not cooperate. As always, what presidents find is that they have to respond to the world as it is, not as they would like it to be.
DAN SHAPIRO
It may be true that a decision not to be more present on the ground and not to make more of a commitment to help shape the end game was a factor in the chaos that followed. But one had to consider the counter scenario—which was the one [Obama] was intent on trying to avoid—that we would become an active participant in another unwinnable ground war, grinding on and on with us taking more losses, more responsibility, and more heat throughout the region.
JONATHAN FINER
It’s important to focus on the outcome. What was being contemplated, had diplomacy not intervened, was a pretty limited military strike that by everybody’s account would not have in any way destroyed Syria’s chemical weapons. What diplomacy accomplished was the removal of 1,300 tons—actually, probably slightly more than 1,300 tons—of some of the most heinous weapons that existed anywhere on the planet.150 We knew the risk, at the time, that Syria was not going to declare its entire supply but that it had declared the vast majority of it. That we were going to need to remain vigilant to be on the lookout for indications that they had kept some of this stuff.
DAN SHAPIRO
In this part of the world, if you pull back your hand to throw a punch and then put your hand down without throwing a punch, the assumption is you’re afraid to throw the punch and never will. It doesn’t matter that you got a better result through a diplomatic alternative. We made pretty clear in the weeks and months that followed that the Iranians should take no comfort from this, and no conclusion should appropriately be drawn that, if necessary, [Obama] would not use military force in Iran to stop the nuclear program. He would have used it, had that been the only way to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. I was actually quite certain of that, having heard him discuss it many times. It may be the case that there were people in the region who did not believe that.
RICHARD NEPHEW
Director, National Security Council, White House (2011–2013)
Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, US Department of State (2013–2015)
You gotta remember how this all was working on the Iranian side. [President Hassan] Rouhani had just been inaugurated in early August. I was part of the secret-talks team, and we met with the Iranians in Muscat the very last few days of August. Then we had an agreement, provisionally, that we were going to try and set up a P5+1 meeting.151 We were basically saying, We need to work with our partners. You need to hear from them, but we should also work out a little bit whether or not there’s an agreement here before we get too far into that process. You know, to avoid wasting time. We met with them, I wanna say the Thursday in New York before UNGA152 started, and then a couple times during the weekend. And we were back and forth on the train to New York because it was convenient and easy to do that.
WENDY SHERMAN
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, US Department of State (2011–2015)
Acting Deputy Secretary of State, US Department of State (2014–2015)
Quiet discussions went on before Rouhani’s election and inauguration but did not really get much traction. When Rouhani was elected, President Obama believed there might be more of an opening, and had Deputy Secretary Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan and their small team continue talks in Muscat. The change that took place, besides Rouhani’s election—that was noted not only in the secret channel but in the P5+1 negotiations. When Ahmadinejad was president and Saeed Jalili153 ran the negotiations, everything was a set piece. The Iranians spoke in Farsi. The rest of us spoke in English. We traipsed around the world and didn’t get much of anywhere. When Javad Zarif took over and became foreign minister, all of the negotiations were in English. There was clearly a shift in wanting to try to accomplish something. Rouhani had made that part of his election campaign.
DENNIS ROSS
After the Rouhani election, the talks got going in earnest and then led to the Joint Plan of Action, which was the interim agreement, as opposed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which became the deal that was finalized. So there was an interim deal that was finalized at the end of November of 2013, and then it took until mid-July of 2015 to do the larger deal.
RICHARD NEPHEW
We entered those conversations with an extreme sense of realism. We weren’t fooling ourselve
s in thinking that, you know, the outcome of walking away from the deal was good. It wasn’t. Now, I was convinced that Obama would have walked away if he hadn’t gotten something that was acceptable. But I was quite convinced that the Iranians would make the concessions we needed them to make and that we would be able to package a sanctions release such that they could walk along with it. But I never really lost sight of the fact that, for the Iranians, this was an existential problem. I’m not saying they were on the verge of economic collapse within a day, but that we had established that our resolve in stopping them was pretty high. And they had to deal with that.
WENDY SHERMAN
President Obama gave Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan permission to float the possibility of a very limited civil, peaceful enrichment program if there was a quite severe monitoring and verification. That opened the door to a negotiation on an interim agreement where Iran froze and even rolled back parts of its program in return for some limited [economic] sanctions relief, in hopes that, in over six months, bringing this draft interim deal into the P5+1 process, we would be able to complete a final agreement.
DENNIS ROSS
One of the things that emerged during those talks was the Iranian side convinced our side that they were for real. There was a debate within the administration whether to take this interim step because, in effect, what we were doing was conceding the idea that they would have uranium enrichment.154 We did it by saying Here’s this agreement that will effectively freeze the [nuclear] program that the Iranians have, will give us greater access to monitor what they’re doing, and that the 20 percent enriched material that they have will rock back to basically zero. They’d either convert it, or ship it out. And the debate was, Okay, the biggest card we have to play is that in the end, they’ll be able to enrich. Now, the right to enrich wasn’t acknowledged at this point, but by saying you’re going to negotiate the limits of enrichment, you’re conceding that they’d be allowed to enrich. So there was a concern that once you’d concede that, you had given up your greatest leverage.
RICHARD NEPHEW
Remember what our objective was then. Our objective was to get our initial Joint Plan of Action. That was the whole focus, something to get us started. And we didn’t really bring in anybody else until after we had worked through a lot of—not all of, but a lot of the issues with the Iranians. And then, in early November, we presented to our [P5+1] partners the text that we had been working on with the Iranians. That wasn’t finished, but we had made some progress, and so it had a lot of the blanks filled in, for lack of a better word.
WENDY SHERMAN
Iran always believed no deal was possible without a deal with the United States. Our partners understood that. They didn’t always like it, but they understood it. That secret bilateral channel allowed us to get traction. Then, that draft interim agreement, with a handful of brackets still having to be resolved, came into the formal P5+1 process . . . We formally met in Geneva,155 and Secretary Kerry joined, along with the other foreign ministers. This was the meeting where most publicly the French said it wasn’t good enough. There were other concerns that ministers had. Secretary Kerry wanted to make sure that everybody was on board and comfortable with the Joint Plan of Action. So everybody went home for two weeks for further consultation, then came back to Geneva and got to a Joint Plan of Action.156
DENNIS ROSS
I think the administration was surprised by the Israeli opposition to it, because the administration succeeded in stopping the clock, and they got the rollback on the 20 percent. This was basically right on the threshold of highly enriched uranium, as opposed to low-enriched uranium. And so the idea that you were freezing what the Iranians would have and rolling back to 20 percent, I think they were under the presumption that the Israelis would have been supportive. But there was also not the kind of briefing that the Israelis expected. They were blindsided when Kerry came to see Netanyahu on [November 6, 2013], and I know this well because I happened to be in Israel at the time.
RICHARD NEPHEW
They were upset. They may have known about it, so their sense of surprise in their being upset may have been a little bit feigned, but they were upset.
DENNIS ROSS
You ended up having a classic example of diplomacy, where surprises rarely work well unless they’re far reaching and have changed the geopolitical circumstances. Fundamentally, most surprises in diplomacy don’t go down well with the ones who are actually surprised, and so the Israelis didn’t like this agreement at all. Netanyahu called it a “historic mistake.”157
RICHARD NEPHEW
The longer comprehensive deal, we would start negotiating effectively in January. The way I had approached this was, after we had clearly established in the initial Muscat rounds that they wanted a deal, I thought that because we were serious about it and because they were serious about it, we would be able to work out some kind of framework.
WENDY SHERMAN
Six months turned out to be way too little time to accomplish this complicated task, and it took us overall nearly eighteen months or so, depending on how you count when we began, to achieve a final agreement.
RICHARD NEPHEW
I couldn’t have told you what I thought it was going to be, exactly, but I was convinced that, because Rouhani wanted it, and because Obama wanted it, we were gonna be able to work out some initial deal. And so long as politics in Washington and Tehran didn’t screw it up, I thought we were going to get all the way to a comprehensive deal.
November 8, 2013: Obama, aboard Air Force One, speaks with Prime Minister Netanyahu with the P5+1 talks for a Joint Plan of Action underway in Geneva. Pete Souza, White House
BRIAN DEESE
At that point, I had moved from the White House over to [the Office of Management and Budget], and so I was actually dealing with all the furloughs and dealing with what happens when the government shut down.158
FERIAL GOVASHIRI
When the government shutdown happened, there was essential staff and nonessential staff out. But there were still people who worked, and because we aided the leadership, we would still have to come in and work when no one else did.
JAMES KVAAL
I remember the office being almost completely deserted. It was almost a ghost town.
TED CHIODO
I did everything. I ran the printers. I hole-punched the stuff. I didn’t take a day off. You’re working for free, and you had to work twice as hard. I had been used to that on the campaign, working around the clock in an office of one. So I felt, sometimes, when I got into a zone, I was sort of better. It was easier for me just to do everything.
FERIAL GOVASHIRI
People would still expect the same. You had to basically work double and triple as hard. So many people were excited—“Oh, we get the day off!”—and I was like, “Uh, someone else is doing your job for you.” But it wasn’t their fault.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
The shutdown was tough on everybody. If you were in this for the right reasons, there’s something deeply heartbreaking about a government shutdown. Just physically, workload-wise, you’re shrinking the staff down to a skeleton crew. That was a long set of days.
NATE LUBIN
So October 1, the day the shutdown happened, was the same day Healthcare.gov launched, and the launch broke and no one would pay attention for two and a half weeks because the government was shut down . . . [For] those of us who couldn’t leave, it was a bizarre couple of weeks walking around the White House with nobody there and those of us trying to figure out what we could and couldn’t do.
BRAD JENKINS
Doing the blocking and tackling of getting celebrities to get the word out [for Healthcare.gov] was going to be the way to go—that was my life for a year—but that all went to shit when the website wouldn’t work for two months. We literally got seventy celebrities on the first day of enrollment to tweet out Healthcare.gov. We got Lady Gaga backstage at her concert, and all of her [forty-eight] millio
n followers went to a website that didn’t work. It was my worst nightmare.
NATE LUBIN
No one had heard anything but This is broken and terrible and don’t go there because it’s not going to work. The site was working by mid-December—not perfectly, but well enough.
BARNEY FRANK
We had expected the Republicans to get a lot of political pain from the shutdown and, in fact, the initial responses were bad. Then, the reason they never paid any price for the shutdown was that totally screwed-up rollout of the health-care bill. That was the unforgivable error of the Obama administration.
NATE LUBIN
Not enough people were signing up. The policy problem with that was, the people who were signing up early were people who needed health care. Which was good—we wanted those people to sign up. That’s the point of the law. But if you only had six people willing to wait online for six hours, if you knew the basics of how health exchanges work, that’s a recipe for a failing exchange. You needed to get young people, healthy people to sign up.
BRAD JENKINS
All of these celebrities were rip-shit pissed. Maybe they weren’t angry, but their publicists and managers were emailing me: What the fuck? So we burned that bridge. It took two months to fix the website, and it’s very hard to go back to Lady Gaga and ask her to tweet out Healthcare.gov again.
BARNEY FRANK
I would have been getting reports on it every other day. It was not just that the rollout was screwed up, but [Obama] and his top people appeared to be surprised by it. The negative publicity from that helped the health-care bill [lose] popularity and got Republicans off the hook for the shutdown. He’s culpable for not having put everything possible into making sure that that administrative screwup didn’t happen.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
What we were then faced with was we still had the same number of people we needed to enroll by the deadline,159 and it became, if not everybody’s full-time job, then everybody’s part-time job. I spent a significant chunk of my team’s time on exactly that question. “You’re my mayors’ liaison. What mayors can you get to tweet out Healthcare.gov? What mayors can you get to hold events?” And you sort of went down the line with everybody’s portfolios.
