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Revolutions

In early 2010, President Obama sent US troops on a humanitarian mission to help Haiti recover from a devastating earthquake that had killed more than 150,000 people. After a discussion in the Situation Room among top national security officials about the progress of the mission, I pulled aside Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. The participants in the meeting had seemed confused about the US military’s exact mandate, and I stressed how important it was that our forces in Haiti be given a clearly defined set of tasks.

Tom had served in every Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter, and he would be elevated to National Security Advisor later that year. He often dispensed wisdom on how government worked, and told me I should not have waited until a high-level meeting had ended to make my point.

“Listen,” he said firmly. “If you hear nothing else, hear this. You work at the White House. There is no other room where a bunch of really smart people of sound judgment are getting together and figuring out what to do. It will be the scariest moment of your life when you fully internalize this: There is no other meeting. You’re in the meeting. You are the meeting. If you have a concern, raise it.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA INVITED ME to “catch up” over lunch in May of 2010, a few months after US troops had safely returned from Haiti and six months before the so-called Arab Spring would begin.

Obama walked me into his small private study off the Oval, where he and Vice President Biden held their weekly one-on-one lunch. As we entered, I saw a pair of Muhammad Ali’s red boxing gloves that I remembered Obama had also kept on display in his Senate office. On the walls were a nineteenth-century oil painting of Abraham Lincoln strategizing with his generals about how to end the Civil War and a seascape of Cape Cod that reminded me of the beach outside the window of my old apartment in Winthrop. Obama told me he had praised the painting when he had seen it hanging in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy, who had painted it himself, then surprised Obama by giving it to him.

“I don’t talk to you enough,” Obama said as we sat down. “I thought it would be useful to hear what you think we are doing right, what we are doing wrong, what ideals we have betrayed lately.”

For someone in his position, Obama remained refreshingly aware of how sequestered he was. Even in private, he seemed to inhabit a sphere of his own. His place had been set at the head of a table that could have seated six people, while mine was laid at the opposite end. Although we were in a small room, he felt far away.

Our conversation quickly turned to the Middle East, where the Egyptian government had just enacted a two-year extension of its harsh emergency law. I lamented the fact that the United States rarely protested how our autocratic allies in the region acted, even when they repressed their people in self-defeating ways. We got to talking about how such draconian measures could have destabilizing effects that would end up harming US interests. Obama grew animated talking about the sclerotic and out-of-touch governments ruling much of the Arab world.

“If these guys don’t address the demands of young people,” Obama predicted, “something’s gonna give.” He was clearly interested in what this combustible situation foretold for the people of the Middle East and North Africa, and in turn for US foreign policy.

Soon after our lunch, three of my NSC colleagues and I collaborated on a memo to Obama that addressed the urgent need for political and economic reforms. Working alongside Dennis Ross, the Senior Director responsible for the Middle East; Gayle Smith, the Senior Director for Development and Democracy; and Jeremy Weinstein, a political scientist who worked under Gayle, we proposed looking afresh at US policy in the broader Middle East.

While Gayle, Jeremy, and I brought expertise on democratization, Dennis had decades of regional experience that we lacked. He had been a key player on Mideast policy in multiple presidential administrations and had served as President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton’s lead envoy on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Jeremy, who had taken leave from Stanford to work at the NSC, was the heart of our team. I was already working with him on a major global anti-corruption effort, known as the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which he had conceived of, and Gayle and I would spearhead in parallel to our efforts on Middle East reform.^* We viewed the initiatives in tandem, as OGP called on governments to be more transparent, which in turn empowered citizens to hold political leaders accountable for their failure to deliver. Befitting his professorial background, Jeremy preferred making aruments for which he could demonstrate empirical support. “Here is what we know,” he would say whenever we tried to drill down on some seemingly unanswerable dilemma. He would then cite academic research that spoke to the precise issues at hand.

Our memo to President Obama warned that people in the Middle East and North Africa were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their governments. We asked him to issue a “Presidential Directive” instructing US government agencies to examine how the United States could get ahead of these brewing grievances by advancing the cause of reform.

Obama read our memo, and in August of 2010 he issued the formal directive we recommended. Using the language we had suggested, he told government agency heads that America’s interest in political and economic stability was harmed by blindly supporting authoritarian Middle Eastern governments and frequently ignoring how they treated their citizens. The President instructed the heads of his cabinet agencies to identify leverage we could use to encourage governments in the region to be more open and responsive to the needs of their people.

The logic behind President Obama’s guidance was that the United States needed to act while we still had time to support political evolution in the Middle East. Otherwise, we would find ourselves figuring out how to respond to revolution. Or, as I put it when we gathered US officials in the EEOB to brief them on the directive, “President Obama believes that if we are willing to bear more pain now, there will be less pain later.”

With Jeremy sitting behind us in a large, secure conference room, Dennis, Gayle, and I began chairing biweekly meetings with Middle East experts from State, Defense, Treasury, the intelligence community, and other parts of the government. Jeremy and other NSC officials led additional meetings to develop a set of detailed plans on how to engage specific countries. We used these meetings to generate ideas for how to revamp long-standing US policies in the region, most of which had changed very little over preceding administrations.

Many of the US government’s Middle East experts who attended our meetings argued that the political status quo in the region served US interests. Therefore, they warned that the types of reforms we were discussing could invite negative consequences. Despite Obama’s explicit request for detailed proposals, they balked at coming up with ways to encourage Middle Eastern governments to change.

This reaction was not entirely surprising. American diplomats were our primary eyes and ears on the ground in the Middle East, and while some were entrepreneurial, managing to explore the societies in which they lived, others were out of touch with what was referred to as “the street”: students and young adults, people who lived outside of major cities, and those with lower socioeconomic status. The security regulations put in place after the September 11^th attacks compounded the disconnect, as diplomats were sometimes also restricted in their movements. These factors meant that they tended to over-rely on governmental and elite sources to inform their thinking. As a result, the US government heard little from citizens who were growing angry with the inequality, corruption, and repressiveness of life in outwardly stable countries like Tunisia and Egypt.

During my early days at the NSC, Richard Holbrooke had warned me that I should get used to feeling dependent on other governments for information. “US officials wearing badges around their necks run around the world trying to find foreign officials who wear badges around their necks. And they call it diplomacy,” he said. “This is why we know so little about what is actually going on anywhere.”

I was not a Middle East expert, and the regional specialists’ fears about altering the status quo were credible. However, many of their arguments appeared not to have been stress-tested in decades. As a baseline, many seemed to reflexively assume that the status quo could be maintained. Conversely, Dennis, Gayle, Jeremy, and I argued that regimes that consistently failed to deliver for their people would come under growing pressure. And when citizens contested the ways they were being governed, long-standing leaders could soon find themselves backed into a corner, resorting to ever-more incendiary means to cling to power.

Polling already showed that the more repressive governments became in trying to keep a lid on brewing discontent, the less legitimacy they had with their people. When we took into account key trends—like mass unemployment, a population predominantly made up of young people, technology that increased the average person’s ability to see elites’ standard of living and to organize—we concluded that change was coming. Or, as Obama had forecast during our lunch, “something’s gonna give.”

We made the case for building US policy in the region on a foundation of principles rather than continuing to rely on particular leaders. To get our point across, we started using the biweekly sessions to challenge traditional assumptions. We reminded participants that Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was seventy-four years old, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was eighty-two, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was eighty-six. Since authoritarian leaders would not live forever, we asked our colleagues what would come after these men exited the scene.

Mubarak, for example, planned to hand over power to his son Gamal. This bothered many Egyptians, who saw Gamal as corrupt and wanted to have a say in who would run their country. Yet US officials had not pushed for fair elections, fearing that doing so would jeopardize the Egyptian government’s support for peace with Israel and counterterrorism cooperation with the United States. However, when we discussed what motivated the Egyptian government, we managed to secure relative agreement around the table that the country’s leaders were looking out for their own security interests. Even if we challenged them on issues of governance, they had ample reasons for pursuing the policies on Israel and terrorism that we wanted to see continue.

After four months of meetings, many of the most skeptical participants seemed to embrace the need to pursue incremental but meaningful change. Together, we arrived at a set of core principles that provided the foundation for a modified approach to the region. US officials would start speaking more in public about issues that we knew resonated with frustrated citizens. Even the Pentagon would be expected to deliver the President’s message on the importance of reform. And different US government agencies would bring to bear a variety of carrots and sticks to try to convince governments in the Middle East and North Africa to respond positively to our recommendations. We also developed granular reform proposals for a number of specific countries.

Once the President blessed the new strategy, which we expected he would do within a few days of receiving the plans, we would still face many hurdles. The dictators in the region would naturally resist liberalizing, and some US officials would be unenthusiastic about implementing the President’s guidance. Still, the existence of a US government reform agenda for the broader Middle East represented a shift.

On December 17^th, 2010, just as we were sending this large package of material to President Obama for his approval, a Tunisian fruit vendor lit himself on fire.

Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act of protest against corruption and humiliation set in motion a cascade of revolts that would reorder huge swaths of the Arab world. These uprisings would end up impacting the course of Obama’s presidency more than any other geopolitical development during his eight years in office.

The revolution had begun.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS AFTER THE TUNISIAN UPRISING started and four days after Mubarak, the seemingly permanent ruler of Egypt, stepped aside, the protests reached Libya. In the eastern city of Benghazi on February 15^th, 2011, Libya’s internal security service arrested Fathi Terbil, a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer who had spent years advocating on behalf of the victims of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. That night, hundreds of people gathered to demand Terbil’s release, and over the next two days, Libyans in other towns took to the streets.

In response, the Libyan regime’s forces began shooting civilians. These attacks prompted more demonstrations—and more violence. After four days of protests, 233 people were reported dead, and Libyan Americans were frantically dialing the White House switchboard, pleading for help.

Before the Arab Spring, Qaddafi seemed like such a cartoonish character that one could sometimes lose sight of his ferocity. My only in-person exposure to him had come in 2009, when I helped organize Obama’s first trip to the UN as President. Qaddafi spoke to the General Assembly immediately after Obama, rambling on for one hundred minutes and at one point theatrically throwing a copy of the UN Charter over his shoulder.

Yet alongside his flashy antics, during his forty-two years in power, Qaddafi had turned Libya into one of the most repressive states in the world. He had made it illegal to hold demonstrations or criticize the government. His regime’s criminal code had made capital offenses out of various forms of political opposition, and the judiciary had once handed down a death sentence to someone for starting an NGO. Libya’s security forces had become notorious for persecution, torture, and summary executions of those who defied Qaddafi’s rule. Over the course of twenty-four hours in 1996, they had killed 1,270 inmates in the Tripoli prison that housed many political prisoners. The secret police, state-backed militia, and other armed elements had complete impunity to terrorize the Libyan people.

When the Qaddafi regime turned its guns on peaceful demonstrators, Obama publicly condemned the crackdown. In Tunisia and Egypt, pressure from the US President and other world leaders played a role in ultimately convincing the militaries in those countries to allow protests to continue. But with Libya, the United States had just restored full diplomatic relations in 2006.¹³ With only shallow ties between the two governments, senior American officials could not call up their counterparts in the hopes of influencing the decisions being made by Qaddafi and his inner circle.

The Libyan dictator was highly unlikely to have listened anyway. Rather than show signs of relenting, he promised—and delivered—more violence. After protests spread from Benghazi, the country’s second largest city, to the capital of Tripoli, Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, addressed the nation. He described the “rivers of blood” that would flow if demonstrations continued. Roughly ten days after the first major street protests, the UN reported that more than 1,000 people had already been killed.

President Obama had seen enough, and on February 26^th, he called on Qaddafi to step down.

In these still-early days of the Arab Spring, Ben Rhodes pointed out to me that events in the Middle East had become “watercooler issues.” Americans who did not generally follow current events were captivated by the mass protests and closely tracked what Obama was doing in response. The President had been reticent when Iran’s “Green Revolution” erupted in 2009, fearing that offering his vocal support would allow the Iranian government to caricature protesters as American-backed agents. With Libya, however, Obama was forceful. To convince Qaddafi that he should negotiate his political exit, he directed Donilon to get US government agencies to identify sources of leverage over the Libyan leader.

Everything we knew about Qaddafi’s personality suggested that he cared passionately about his worldly possessions. If he believed his wealth was endangered, we thought, he might stop the violence and step aside, following in the footsteps of the Tunisian and Egyptian leaders. Moving quickly, we froze $37 billion of Qaddafi’s assets in the United States, while our NATO allies froze an additional $30 billion.

We then rallied the world to take steps to pressure the Libyan regime. The Arab League—the main regional organization for Arab nations—suspended Libya as a member, even though it was then serving as its chair. The UN General Assembly also suspended Libya from the Human Rights Council (where it should never have been elected a member in the first place), and called an emergency session to establish a commission that would investigate Libyan war crimes. The fifty-seven-country Organization of Islamic Cooperation likewise condemned Qaddafi’s “excessive use of force” for creating “a humanitarian disaster.”

A powerful voice during this period was Libya’s own ambassador to the UN, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgham. A longtime regime loyalist, Shalgham defected to join the opposition because he was horrified by Qaddafi’s brutality. In an extraordinary scene, while sitting behind Libya’s UN placard, he pleaded with the world to stop his president.

“Please, United Nations, save Libya,” he begged. “No to bloodshed. No to the killing of innocents.” Libya’s deputy ambassador, who had defected several days before Shalgham, sat behind his boss in tears.

Less than two weeks after the protests had begun, the United States led a unanimous Security Council in imposing an arms embargo and economic sanctions on the Qaddafi regime. The Council also referred the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed in Libya to the ICC. I had worked with Susan and her team in New York to refine the elements of the far-reaching resolution. When it passed in such record speed, I thought it was probably the best example in history of governments hastily using a vast array of “tools in the toolbox” to try to deter atrocities. The resolution was also notable for uniting countries like China, Russia, Germany, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States on a complex issue of international security—a rarity in geopolitics.

The overall solidarity among nations reflected sincere horror at Qaddafi’s murderous crackdown, but it also highlighted the Libyan leader’s international isolation, which predated the Arab Spring. Qaddafi had funded insurgencies and supported terrorism in innumerable countries. He had also lied to or insulted a remarkably large number of heads of state. He was unique in having virtually no friends who would stand up for him. Not China. Not Russia. Not his fellow autocrats in the Arab world.

We hoped that in light of this global unity, Qaddafi would reconsider his bloody endgame and elect to negotiate an end to the crisis.^* But at no point did the Libyan leader take genuine steps toward a peaceful resolution.

AS THE PRESIDENT’S HUMAN RIGHTS AND UN ADVISER, I suddenly found myself closer to the center of the action at the White House than I had been before. I avidly embraced the responsibility this carried, although it coincided with a very difficult period in my personal life.

The previous year, Cass and I had started trying to have a second child. We were fortunate to get pregnant quickly, but I miscarried several weeks later. This proved to be a pattern: we experienced three further miscarriages in succession.

One occurred when I was two months pregnant with a baby we had already decided to name “Jack” if it was a boy. At the time it happened, I was in Sri Lanka attempting to raise with the country’s president the need for accountability for war crimes committed in the last stages of his government’s war against the Tamil Tigers. I began to bleed just as I boarded the plane home.

After landing in Washington, I met Cass and we went straight to the emergency room at Sibley Hospital. An ultrasound technician examined me, moving the probe back and forth against my lower belly. His rhythmic pressure made it appear as though the baby were moving on the screen, and my spirits soared.

“There’s your baby,” the technician said.

“And his heartbeat?” I asked expectantly, craving confirmation of what I thought I had just seen.

“No, that’s me making the movement,” he replied with little affect. “Your baby has no heartbeat.”

I dug my face into Cass’s chest and cried, as he did the same.

Cass was immensely supportive during these heartbreaking times, but I also came to count on the Wednesday Group—my female colleagues on the NSC. As I tried to bounce back from my multiple failed attempts to have a child while managing the intensifying demands of my job, our six p.m. Wednesday meetings became a sacred refuge. The mothers in the group lifted me up, particularly when Cass and I began in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.

On a few occasions during 2011, I ended up having to slip out of high-level meetings to make it to the IVF clinic in time for a scheduled egg retrieval, or to have the doctors implant the embryos Cass and I had spent the previous weeks making together. I often felt self-conscious making my exit, but when I caught the eye of a Wednesday Group member across the room, she would wink or give me a thumbs-up, and my guilt at leaving would give way to a burst of excitement. Without this support, the combination of the pregnancy disappointments and the juggling might have led me to give up on what at times felt like a futile pursuit.

Friends who tried IVF had often complained about feeling fatigued by the stress of being poked by so many needles or by the battery of foreign drugs in their bloodstreams. While I certainly didn’t enjoy the daily drug injections, I relished the opportunity to have agency over at least one aspect of our effort to have a child. I finally felt as though I was doing something concrete to contribute to our quest.

As a former reporter, I retained the habit of carefully detailing in my government notebooks what was discussed and decided in meetings in the Situation Room. During this period, however, my scribbles jumped from detailing Libyan military movements to recording specific telephone instructions from a nurse about how to adjust my IVF drug regimen. It dawned on me that future researchers of the Arab Spring who dug through the White House archives would have a hard time making sense of this juxtaposition.

I WAS BETWEEN ROUNDS of IVF when I received an invitation to accompany Secretary Clinton to Geneva, where she would be speaking at an important UN Human Rights Council meeting on Libya. I had long hoped to work closely with Clinton. Even though she made a point of asking about Declan when I saw her at the White House, I continued to feel awkward in her presence.

Jake Sullivan, her longtime senior aide, had orchestrated the invitation. Just thirty-four years old and even younger-looking, Jake was a force of nature. I had never seen anybody so quickly and wisely synthesize information and transform it into strategic counsel. I felt I learned from him almost every time he opened his mouth. I relished the chance to discuss fast-moving events with him during the trip, and happily said yes.

Flying to Europe on the plane her staff had christened “HillForce1,” I handed Clinton a printout of the recent findings from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay:

Libyan forces are firing at protesters and bystanders, sealing off neighborhoods and shooting from rooftops. They also block ambulances so that the injured and dead are left on the streets. Reports from hospitals indicate that most of the victims have been shot in the head, chest, or neck, suggesting arbitrary and summary executions. Doctors relate that they are struggling to cope and are running out of blood supplies and medicines to treat the wounded. Images of unverifiable origin appear to portray the digging of mass graves in Tripoli.

I found the last sentence particularly chilling, as it brought me back to Srebrenica and the mass graves that had been dug for thousands of bodies.

On my laptop, I pulled up a photo of a large protest in Benghazi.

“They’ve lost their fear,” I said, showing Clinton the image.

She nodded, adding, “Not a woman among them.”

Even though she believed Qaddafi’s attacks on his people disqualified him from leading Libya, she was rightly worried about what would come next.

When we arrived at the Human Rights Council meeting, ambassadors and their aides chatted with each other and typed on their BlackBerries, barely listening as speaker after speaker read monotone statements condemning Qaddafi. But when Clinton began to speak, the crowd hushed.

Clinton reinforced President Obama’s demand that Qaddafi step down, and, knowing she was speaking to ambassadors from other repressive countries, pointedly warned, “The power of human dignity is always underestimated until the day it finally prevails.”

I had a mix of feelings as we flew back to the United States. On the one hand, I knew that President Obama had summoned virtually every American nonmilitary tool to influence Qaddafi, while convincing the world to do the same. On the other hand, I saw that something had been unleashed in Libya that was beyond Qaddafi’s power to control—and ours as well.

For all of our hopes that the Libyan leader would step down or at least cease attacks on civilians, he repeatedly made clear that he planned to stay in power—and that he viewed those who opposed him as an existential threat to be eliminated. In a fist-pounding, seventy-five-minute speech on Libyan television, he had ranted against the opposition, calling them rats and threatening to slaughter them if they did not surrender. At one point he claimed, “I and the millions will march in order to cleanse Libya inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alley by alley, person by person, until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum.”

The question of what these threats would mean for Libyan civilians took on profound urgency as Qaddafi began to seize momentum on the battlefield. By the beginning of March, his forces had recovered from early losses and were marching toward Benghazi, the home of the revolution and main opposition stronghold, and recapturing cities and towns along the way.

The director of the Benghazi Medical Center told one wire reporter that people were showing up at his hospital with “mainly gunshot wounds to the head, chest, abdomen—mostly young people under 25.” He said, “The size and type of these injuries were horrific. Some were cut in half.” Elsewhere, a British journalist witnessed people arming themselves with household items like hammers and axes to defend against Qaddafi’s advancing forces.¹⁴

By this point, columnists and NGOs had begun urging Obama to use military force to prevent a wholesale massacre. On March 1^st, the US Senate passed a resolution by unanimous consent urging the UN Security Council “to take such further action to protect civilians in Libya from attack, including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan territory.” Congress didn’t specify what “such further action” beyond a no-fly zone might include, but even establishing one would likely require the United States to bomb Qaddafi’s air defenses—something the Senate resolution failed to mention. As often happens in a crisis, members of Congress and editorial writers wanted to be seen calling for decisive measures (“Obama must act!”), but they used vague language to duck responsibility for the ensuing costs.

On the afternoon of March 15^th, Obama convened his cabinet secretaries in a National Security Council meeting to discuss whether anything could be done to prevent the fall of Benghazi and other towns. In the hours before the meeting, as I digested that day’s ghastly stream of reporting and intelligence, I felt like time was slowing down and speeding up at once. Every red light on my BlackBerry seemed to bring a new SOS from a Libyan saying, “Please help! They are launching an all-out offensive! They are crushing us . . .”

I had not originally been included on the list of people authorized to attend the President’s meeting, but, mindful of our earlier exchange about Haiti, I wrote to Donilon, urging that he allow me to come.

An hour before the NSC cabinet meeting, I received word that I had been approved.

This was the meeting.