It was St. Patrick’s Day 2011.
As we milled about on the floor of the U.N. Security Council waiting for all members to arrive to vote, I chatted with staff and fellow ambassadors. Many were sporting green ties in honor of the Irish, while I wore a green wool jacket. The color was not deep but almost a lime green, similar in hue, coincidentally, to the Libyan flag. Within a few minutes, I noticed that the South African permanent representative, Baso Sanqcu, a bald compact man, was absent. I didn’t want the vote to proceed without knowing how it would come out, so I dashed to the door of the Council to intercept Baso when he came in. Eventually, he arrived.
Presumptuously, I blocked his entry.
“Do you have instructions?”
“Yes,” he replied, clearly somewhat exasperated.
“What are they?” I pressed.
“We will vote yes,” he conceded but didn’t seem happy about it. I thanked him and moved out of his way so he could enter the chamber.
The subject of this crucial vote was Libya, a hot topic on the Security Council’s agenda along with several other matters stemming from the regional uprising known as the “Arab Spring.”
The convulsion in the Middle East began when a desperate street vendor set himself on fire in Tunisia in December 2010. Within two months, President Hosni Mubarak was deposed in Egypt, after three decades of both repressing his people and serving as a reliable regional partner of the U.S. In raging debates around the Principals Committee table about how the U.S. should respond to Mubarak’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters, Secretary Clinton, Defense Secretary Gates, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and Vice President Biden argued forcefully for standing by Mubarak, whom they had known for years. Younger officials, including Ben Rhodes, Tony Blinken, Samantha Power, and me, maintained that the U.S. should support the democratic aspirations of the youth in Egypt and across the Middle East.
President Obama ultimately decided to align America with the peaceful protesters in Egypt’s Tahrir Square seeking to exercise their universal human rights. He urged Mubarak to step down, first privately, and when that failed, Obama reiterated his plea publicly.
The Arab Spring brought similar policy dilemmas from Bahrain to Yemen to Syria; in each instance, the administration’s approach varied depending on the specific circumstances. America’s traditional Sunni Arab partners, led by Saudi Arabia, were outraged that the U.S. would (in their view) betray a partner like Mubarak and were deeply unsettled by the unrest sweeping the region. But even as our Arab partners lamented Mubarak’s departure in Egypt, they were eager to see Assad removed in Syria and Qaddafi gone in Libya.
Less than a week after Mubarak’s resignation in mid-February 2011, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who had brutally enforced one-man rule for over forty years, suddenly faced his own uprising. Across the country, Libyans, led by opposition elements in Benghazi, demanded Qaddafi’s ouster. As their protests intensified, Qaddafi responded with escalating violence, unleashing his military against civilians and rebels alike. The Libyan army fired directly on unarmed protesters, killing five to seven hundred in February 2011 alone, according to estimates by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The regime also arbitrarily arrested masses of opponents, committed torture and rape, forced disappearances, and indiscriminately bombed populated areas as the rebellion intensified. Given Qaddafi’s history of slaughtering thousands of his own people, we believed that he might stop at nothing to quell his opposition.
It was not just U.S., European, and Arab officials who comprehended the potential gravity of the situation. Qaddafi’s own diplomats in New York saw the writing on the wall and, after years of loyal service to a pariah regime, they split with Qaddafi and joined the opposition. I had come to know Ambassador Abdurrahman Shalgham, the Libyan permanent representative and former foreign minister, and his deputy Ibrahim Dabbashi, because Libya had served as a nonpermanent member of the Security Council during my first year in New York. In private, they were tough but thoughtful individuals, who throughout this crisis demonstrated more of a conscience than they had let on previously—even bravely lobbying the Security Council to take forceful action against their own government.
As international outrage mounted, the Security Council moved to impose sanctions on the Libyan regime, including an arms embargo and asset freeze; in a rare move, the Council also referred Qaddafi and his henchmen to the International Criminal Court to be tried for war crimes. The U.S. froze over $30 billion in Libyan government assets, closed our embassy in Tripoli—bringing our diplomats out of harm’s way—and moved warships from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean to show force and increase our optionality. Yet, despite these actions, Qaddafi intensified the killing.
By early March, the British and French had begun to lobby for the international imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from Qaddafi’s forces. In Washington, we agonized over how to respond. There was reluctance to get into a third war, after Afghanistan and Iraq, in yet another Muslim-majority country. Doing nothing, however, pierced the conscience of many of us. The no-fly zone seemed a half-assed response, like being a little bit pregnant. We would own the problem but not have the means to fix it. Merely preventing Libyan planes from flying and bombing would not stop the ground forces with tanks from seizing successive cities on the road from Tripoli to Benghazi. Moreover, we discounted the ability of the U.K. and France to sustain an effective no-fly zone on their own, despite their considerable bluster, and knew that they would not launch without the backing of the Security Council, which required our assent.
The calculation in Washington shifted when on Saturday, March 12, 2011, the twenty-two-nation Arab League adopted an unprecedented statement calling on the UNSC to impose a no-fly zone and protect civilians, while recognizing the Libyan opposition forces as the legitimate government. On Monday, Lebanon introduced a draft resolution to implement the Arab League decision. France and the U.K., which had for weeks been agitating for a no-fly zone, championed the text as well. The looming question was: What would the U.S. position be?
Washington continued to dismiss a no-fly zone as worse than nothing, and I had argued that case forcefully in closed-door, “informal” meetings of the Security Council. Because I so roundly rejected a no-fly zone, the U.K. and French ambassadors had concluded that Washington wanted to do nothing.
On early Tuesday evening, I stepped out of a vehement and inconclusive Council debate to walk back across First Avenue to our office at the U.S. Mission in time to join a meeting with President Obama and his national security principals via secure videoconference. Hillary was plugged in remotely from Paris. The issue—what to do about Libya—was the same one we were debating in the Council. Qaddafi’s forces were moving steadily eastward down the coast capturing town after town from the rebels and closing in on the insurgency’s stronghold in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. Qaddafi had vowed to wipe out its residents, warning: “Prepare yourselves from tonight. We will find you in your closets.”
The Principals debated back and forth, as the president listened intently and, per usual, asked probing questions. Gates, Biden, Donilon, and White House chief of staff Bill Daley argued we should not intervene. While taking the humanitarian risks into account, these colleagues stressed that, ultimately, we had no compelling national security interest in Libya and should not involve ourselves in another Middle Eastern conflict. Even though the Arab League had requested U.N. (and thus U.S.) involvement, my colleagues maintained that Libya was not our fight and, effectively, that the likely costs of letting Qaddafi take Benghazi and retain his iron grip were acceptable when compared with the risks.
I argued the opposite—we should try to save innocent lives. The Arab Spring would be killed in the crib if Qaddafi were allowed to wipe out his citizens. The country was important as a linchpin in central North Africa, tucked between volatile Egypt and Tunisia and a gateway both to Europe and Africa’s terrorist-infested Sahel region to the south. Though not yet a genocide, mass atrocities were certain as Qaddafi brandished the means and the motive to kill thousands imminently. I maintained that President Obama should not allow what could be perceived as his Rwanda to occur—a moment when the world looked to the U.S. for leadership, and we blinked. A comparatively limited U.S. military commitment could make a meaningful difference. We should not agree simply to a no-fly zone. If we were serious, we needed a much wider U.N. mandate to protect civilians, and I believed there was a reasonable chance we could get one out of the Security Council.
Ben Rhodes, Tony Blinken, and Samantha Power joined me in advocating for action. To my surprise, so did Hillary Clinton. Having just visited Egypt, and now in Europe for consultations with Arab and European leaders, she changed her mind, morphing from reluctant to intervene to supporting U.S. involvement.
Obama was frustrated. We were under pressure to make a decision, and the only option he had been given was a feckless no-fly zone, which everyone agreed wasn’t worth the candle. Why, he railed at his national security advisor and Pentagon team, were we not in a position to consider viable alternatives? He abruptly adjourned the meeting to host an annual dinner for the four-star combatant commanders and their wives. “We’ll come back here in two hours. By then, I want some real options on the table,” Obama ordered.
Meanwhile, at the U.N., the informal meeting on Libya had ended inconclusively. My team and I had prepared for various contingencies, including the possibility that we would be asked by the president to pursue a far more ambitious resolution of the sort I believed we needed. That draft was in my back pocket, just in case.
When the NSC meeting resumed, we discussed concrete options, including an approach that would entail first bombing Libyan air defense systems to gain exclusive control of the skies and then targeting Qaddafi’s heavy weapons—tanks, artillery, aircraft—and any massing Libyan troops if they threatened civilian areas. All agreed this was a more logical approach if we were going to engage militarily, but the Principals still differed on whether or not to act. As he often did, President Obama polled not just the Principals at the table for their views but also the expert staff seated along the walls of the wood-paneled White House Situation Room. The staff generally favored action.
Having digested all the various perspectives and asked piercing questions, Obama spoke. He said he would favor U.S. military action, but only under several conditions: 1) that I could obtain UNSC authorization for a robust mandate to protect civilians; 2) that Hillary could get the Arab League countries to agree to participate; and 3) that the U.S. role would be limited—we would launch the attacks, take out Qaddafi’s air defenses, and establish air superiority but after that the Europeans, especially the Brits and French, would have to carry the bulk of the load.
Biden reiterated his opposition but took some comfort in Obama’s conditions, predicting that there was no way Russia would allow this resolution to pass. I offered my own assessment, “The Russian position so far is ambiguous, so the vice president could be right that they will veto any resolution. But I also think there is a decent chance we can get this resolution through. Mr. President, I will give it my best shot.” Getting the Arabs to put real skin in the game, rather than just rhetoric, also seemed a significant hurdle. So, the meeting ended with us having marching orders but the outcome in doubt.
The next morning, I came to the U.N. with a head of steam and a tough, sweeping authorization in the form of a draft resolution at the ready. As soon as the Security Council meeting started, I asked for the floor. With the full force of emotion commensurate with the gravity of the situation, I laid out the U.S. position:
I spent most of last night in a series of meetings with my president and his national security team. I am now prepared to share the U.S. position. Our view is that the situation in Libya is dire; and, we have very little time to save lives. After considerable deliberation, the U.S. is prepared to back a strong resolution to protect civilians and strengthen sanctions on the Qaddafi regime. We will not support a simple no-fly zone, which will do nothing to stop the forces massing on the ground heading for Benghazi. With the robust mandate we seek, we will take out Libyan air defenses, their heavy weapons—like tanks, artillery, and aircraft—and halt advancing columns of soldiers. This would need to be an unfettered mandate to protect civilians, and I don’t want any ambiguity about what we intend to do with it. This will be an air war to save innocent lives. The U.S. is prepared to join militarily with like-minded countries in a coalition to enforce the resolution to save innocents. The choice is yours: you can vote with us; or, accept responsibility for another historic failure of this Council to act to prevent a potential genocide, when the means were available to do so. Your governments must decide which side of history you will be on. Mine will be on the side of meaningful action to save civilians and the population of Benghazi.
Just before I said my last word and leaned back in my seat, my team moved quickly around the room, handing out our draft resolution that would implement what I had outlined.
The Council was dead silent for several seconds after I finished. Everyone was somewhere between moved and shocked. Lebanon broke the silence and signaled that it was on board with a stronger U.S. text. The United Kingdom followed suit. France was flummoxed. My counterpart, Gérard Araud, with whom I had a complex and not yet entirely friendly relationship, balked. Why raise the bar? Why not stick with a no-fly zone? He thought that we were bluffing. To the press, on background, he opined that he suspected the U.S. was playing games—upping the ante so far that we were trying to ensure our draft would fail, while allowing us to claim credit nonetheless. It was a typically French conspiratorial view of events that was not entirely unjustified, given the abrupt shift in the U.S. position.
Privately, I assured Gérard that we did not play that way: What you see is what you get. We genuinely favored the more robust mandate as the only approach we thought had merit, if we were going to act. My message was—So, let’s work together to get this done.
Russia, sensing an opening, offered its own alternative draft resolution that simply called for a cease-fire in Libya with no enforcement mechanism. It was a last-minute gambit to derail our more robust text. The Russian draft gained little to no traction in the Council and, uncharacteristically, Churkin dropped it without much of a fight. After France signaled it would support the U.S. text, I “put it into blue,” which meant the resolution was finalized, no further changes could be made, and it could be voted on—up or down—within twenty-four hours.
By the end of the day, as my team quietly polled Council members, it seemed we were in striking distance of enough votes. Russia and China, almost always hostile to U.N.-authorized humanitarian intervention, were question marks. They had no special affinity for Qaddafi, but also don’t like giving the U.S. free rein, especially to use force. The three African members—Nigeria, Gabon, and South Africa—were also uncertain, as the African Union had long benefited from Qaddafi’s largesse and hated to see the U.S. intervene in Africa with Arab forces rather than support African-led diplomatic and military efforts. Germany and Brazil made clear they were likely to abstain. We needed at least nine of fifteen Council members to vote yes, and no veto-wielding members to oppose.
That night, Gérard convened the P5 ambassadors at the French Mission to discuss the timing of the vote and next steps. Churkin pulled me aside for a private conversation. Without prelude, he said, “I believe Moscow will abstain on your resolution.” That meant the veto-wielding Russians would not vote yes but also would not block passage of the resolution.
I looked at him quizzically. Moscow almost never signaled in advance how it would vote on a controversial text. It also struck me as very strange that the Russians, even under Medvedev, would so readily allow such a robust resolution to pass that would give us carte blanche on the use of force, impose exceptionally tough sanctions, and authorize a blockade of Libyan arms imports. I had thrown the whole kitchen sink into that resolution, larding it up with authorities that we had never previously achieved in other contexts like North Korea and Iran. Yet Churkin did not seem troubled by his instructions and appeared to relish sharing them in advance. I asked him what he expected the Chinese to do, knowing that Russia and China closely coordinate their U.N. votes on everything of consequence. He said he thought they too would abstain.
Now, I was suspicious. We had just surmounted the biggest hurdle to getting our text adopted, but something didn’t feel right. The Russians, I surmised, were betting that we would get bogged down in Libya. I believe they figured we were making a major mistake, and they had decided to give us just enough rope to hang ourselves. Or maybe, Vladmir Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, was giving his president Dmitri Medvedev, whom he would replace the next year, enough rope to hang himself.
I reported to Washington that the holdouts now seemed to be the Africans, whom we needed to vote in favor of the resolution in order for us to cross the nine-vote threshold. Gabon would not be a problem if we could get Nigeria. My hunch was that Nigeria seemed get-able with some effort, and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson, my former Clinton-era principal deputy, managed to secure Nigeria’s support. But South Africa was a problem, given its typical prickliness and the governing African National Congress’s revolutionary aversion to Western involvement in the continent’s affairs.
With the vote scheduled for late afternoon on Thursday, March 17, President Obama called President Jacob Zuma of South Africa to press for his support. The NSC staff reported to my team that Obama sensed he had gotten a favorable response, but Zuma was not clear. Moreover, in New York we had not heard anything at all from the South African Mission. My staff was chasing them, trying to determine their position, but could not find out even if they had received instructions from Pretoria, much less what they were. That’s why I staked out my South African counterpart at the entrance to the Security Council.
When the vote was called, ten members including all the Africans supported the resolution, and five (Russia, China, India, Brazil, and Germany) abstained. Raising my hand to vote yes, I unwittingly created an image that would gain fame in Libya. It was nighttime in Libya when the Council session concluded. The Libyan ambassador chased me down excitedly after the vote to hug and thank me, and he shared live footage on his phone of massive crowds in Benghazi cheering and celebrating the vote. The image of me in my green jacket, raising my hand to vote yes and scanning the large, circular Council table to verify that we had the needed votes, was played over and over again on a big screen in Benghazi’s main square. Ironically, my homage to St. Patrick’s Day led to the iconic picture that captured the moment for the Libyan people.
I got the U.N. vote and did all the press engagements that the White House requested in its aftermath. Secretary Clinton had worked skillfully to get the Arabs on board, particularly Qatar and the UAE. President Obama talked to French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister David Cameron and obtained their commitment to carry the bulk of the military load. The conditions had been met. Obama publicly warned Qaddafi one last time to halt his advance on Benghazi, but Qaddafi persisted.
A few days later, President Obama left for a long-planned official visit to Latin America with his family and the White House team. It was spring break for my kids, and we flew as planned to Anguilla in the Caribbean. We desperately needed this time away together. Separation from my family was always the most difficult part of my job at the U.N. The kids were six and eleven when I began in New York, and by the time I left would be ten and fifteen (almost sixteen). When we set off for the Caribbean that spring, eight-year-old Maris and Jake, almost fourteen, were each becoming the two very different individuals they are today. Maris, steady and still wise for her years, seemed to be adjusting to school and friends, while Jake had begun a more dramatic transition from boy to an independent-minded teenager. He and his dad fought frequently in my absence, as Jake tested his boundaries.
Ian had borne the brunt of caring for the kids when I was away—getting them ready for school, serving breakfast and dinner, carpooling, and overseeing homework. Just as I was wrapping up my week, his work at This Week was kicking into high gear, peaking every Friday through Sunday. By late 2010, Ian and I were forced to admit we were ships passing in the night, and the kids had serial parents rather than much collective family time. Given the strain on our family and his waning enthusiasm for the job, Ian decided to take a buyout offer in January of 2011. After leaving ABC, he looked forward to dedicating his talent and time to community service.
Selfishly, I worried that Ian would become a stay-at-home dad, making him the primary parent. My fears ranged from Honey, I’m afraid the kids will see me somehow as less relevant in their lives and even more distant, to Ian, what if you feel unfulfilled as a stay-at-home dad or resent being seen by status-conscious Washingtonians as less respectable? Ultimately, none of my concerns were justified. Ian loved life after ABC, and I was a huge beneficiary of his greater freedom and attention to the home front, including his invaluable assistance to my ailing parents.
Beyond the stresses of the Libya negotiation and our family separation, the time away for spring break would be welcome for another reason. On the morning of March 10, I had received a devastating call from Ticey Westbrooks, the wonderful young nurse who was taking care of my dad at his home in Washington State.
Over a year earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, my ninety-year-old father had suffered a stroke while he was staying with us in Washington for the holiday. He came upstairs to breakfast a bit wobbly, complaining that his vision was partially blocked. After a couple calls to some doctor friends, we hurriedly took him to nearby Sibley Hospital, where he was diagnosed and admitted. While in the hospital, he developed a bowel obstruction that required emergency surgery, which was itself very risky. He survived the surgery, but his blockage did not resolve, requiring a second surgery two weeks later. I spent weeks working out of corners of Sibley Hospital. After six weeks in hospital and rehab, a much weakened and very cranky Dad came home to live with us.
I hired and managed the 24/7 caregivers who helped him bathe, drive, and exercise, while Ian played an outsize role in keeping Dad company in my absence. For the kids, it was a blessing to have many extra months living with my dad. He used his time with Jake and Maris to impart his “life lessons” on race, duty, excellence, and self-esteem. They played chess together, and Jake and Dad spent hours discussing political philosophy.
After flying him back to Camas, Washington, in October and getting him settled in with Ticey, I managed to visit Dad twice. His health remained precarious but not critical, and his mind was still solid. We talked almost every day. In fact, we had spoken the night before the unexpected early morning phone call from Ticey—after I finished at the U.N. Dad was thrilled to hear about Jake’s latest report card, which signaled a sustained improvement in his academic performance.
As usual, we ended the conversation with me saying, “I love you,” and Dad replying in his warm, deep voice, “Honey, I love you too.”
“Night, night,” I said.
“Sleep tight,” he replied, replicating our ritual from my childhood.
When she called that next morning, Ticey was in tears but managed to choke out that Dad had passed away peacefully in his sleep overnight.
Emmett Rice had always been the world to me and, suddenly, he was gone.
I had to break the news to my brother, Johnny, pulling him out of a business meeting. He happened to be in New York, and he hurried over to the Waldorf, where we hugged and cried together. President Obama called almost immediately to offer his condolences, as Johnny and I sat together for some while in disbelief and mourning. Before long, Johnny reminded me that I had work to do, “Dad wouldn’t want you slacking now, with Libya and everything else on your plate.” I had to keep going.
The memorial service in Camas would wait, and we would throw a party in Washington in Dad’s honor some weeks later. Dad wasn’t much of a planner, except in certain matters. He gave us clear instructions years before on how to handle his passing: a very short service with no long speeches; no church; good but inexpensive wine; and his carefully crafted playlist dictated for the occasion. Miles Davis. Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong. Oscar Peterson. And, of course, Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ for Jamaica” to bring it all home.
Ten days later, I so badly needed this break in Anguilla to process Dad’s passing as well as to comfort and be comforted by the kids and Ian. Soon after our arrival in Anguilla, the president gave the order to initiate air strikes in Libya. I was slowly starting to decompress, absorbing the sunshine and relative quiet.
On our third day, as I played my usual morning game of tennis with Ian, one of the DS agents came abruptly on the court, interrupting our rally to announce that the White House chief of staff needed to talk to me. That’s strange, I thought—Bill Daley almost never called me. I had known the large, balding Bill Daley since he was commerce secretary in the Clinton administration. I left the court and climbed into DS’s SUV to have cool and quiet for the call.
“Where are you?” Daley said as soon as he picked up.
“I’m in Anguilla with my family.”
He shouted, “You start a fucking war and then you go on vacation to the Caribbean?”
Shocked to a chill, I replied evenly: “I am on a long-planned vacation. I am the U.N. ambassador. My part of this equation is done. I passed the resolution, and I did the press work. What else could I possibly do? I don’t control any aspect of the military action.”
“I can’t believe you are away.”
Incredulous, I asked, “Did President Obama ask you to call me?”
“No,” he conceded.
“Well, Bill, thank you,” and I politely ended the call.
Angry and upset, I was shaking and my heart was racing. He knew I was on vacation, and his only objective was to ruin it. The rest of the day was horrible until the evening when the phone rang again.
Valerie Jarrett’s warm and steadying voice greeted me. She quickly asked, “Are you okay?”
“No, not at all,” I confessed. Still incredulous, I relayed the conversation with Daley.
“Yeah, I heard he was really rough on you. Don’t worry about it. It’s not about you. He is under a lot of stress. The president is fine with you being away.”
If not for her call, I wouldn’t have recovered enough to regroup and make the most of the remainder of the week with my family.
The following Monday, President Obama made a short trip to New York to dedicate the new U.S. Mission building, which was aptly named after the late commerce secretary, my old neighbor and friend, Ron Brown. Obama greeted me in the elevator as we rode up with his agents to the top floor for the ceremony.
“Nice tan,” he commented, laughing. “I hear my chief of staff had a bad day last week.”
“No kidding.”
He smiled and said apologetically, “Don’t worry about it. We’re cool.”
My relief was complete, but my anger at Daley unabated. I went to see him a couple of weeks later to make sure he understood how I felt about our conversation. He acted like nothing had ever happened.
The operation to protect civilians in Libya accomplished its proximate goal. Benghazi was spared. So were countless thousands of civilian lives. The Libyan army continued to fight rebels, but no major massacres of civilians were reported. Rebel forces steadily gained ground, buoyed by the persistence of NATO air strikes. No Americans were killed in combat, although two U.S. servicemen were safely recovered after their plane went down due to mechanical problems, having been assisted by Libyans grateful for the American intervention.
U.S. involvement in the air campaign lasted longer than expected, as our European partners proved unable to carry the load, despite their pledges. They lacked ordnance and sufficient combat aircraft to sustain the fight. As the mission stretched on for several months, the Russians and Africans quickly turned against the operation, blaming the U.S. and our allies for vastly exceeding the mandate given.
The mandate was extremely broad, but I had explained plainly before the Security Council how it would be used. Still, Russia resented that the mission lasted months and argued that the objective had seemed to morph from sparing civilians to removing Qaddafi. In fact, regime change was not the original objective of the mission, but Qaddafi would not relent. Consequently, the NATO-led bombing campaign ended only after rebels captured and killed Qaddafi on October 20. The Russians (and Putin in particular) have since tried to portray Libya, falsely, as proof of American duplicity and obsession with regime change. In Putin’s warped mind, Libya is a key milestone on the road of deteriorating U.S.-Russian relations.
Initially, the mission in Libya seemed a triumph of good over evil. The United States was deeply popular, along with France and the United Kingdom. The New York Times reported in May 2011 that, “Many Libyan parents with newborn girls are reportedly naming them Susan, in honor of Susan E. Rice, the Obama administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, for her vote in the Security Council in favor of establishing the no-fly zone”—the imprecise term the Times used to shorthand the totality of the U.S.-led military action.
When I visited Libya in November, less than a month after Qaddafi was killed by rebel soldiers in Sirte, his last stronghold, I was welcomed with more warmth and joy than I have experienced before or since as a representative of the United States on foreign soil. Massive crowds gathered in the central square in Benghazi to greet me, many by raising their right hands and moving their heads swiftly from side to side, mimicking my body language as I scanned the Security Council table to count the yes votes for the historic Libya resolution. On the walls of buildings surrounding the square were pictures of hundreds of young Libyan men murdered or missing under Qaddafi’s rule. I was surprised to see a big sign captioned, “Fantastic Four—God Bless You All. Thanks For All,” with large photos of U.K. prime minister David Cameron, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, President Obama, and me!
In the streets of Benghazi, men and women swarmed me, asked to shake my hand, and thrust their kids into my arms to hold. The large complement of Diplomatic Security and the rebel security guards who protected me seemed a bit nervous, but the tight crowds were clearly friendly, and I was never fearful.
As my team and I flew out of Benghazi, my wise, young special assistant and friend, Priya Singh, shared a message for me from one of our Libyan escorts. He said that for all the public displays of gratitude we saw that day, the people of Benghazi would never be able to thank the U.S. enough, because just before the U.N. vote and President Obama’s decision to intervene, Qaddafi’s troops were closing in on the city with orders to rape and kill. Without U.S. leadership, they would not be there to greet us. Deeply moved by his words, I confessed to Priya, “I feel like I could be done today. I feel I’ve done something.”
Unfortunately, it was not enough and, before long, Libya’s tide of joy began to recede. After some months, the interim Libyan government proved to be divided and ineffectual. The international effort to support the new government faltered for lack of strong leadership from the U.N., Europe, or the U.S. We underestimated the difficulty of establishing a unified, stable government in a country where there had never been actual institutions, only the writ and whim of one man. Wishfully perhaps, having internalized the lessons of Iraq, the administration sought to minimize U.S. involvement in Libya, while expecting our European allies to drive the state-building effort—a challenge they embraced in principle but lacked the capacity to meet. In New York, I gathered Arab, European, and U.N. counterparts with some regularity to try to galvanize and concert our diplomatic and peace-building efforts. Meanwhile, in Washington, lingering ambivalence among some Principals about the original operation led the NSC to convene few Principals Committee meetings at a time when our efforts might have had maximum impact.
Then, in September 2012, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three U.S. officials were killed in a terrorist attack on our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi. Heartbroken, my colleagues and I mourned the deaths of all four Americans. For me, it also brought back the trauma of the 1998 terrorist attacks on our embassies in East Africa. Yet, this latest assault was equally personal, as I had come to know Chris as a valued colleague in Washington. Warm, handsome, and fearless, Chris was deeply knowledgeable and committed to the Libyan people. He couldn’t wait to get back out there as ambassador to a post-Qaddafi Libya. Like all who knew Chris, I was shocked and profoundly pained by his loss in a country he so loved and a city that so loved him. Benghazi and its highly politicized aftermath caused policymakers in Washington to shy away from Libya even more.
In the president’s second term, as national security advisor, I tried to refocus and sustain senior-level attention on Libya in order to support a unified national government, stabilize what was increasingly becoming a failed state, and dislodge the ISIS terrorists who had filled the vacuum created by the Qaddafi government’s collapse and the opposition’s failure to install an effective replacement. While we did manage to reduce the terrorist threat in coastal Libya, extremists flowed through Libya to the Sahel, destabilizing Mali, Niger, and other parts of the region.
Libya remains a state without an effective government, and an exporter of refugees and instability. As in Somalia, I believe the U.S. intervened for the right reasons. We made fewer mistakes and paid a far lesser price for our success protecting civilians in Libya than we did in Somalia. And yet what we left behind is not dissimilar—a fractured state without an effective central government, continued factional fighting, a lingering terrorist threat, and a source of insecurity in the region. Though I remain conflicted, on balance I still think we did the right thing to intervene in Libya and save thousands of innocent lives. Libya was an urgent case, I believe, where the risks and costs of intervention to the U.S. were tolerable when weighed against the humanitarian benefit. That said, while we and our European partners won the war, we failed to try hard enough and early enough to win the peace. Whether it could have been won at all is a real question; but not having given it our best shot, we will never know.