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by
Ben Rhodes
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August 14 - August 23, 2019
“Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.
willing to meet, without preconditions, with a number of U.S. adversaries, including Iran and Cuba. “I would,” Obama answered. “And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is somehow punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration, is ridiculous.”
“I know,” he said, “that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” The
we were winning without the people who were the arbiters of opinion in Washington,
Palin’s ascendance broke a seal on a Pandora’s box: The innuendo and conspiracy theories that existed in forwarded emails and fringe right-wing websites now had a mainstream voice, and for the next eight years the trend would only grow.
“I say this as the president of a country that not very long ago made it hard for somebody who looks like me to vote, much less be president of the United States. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries.” The references to America’s own historical sins—to people like Obama and me—reflected a positive, patriotic, and progressive view of American history; the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.
I stood there watching, thinking that Obama would never have become president without the mistake America had made in Iraq, nor would I have ended up working for a president.
Obama had told a different story about what America was and how we would engage other nations and peoples. But on-the-fly decisions we had made about the words Obama spoke inflamed the spreading attacks and innuendo, from Fox News to the halls of Congress: Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, he’s not patriotic, he’s not like Us, he might even be Muslim. I had become the coauthor of “Obama’s Apology Tour.”
These actions take place on their own momentum—rooted in a vast complex of deployments, alliances, international agreements, and budget decisions that could have been made a month, a year, or decades ago. This reality contributes to occasional schizophrenia, because our foreign policy represents a particular view of U.S. interests at the time that particular decisions were made.
He lived in Indonesia as a child, just years after a U.S.-supported coup initiated bloodletting that killed hundreds of thousands of people—the kind of event that barely registers in the United States but shapes the psyche of a foreign country.
just about every aspect of American power and its role in people’s lives since World War II lurks somewhere in Obama’s background—our capacity to keep the peace abroad and to disrupt it; our capacity to transform individual lives through both our generosity and our callousness; the allure of our democratic values and our imperfection in realizing them.
he harbored a deeper concern about overreach—how our policies affect people in places like Indonesia; the casual manner in which, from Vietnam to Iraq, we failed to consider the consequences of our actions; the dangers of unchecked executive power.
Obama believed in a competent, stabilizing force: the necessity of taking military action against certain terrorist networks, the benefits of globalization in lifting people out of poverty, the indispensability of the United States to international order. He wanted to redirect the ocean liner of American foreign policy, not sink it.
“It will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with courage, rectitude, and resolve.”
“I think we were pretty careful in saying that a speech isn’t going to solve all these problems,” I replied. “Yes.” He paused. “You know, Bush’s second inaugural is a great speech, but you can’t just promise to ‘end tyranny’ in the world.” He let the thought hang in the air; he’d just met with Mubarak, a tyrant who had ruled Egypt for decades. “The language is great,” he added. “It’s probably Bush’s best speech.” “I think we landed in a good place,” I said. “I hope nobody throws a shoe at me,” he said.
the debate about what to do in Afghanistan was becoming a proxy for a debate about what had gone wrong in Iraq.
“The American people are idealists,” he said, “but their leaders have to be realistic and hard-headed.” At the beginning and end of the speech, he wanted to draw upon American idealism—Roosevelt’s belief that we “carry special burdens” in the world. In between, he wanted to acknowledge that in disorderly places there is a limit to what we can achieve.
tension between “the world as it is” and our effort to strive for “the world that ought to be.”
there is a far greater unity among the masses in Egypt on what and who they want to see gone than there is on what and who they want in its/their place.”
the ambassadors from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two of the most powerful envoys in Washington, were telling people in the press and the foreign policy establishment that Obama had been badly advised by younger people like me who were more interested in preserving Obama’s brand than listening to the wise hands who understood that democracy couldn’t work in the Middle East. It was the beginning of a multiyear effort by those two countries to restore a dictatorship in Egypt, and it would ultimately succeed.
at home, the Republican Party had embraced a strategy of virulent and brazen opposition that led healthy majorities of its own voters to believe that Obama was born in Kenya. Mitch McConnell, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate, abandoned any pretense of cooperation, saying that his top priority was to make Obama a one-term president. The decorum that usually shielded national security from politics was tossed aside. The hard truth was that Republicans had been rewarded for this behavior by winning the House of Representatives, aided in part by the constant echo chamber of Fox News and the
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Globalization had pushed up against people’s sense of their own unique identity. In Russia, Vladimir Putin was planning his own return to the presidency, watching warily as popular movements upended Mubarak and Gaddafi. In
Obama had vetoed a resolution at the UN Security Council that condemned Israeli settlement construction using words taken from Obama’s speeches.
the demographics of Israel changed throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and invading Arab armies were replaced by occasional acts of terror, the Israel that my mother’s generation idealized was increasingly eclipsed by an Israel driven by the settler movement and ultra-orthodox émigrés. That was Netanyahu’s political base, and he knew how to play in American politics on their behalf.
Netanyahu had mastered a certain kind of leverage: using political pressure within the United States to demoralize any meaningful push for peace, just as he used settlements as a means of demoralizing the Palestinians.
“Dealing with Bibi is like dealing with the Republicans.”
we had gone too far for Putin in pulling Medvedev toward an American position on the UN Security Council resolution on Libya. Russia was historically aligned with Libya and opposed to U.S.-led efforts to impose regime change on other countries, and Putin had publicly criticized Medvedev over Libya. Russia was heading into a presidential election, and it still was not clear whether Putin would run to reclaim the office that he had handed off to Medvedev. The impact of Putin’s criticism was apparent immediately. Medvedev began the meeting with a long complaint about our policy in Libya.
Working off a guide book, I found a boarded-up synagogue and then a Jewish cemetery. Some of the headstones had been defaced with swastikas and excrement, along with the names of death camps. A few empty vodka bottles were smashed, suggesting it was the kind of place where far-right young men came to get drunk and make themselves feel empowered, the counterpoint to the story of human progress that Obama had just told in London.
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was something we had to manage, not solve—keep the two sides talking; persuade the Palestinians not to give up on the prospect of a state altogether; block the United Nations from piling on Israel. Reaction, not action.
the Middle East—where autocracy, tribalism, and sectarianism seemed more powerful than any external force, even the United States of America—I
What does it mean to invade a country, topple its leader, face a raging insurgency, open a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict across a region, spend trillions of dollars, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and permanently alter hundreds of thousands of American lives?
Some threshold had been crossed. They were slamming us in the crudest possible way in the middle of a crisis. They were attacking career Foreign Service people who had issued a statement while their embassy was under siege. They were ignoring the fact that the video was offensive. They were making it harder for us to say things that could help protect American lives abroad. They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism.
“Benghazi” would be transformed from the name of a city in Libya where American intervention had saved tens of thousands of lives into something entirely different: a word that represented the sentiment in that statement of Romney’s, an expression of an ugly conspiracy theory to delegitimize Obama and Clinton, destroy any concern for facts that didn’t fit the theory, and dehumanize a small group of people, including me. Benghazi.
Fridays being the biggest protest days in Muslim communities, as it’s the weekend and people attend Friday prayers, where imams can stir up a crowd and extremists can take advantage of the chaos.
Morsi was toppled in a military takeover of the government and put into prison, where he remains to this day. A general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, took power, casting himself as a savior of Egypt from Islamists with the full backing of Saudi Arabia and the UAE—two
In the course of a presidency, a U.S. president says millions of words in public. You never know which of those words end up cementing a certain impression. For Obama, one of those phrases would be “red line.”
it took a period of months before the intelligence community formally determined that the Assad regime had in fact used chemical weapons. When this assessment was released in April 2013, the question became what we were going to do about
Obama decided to publicize a decision to provide military support to the Syrian opposition—the latest iteration of the plan that Petraeus had first presented in 2012.
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marty Dempsey, who had internalized the limits of U.S. military action in the Middle East. One time he surprised me in the hallway of the West Wing by recommending that I read Rachel Maddow’s book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. Up to this point, he had argued that Syria was a slippery slope where there was little chance of success; now he said that something needed to be done even if we didn’t know what would happen after we took action.
Republican members of Congress wrote Obama a letter that threatened him bluntly: “Engaging our military in Syria when no direct threat to the United States exists and without prior congressional authorization would violate the separation of powers that is clearly delineated in the Constitution.”
Boehner also focused on the need for congressional authorization: “It is essential you address on what basis any use of force would be legally justified and how the justification comports with the exclusive authority of congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution.”
For eight years, Republicans had defended Bush’s ability to do whatever he pleased as commander in chief; now they were suddenly devoted to constitutional limits on the commander in chief? I was used to the relentless style of politics from Obama’s opponents—the effort to find any piece of information that could embarrass him, put him on the defensive, wound him politically. But I’d spent two days reading detailed descriptions of people being gassed to death, watching video of children with vacant eyes lying on the floor of a makeshift hospital. Faced with this harsh reality, Congress was
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the decade since 9/11, we’d gone to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Now there was a demand that we go into Syria; next it would be Iran. “It is too easy for a president to go to war,” he said. “That quote from me in 2007—I agree with that guy. That’s who I am. And sometimes the least obvious thing to do is the right thing.”
Congress and the international community. They both press for action but want to avoid any share of the responsibility.”
AIPAC lobbied in support of our position; so did the Saudi government—but none of it mattered. No wave of support materialized in Congress or in public polls. One after another, members of Congress in both parties—including people who had demanded that we take action in Syria—announced that they would vote against authorizing it.
In Libya, everything went right—we saved thousands of lives, we didn’t have a single casualty, and we took out a dictator who killed hundreds of Americans. And at home, it was a negative.”
“Benghazi” was an accusation that seemed to mean everything and nothing at the same time, shifting from one conspiracy theory to the next.
The best way to put the whole thing behind us would have been to release all of the information we had about Benghazi. But institutionally the White House counsel needs to avoid setting a precedent that the inner workings of the government are easily obtained so that the president can receive unvarnished advice. And so we were going to face the drip, drip, drip of a story coming out in bits through the drama of congressional committees forcing information out of the White House, information that reached the public only after being filtered through the faux outrage of the Republicans who
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