The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

The plane is both unlike any other you will ever be on and not as nice as you think.

In the machinery that moves the president around, he is described as more of an object than a human being.

As I sat in my large beige chair reading printed drafts of the many sets of remarks he’d give over the course of the next several days, I felt myself sinking into the comfortable embrace of a machinery that would feed me, fly me, carry my bags, and move me around cities so that I could perform my function for “the president.”

“I believe,” he said, “in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” It was a quote that would be used for the next eight years to cast Obama as less than sufficiently adamant in his belief in America’s primacy among nations.

It seemed that we were squandering his popularity to address the circumstances we’d inherited instead of being able to invest it in the new initiatives we envisioned.

Obama echoed this frustration when I saw him the first night in France. “I’m spending all of my political capital,” he said, “just to keep things going.”

Temporary NSC offices on the road are unpleasant places. Blue tarp is put up along the walls of a hotel room to prevent video surveillance; a constant mind-scrambling mix of pop songs plays to block efforts to eavesdrop. Obama came into the middle of the cramped room, surrounded by a handful of aides, and said, “Being president isn’t as glamorous as they make it sound.”

Obama rarely gave positive feedback, but—like a coach who knows how to get the most out of his players—he chose the right moments.

promised to recognize the fact of the 1915 Armenian genocide, and Samantha Power had been emailing me steadily to argue for some reference to it in the speech. All of the other advisors, less invested in the purity of our campaign positions and more focused on the need for Turkish cooperation, wanted to avoid it altogether.

There was also the matter of Turkey’s treatment of minority religious and ethnic groups. Obama thought for a moment. “Let’s get into it,” he said, “by talking about how we’ve been able to overcome similar issues. It’s not like we’re without sin. I mean, what happened to the Indians? Or black folks? Let’s make the point that democracy is the way we deal with those problems, all right?”

“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.

Dogma

More than a thousand troops cheered when Obama said it was time to turn things over to the Iraqis and bring them home. 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.

Sealed in the white noise of an aircraft that already felt like a second home, I felt that I had proved myself, that I belonged, that what we were doing was not only interesting but important.

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.”

So for any president, the conduct of foreign policy represents a strange mix of managing the circumstances you’ve inherited, responding to the crises that take place on your watch, and being opportunistic about where you want to launch the new initiatives that will leave an imprint on the world.

Obama was unique in that the mere fact of his own identity was going to leave an imprint on people abroad.

Yes, Obama believes in the liberation of peoples, but he is at his core an institutionalist, someone who believes progress is more sustainable if it is husbanded by laws, institutions, and—if need be—force.

Obama wanted to say that the 240 Muslim detainees in Gitmo had spent years “in a legal black hole”—a relatively noncontroversial statement, since no one at Gitmo had been convicted of a crime; the intelligence community wanted to delete that sentence as well, offering instead this justification: “The detainees at Guantanamo have more legal representation and have been afforded more process than any enemy combatants in the history of the world.”

The person I was working for was president of the United States, and a figure uniquely revered by people around the world; but his views did not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.

we ended up presenting Obama with two choices for where he could deliver the speech: Jakarta, the place where he had lived as a boy, which offered a venue for him to talk about a more tolerant brand of Islam; or Cairo, which was the center of a region that had been the source of so much extremism and instability in recent decades. Jakarta was the safer choice, far from the wars, conflicts, and autocrats of the Middle East. And that’s precisely why Obama chose Cairo. “Let’s be honest,” he told a group of us. “The problems are in the Arab world, not Indonesia.”

He wanted to describe a new framework for how we could cooperate with the Muslim world. “The West,” he said, “has to reeducate itself about Islam and the contributions that it has made to the world, and Islam has to recognize the contributions that the West has made to articulate certain principles that are universal.” He ticked through Islam’s contributions to art, science, and mathematics when “we were a backwater”—including himself in what would have been, at the time, Europe. Then, “we need to talk about the contributions that America has made.” The goal, he said, could be shorthanded as “We have to know each other better.” He talked about how religious absolutism ultimately fails as a means of governing, just as imperialism does. He stopped walking when he landed on some language that he wanted to use in the speech: “Any world order that elevates one group of people over another will fail.” He sat down in the chair facing us. “Then I want to talk about how I benefited from experience in both worlds.”

He told a story about how his mother once worked in Pakistan. She was riding on an elevator. Her hair was uncovered and her ankles were showing. Yet even though she was older, “this guy in the elevator with her couldn’t stand to be in that type of space with a woman who was uncovered. By the time the door opened he was sweating.” He paused for effect. “When men are that repressed, they do some crazy shit.”

One was democracy. I pointed out that the challenge wasn’t just the sensitivity of addressing the issue in a repressive country; it was the fact that if there was ever a real election in Egypt, the Islamist party—the Muslim Brotherhood—would probably win. America tended to express support for the type of democratic activists who would get only a small percentage of the vote, and it made us less credible. Obama paused on this, then offered a formulation: The United States should welcome the legitimacy of all political movements, even those we disagree with, but we will also judge any political movement by whether they choose to act and govern in a way that is consistent with democratic principles. Little did we know how that position would be tested at the height of the Arab Spring.

I worked with a devout Muslim on the White House staff, Rashad Hussain, to sprinkle in references from the Koran.

When he got tired of hearing me argue that Obama had to show empathy to the Palestinians, he started calling me Hamas. “Hamas over here,” he’d say, “is going to make it impossible for my kid to have his fucking bar mitzvah in Israel.”

In Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other organizations friendly to Netanyahu had established themselves as the adjudicators of what was pro-Israel, and they had zero tolerance for any pressure on the Israeli government, and enormous influence with Congress. Most Americans, of course, also felt a natural affinity for Israel.

He then implored me to call on the Muslim world to recognize Israel “as a Jewish state.” This was a formal position that the United States had not yet taken, as it would be a signal that millions of Palestinian refugees will not have the right to return to Israel as part of a peace agreement.

The Israelis were by far the stronger party in the conflict, but we were acting as if it was the reverse.

Indeed, this established a pattern—a post facto criticism of Obama for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, which ignored the fact that he wasn’t doing anything tangible for the Palestinians and which absolved Israel’s own government for its failure to take any meaningful steps toward peace.

“There’s a lot of discomfort with using the word ‘occupation,’ ” I said, referring to the edits to the Israel section that continued to come through. “What else are we supposed to call it?” he asked. We ended up affirming our “unbreakable” bond with Israel, calling Holocaust denial “baseless, ignorant, and hateful,” and declaring that “threatening Israel with destruction—or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews—is deeply wrong.” We tried to balance this with language that spoke to “the daily humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation,” and saying “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.”

“I think we landed in a good place,” I said. “I hope nobody throws a shoe at me,” he said.

But as soon as Obama opened with “Assalamu alaikum,” the audience erupted in cheers, and I felt the tension recede.

As we posed for pictures, we had a remarkable sense of privacy; there were no other people in sight. Mubarak had set a broad security perimeter, a gesture that spoke to his power—one authoritarian leader inviting his American patron to tour the tombs of his long-dead authoritarian predecessors, structures with far more permanence than words.

In his trips to Washington, Gates arrived nearly thirty minutes early for each meeting—a habit that sent a message about his discipline. He would draw a cup of coffee into a Styrofoam cup, sit at an empty table, and flip through documents as he waited.

The only senior official who consistently opposed sending more troops to Afghanistan was Joe Biden.

Obama liked that Biden had an instinct for this brand of politics, and came to love him with the almost protective sense of devotion to an older family member.

He would pepper his comments with anecdotes from his long career in the Senate, repeatedly declaring that experience had taught him that “all foreign policy is an extension of personal relationships.”

If Petraeus was the polished, intellectual architect of a strategy that sought to secure Iraqi and Afghan neighborhoods, McChrystal was the fit field soldier who unwound by drinking Bud Light Lime and had spent years sharpening the tip of the spear.

Donilon was the kind of guy widely known inside Washington and nearly anonymous outside it.

He stressed that we needed to destroy al Qaeda but that it wasn’t necessary to destroy the Taliban to accomplish this goal. The Taliban had to be pushed back to give us the capacity to go after al Qaeda, but we couldn’t destroy a movement indigenous to Afghanistan’s tribes with local agendas that did not include launching attacks against the United States beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

For the same reason, Clinton said that putting in troops wouldn’t work but you still need to put in troops.

It seemed to sum things up perfectly: We had created political pressure on ourselves to send in troops based on a theory of COIN; the review was determining that COIN couldn’t succeed; but all of the arguments still pointed to sending in the same number of troops. We are not going to defeat the Taliban, Obama kept saying. We need to knock them back to give us space to go after al Qaeda.

McChrystal assessed that we would need a substantial force for four years, until the Afghan Security Forces would be able to take the lead. Meanwhile, Eikenberry was arguing that the Afghan government would never get its act together if it felt as if we were going to be staying forever.

Speaking as the only one who had to think about everything the U.S. government has to do around the world, he said, “A six-to-eight-year war at over fifty billion dollars a year is not in the national interest. The Petraeus surge [in Iraq] was much quicker than that. This has to be a surge like that.”

Brennan gave the best summary of what we ended up doing. He noted that we’d have to sustain our ability to go after al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and train Afghan Security Forces, all of which required more troops for some time. But he noted that it would take “at least a generation” to transform Afghanistan, and that we needed to stick to more modest goals. I said nothing.

It felt like a bit much, but this was the lesson from Vietnam: Limit escalation.

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. When he was finished he went back behind his desk and sat down.

“We should glorify their service,” he told me, “but we should not glorify war.”

Years later, Gates—the most important advisor in the process—would say that Obama’s strategy was right, but he was not sufficiently committed to the mission (a convenient way for Gates to argue that he was right, and any problems in Afghanistan were Obama’s). But that was wrong. Obama was committed to taking out al Qaeda; that was just not as ambitious a mission as what the military had in mind.

Obama had defended the traditional concept of the use of force in self-defense; in other cases, he said, war had to meet certain international standards such as the enforcement of international law. These were the cases in which, Obama had written, eerily foreshadowing Syria, “More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.”