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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Rhodes
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August 7, 2023 - January 7, 2024
Samantha wanted to insert the concept of nations having a “responsibility to protect,” saying that if governments commit atrocities, nations were justified—if not obliged—to intervene. This would have represented a significant new policy for the United States, which Samantha knew. “Think of the message this will send,” she kept saying.
Each agency, I was learning, had its own layer of bureaucracy and rivalry.
This was Washington presenting a constant choice: Ignore something and let it stand, or feed it oxygen by hitting back.
Usually, they dealt with whatever bad thing around the world merited his attention: terrorism, a worrisome trend in the Middle East, a new development with China or Russia. I was always struck by the exclusion of large global trends—climate, governance, food, health—in favor of an intricate level of detail about terrorist plots. After 9/11, the intelligence community was going to let any president know anything it knew about a potential plot, even if there was little he could do about it.
Those were always my favorite moments on trips—moments that connect a president to people in other countries, when people didn’t just see Obama but felt seen by him.
By this point, I’d learned that Obama got mad only at the people closest to him—with everyone else, he was unfailingly polite.
Often, I felt as though I cared more about the global progressive icon Barack Obama than Barack Obama did.
A kindly older Japanese woman then showed Obama around the twelfth-century Buddha, an austere stone monument that put midterm elections in perspective. When we got back to the helicopter, he looked out the window for a few minutes. Then he looked at me and said, “That was good to do.” “It will be the biggest story here in Japan,” I said. “I know. I know why you make me do all of this stuff on trips,” he said. “It matters to a lot of people.” We rode on in silence.
As the sun set into the Pacific, I listened to the voices of strangers wafting up to the balcony and thought about my family and friends. I’d become somebody they watched from afar—whose quotes they might read in the newspaper more often than they spoke to me—someone whose experiences were unknowable to them.
Obama’s call with Mubarak was focused on Middle East peace, but he used it to discuss the protests in Tunisia. “We think it is best if Ben Ali does not return to Tunisia,” Obama said. “We hope the Tunisian government will hold free and fair elections in the future.” I think he will not be able to return again, Mubarak responded with confidence. You will not succeed unless the people are very fair and want you. I told the same thing to Gaddafi.
The main driver of opinion seemed to be generational, with the younger staff pressing for change. Mubarak no longer represented stability, we’d say—his dictatorship was the source of instability. This was a once-in-a-generation chance to achieve meaningful reform in the Arab world. We had a moral responsibility to be on the right side of history.
People would forward me reports that had been sent to them by their friends who had taken up living in Tahrir Square, quoting verbatim from things that Obama had said, lamenting that he wasn’t taking their side; on the other hand, our military and diplomats were getting calls from Egyptian officials expressing anger that Obama was abandoning them. The only thing they had in common is that they seemed to care, deeply, about what we were saying.
To those of us who were pushing for change, it was clear that the cabinet-level principals were not. Time and again, Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Mike Mullen would put forward the Egyptian government’s view—that the protests would die down; that things could be channeled into a “national dialogue”; that our policy should aim to revert to the status quo. This approach was being pushed hard by the Gulf States, chiefly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who feared this kind of unrest coming to their capitals.
He dismissed the people in the street as nothing more than the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbollah, al Qaeda, and Hamas. This was their view of who was protesting in Egypt: terrorists. But that is not what the rest of us could see with our own eyes. The protesters weren’t just Islamists, they were secular activists, young people, Coptic Christians.
forward, elbow on his desk, “I always respect my elders. You’ve been in politics for a very long time. There are moments in history—just because things have been the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be the same way in the future.”
Brennan had spent much of his career working on issues related to the Middle East. Unlike some of the other principals, he knew Mubarak couldn’t weather the storm. But he warned that Egypt wasn’t ready for democracy, that the population had no experience of a politics that wasn’t zero-sum.
Brennan gave me a note: “It is a truism to say that 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.”
Our media, focused on the Washington angle, was filled with stories of mixed messages coming out of the U.S. government—a dynamic that ensured we were making everyone unhappy: the people in the streets, who thought Obama had been slow and uncertain, and the people in power, in Cairo and the Gulf, who thought that Obama betrayed an ally—a belief shared by many in Washington.
“You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.”
On February 22, we reached one of those turning points that became familiar in the Arab Spring—the moment when a dictator gives a big speech that indicates how he’s going to respond to the calls for him to step down.
For me, this was a time when every moment had the electric charge of history.
On February 26, in the most routine kind of press statement—the “readout” of a call between Obama and Angela Merkel—we decided to call for Gaddafi to go. “The president stated that when a leader’s only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now.”
When the U.S. government wants to avoid doing something, it avoids producing the options to do something.
Obama went around the table to get everyone’s views. Biden said that intervention was, essentially, madness—why should we get involved in another war in a Muslim-majority country?
One by one, the more junior staffers argued for action, highlighting the generational chasm that had opened up over the last several weeks.
At the end of the meeting, Obama told us he’d made a decision. We wouldn’t support the French resolution for a no-fly zone. Instead, Susan would put forward a U.S. resolution that went beyond a no-fly zone, calling for “all necessary measures” to protect civilians on the ground, a euphemism for war.
Ministry. I sat nervously eyeing my BlackBerry for news reports while the man next to me, a Brazilian businessman, quizzed me on the positions that Obama had taken on ethanol subsidies during the 2008 campaign. The whole scene spoke to an absurdity in the office of the American presidency—Obama sat at the head table, carrying out his duties, promoting American business in a country of more than two hundred million people, while the vast machinery of the U.S. government, on Obama’s order, was preparing to rain down bombs on a country of seven million.
“Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.” “Kinetic military action” was the type of language used in the Situation Room, a euphemism for dropping bombs and blowing things up. In this context, it sounded like a dodge, a way to call a war something other than a war.
But in my mind, I was part of a group of people acting to implement a humanitarian principle.
LIKE A THIRD-TIER AWARDS SHOW, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is the kind of ritual that you complain about while desperately seeking an invitation.
Once they were in the air for the ninety-minute flight, Obama went back up to the Oval Office to sit and play cards, a more relaxing way to kill time than sitting with us. With nothing to do, we started telling one another the stories of where we were on 9/11 to pass the time. I thought of the view from a helicopter flying through a moonless night in Pakistan.
In that moment, it was as if none of the events of the last decade had taken place—no wars, no Great Recession, no political discord, no experience of my own. It was as though I had just turned away from the sight of the first tower collapsing into ash. Osama bin Laden was dead. I was one of a few dozen people in the world who possessed that knowledge.
When I walked outside into the spring night on the colonnade, I could hear raucous cheering and chants of “U.S.A.!” drifting over the White House.
The only exit that was open was the southeast gate, down on Seventeenth Street, and the streets were full of people. I saw college students piled into cars, driving slowly, honking horns, waving flags, two guys standing on top of a slow-moving car as though they’d conquered the world, and it occurred to me that they were only ten years old when 9/11 happened. They’d grown up in this reality and now they were reveling in the closest thing that the United States of America would ever get to a “victory” in the post-9/11 wars.
The high of the raid, the ability to just feel good about something, dissipated quickly. If the country’s politics couldn’t even allow us to enjoy this, then literally nothing would bring the country together.
In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama’s story was gaining a certain momentum. A hundred thousand troops had left Iraq. The economy had stabilized. Healthcare reform was law. Bin Laden was dead. Obama had largely done the most important things that he said he was going to do.
The other two, thornier ones were refugees and Jerusalem. Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to return to Israel, but would be resettled within the new Palestinian state. Jerusalem would be the capital of both countries, with East Jerusalem going to the Palestinians. Yet these positions were never stated publicly, because neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians were prepared to accept them.
We had reached an impasse. The peace process of 2010 had collapsed when the Israeli government refused to extend a partial freeze on new settlement construction, and the Palestinians refused to negotiate without one.
I was given a list of leading Jewish donors to call, to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.
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. The Israel that I felt love and admiration for had a government that seemed determined to make us a foil.
“It’s not on the level,” I said. This is a phrase that we used, repeatedly, to describe the dishonesty we often felt surrounded by. “It’s not on the level,” he repeated. “Dealing with Bibi is like dealing with the Republicans.”
“You know,” I said, “I used to be a member of AIPAC.” I explained my family’s history, how support for Israel was a kind of secular religion. “So this is all frustrating for me on a personal level.”
This is where we’d find ourselves throughout the administration: unable to nudge Israel in the direction of peace, and left holding up a mirror that showed the necessity of doing so.
members of the royal family circulated, making sure you were never by yourself, expertly making five minutes of conversation that put you at ease before moving on.
It was striking to hear the story of the Obama presidency articulated by a conservative British politician in words that a Republican politician would never dare to use at home.
“the example of our two nations says it is possible for people to be united by their ideals instead of divided by their differences; that it’s possible for hearts to change and old hatreds to pass; that it’s possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies to sit here as members of this great Parliament, and for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army to stand before you as president of the United States.”
There had been a party in the queen’s honor, then Cameron’s staff invited us to a club across the street from our hotel, where our whole team stayed out way too late.
He brushed aside the question of Gaddafi at first. I never gave him kisses like the Europeans, he said. But he went on a rant about how we’d started the war in Libya to protect civilians but were now trying to install a new regime. He was right, of course, although it was hard to see how civilians could ever be protected in Libya while Gaddafi was in power and trying to slaughter them.
Sasha and Malia, Obama joked, could someday get elected and try to start a new Cold War.
That night, I lay down in my room for the kind of fitful night where you never really feel like you’re asleep, but occasionally look at the clock and find that it has skipped forward by an hour or two.