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

by Ben Rhodes

And then Obama diverged from his usual script: Having heard the views of his principals, the people sitting around the table, he started to call on people who occupied the seats along the walls. He wanted, I could tell, different views. One by one, the more junior staffers argued for action, highlighting the generational chasm that had opened up over the last several weeks. When it got to Samantha, she talked in humanitarian terms, pointing out that we knew what Gaddafi had done in the past when his rule was threatened. “He massacres civilians,” she said. “He told us what he was going to do in Benghazi—he’d go house to house, killing people.” Obama turned his chair to face me. “Ben?” I repeated some of the other arguments that had been made—the humanitarian risk, the danger of signaling that dictators could stay in power if they killed but would fall if they didn’t. As I spoke, I could sense Obama’s ambivalence. I realized that my job—my responsibility for communications—offered me an argument that might resonate: the fact that we would have to stand up and explain to the world why we weren’t acting in Libya if we chose not to. “The international community is prepared to do this,” I said. “We know there’s going to be a debate at the United Nations. We know there’s support for action. We know the French are going to move forward. So the one thing I’d also say, I guess, is that we’d have to consider what we would say if we choose not to do something.” I paused to let that sc...