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

by Ben Rhodes

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? Gates and Mullen also argued against doing anything—the military already had its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill Daley, a bald, Chicago-accented centrist who’d recently been hired as chief of staff to make deals with Republicans and stabilize relations between Obama and the business community—seemed incredulous that we were debating the issue at all, given everything we had to do at home. Susan Rice argued for more assertive action. This is like Rwanda, she said, citing a genocide that had been a stain on her own conscience—she was a midlevel staffer in the Clinton White House when hundreds of thousands of people were killed there in only a few months, many with machetes. She’d been a minor character in Samantha’s book, and not one of the good guys. “We have a moral responsibility to act,” she said.