HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (30 page)

The Tunisian government fell the following day, putting a fine point on Hillary’s warning. And within two weeks, Egypt was on the brink. It was one thing, in the abstract, to think about a revolution spreading from one country to the next across an entire region in a matter of weeks, not years or decades. It was another to watch it happening live on television. If the experience with Egypt proved anything, it was that the United States was too slow to respond to political dynamics that it could see coming thousands of miles away. Despite Hillary’s prescience about the factors leading up to the
Arab Spring, her reluctance to throw Mubarak out exemplified the administration’s equivocation.

But when the Arab Spring spread from Egypt to Libya, Hillary slingshot the United States, and the rest of the Western world, from trailing the moment to leading it. More than at any other time during her four-year tenure at State, she showcased her skills as a strategist, a diplomat, and a politician in building a coalition for a war against Muammar Qaddafi—a coalition in which the responsibility would be truly distributed among partners. Unlike many previous “coalition” wars, the drive to crush Qaddafi would not be a de facto U.S. operation dressed up with minimal participation by partner countries. The key was Hillary’s ability to identify the policy sweet spot that satisfied the president, America’s Western European allies, the Arab League, and the nascent rebel governing body in Libya, while helping win tacit assent from initial opponents, such as Russia and Congress. The mission required Hillary to balance the interests of the various players within the United States and of those around the world.

It was the same skill set—though applied on a much bigger stage and with much graver consequences for failure—as building a coalition for a bill in Congress among legislators, outside stakeholders, and voters. And of course, it’s a particularly Clintonian talent to fashion a deal that everyone can live with to advance an idea supported by the Clinton in question. Libya’s liberation, for better and worse, was Hillary’s War.

On February 15, just a few days after Mubarak finally stepped down, protesters took to the streets in Libya, sparking violent clashes a couple of days later between Qaddafi’s forces and a ragtag band of rebel militias. While Qaddafi conducted a vicious crackdown on demonstrators, the rebels quickly seized control of several cities in the eastern half of the country. At the urging of Libyan government officials opposed to Qaddafi’s actions,
French president Nicolas Sarkozy called for the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over the capital of Tripoli, in the western part of the country, so that Qaddafi could not easily move troops and supplies to the rebel-held territory
in the east or launch air strikes against his own people. Foreign policy experts have pinned a lot of possible motives on Sarkozy: altruistic concern for the Libyan people, a need to show strength in advance of French elections, a wish for redemption for supporting Egyptian and Tunisian despots for too long, and solicitude for the interests of the French oil titan Total. Whatever the case, he was first out of the box, and
British prime minister David Cameron, who had also been criticized for a slow response in the other Arab Spring countries, soon joined Sarkozy’s push for a no-fly zone.

Within the United States, a fierce two-to-three-week debate broke out between a small set of Obama administration officials who were eager to prevent Qaddafi from slaughtering his own people and a second group who, for various reasons, were dead set against the use of American military force in Libya. By that point, the issue hadn’t risen to the president’s level, at least not in any official sense. The first group, later portrayed along with Hillary as
a set of mythological Valkyries—or Norse women of war—included UN ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Staff member Samantha Power. But there were men, too, among the minority voices that argued for a military response. Ben Rhodes and Tony Blinken, the vice president’s national security adviser, joined them in making the case that the United States could not stand by and watch a genocide as it had in Rwanda in the 1990s.

But the second group, much more powerful on the surface, included Biden, Gates, White House chief of staff Bill Daley, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey. They told Obama’s White House advisers that they were skeptical about whether America had any legitimate national security interest in Libya. They knew that the military was stretched too thin, and they worried about the prospect of starting a war in a third Muslim country when much of the Muslim world didn’t draw a distinction between the American war on terrorism and a war on Islam. All of that added up to an overarching concern that France and Britain were dragging the United States into a military action that ultimately would be funded and executed by America. “One of the principal arguments against
intervention was, we’d be doing it by ourselves,” said a White House official who was in the room for the discussions. “Every time we do this, we have to hold the bag.”

Hillary had been playing her cards close to the vest in the early deliberations but had begun to lean toward an intervention. In 1994 she had urged Bill to stop the Rwandan genocide, to no avail, and the arguments made by Power, Rice, Blinken, and Rhodes appeared to have an effect on her thinking. She was sympathetic to their view but very much worried that the intervention options on the table were too weak. The no-fly zone wasn’t enough to impede Qaddafi.

“She understood the motivation to want to do something,” said Jim Steinberg, who sat in on national security meetings. “She recognized that just kind-of gestures, futile gestures, were the worst of all worlds. You made it feel like you were doing something, but it wasn’t actually going to make any difference. And much of what was being talked about in the early discussions about intervention were the kind of things we had already seen in the Balkans that would not make any difference—no-fly zones, safe havens, and the like. But those things were not going to transform the situation. And I think her perspective was ‘If we are going to intervene, we have to do it in a way that will be credible and effective.’ ”

Obama wasn’t formally briefed on his options until he had to make decisions about whether and how to intervene later in the process. But his leanings lined up with Hillary’s—or hers lined up with his—according to senior administration officials.

As the debate intensified in Washington, so did the war in Libya. In early March, Qaddafi started to push forward, retaking cities that the rebels had captured in the early weeks of fighting. There were reports of air strikes from Qaddafi-controlled planes in Brega. His tanks began powering eastward along the coastal highway, on a mission to crush the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. “There wasn’t a choice about time frames,” said a senior administration official. “That time frame was forced on us by the movement of tanks across the desert on the doorstep of Benghazi.”

By March 12, as the twenty-one-member Arab League huddled
at its Cairo headquarters, Qaddafi was on the verge of sacking the rebels. Some world leaders and human rights activists believed a slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Libyans might be imminent. After a closed-door meeting that lasted nearly six hours that Saturday, Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, announced that the Arab nations would support a no-fly zone. The Arab countries, which normally presented a bloc against outside intervention, were giving the go-ahead to Western powers to stop Qaddafi. Just like the Americans, they had to weigh whether to stand idly by while Qaddafi slaughtered his own people—fellow Arabs. Ultimately they preferred the rebels over Qaddafi, who had frequently thumbed his nose at his Arab neighbors over his forty-two-year reign.

Their interest in protecting the rebels from Qaddafi gave Hillary just the opening she needed to push for more aggressive military intervention than the ambiguous no-fly zone embraced by the British and the French. She believed the no-fly zone was a false solution because it would let Western powers feel good about taking action but wouldn’t be forceful enough to stop Qaddafi. And it certainly wouldn’t provide the power necessary to assist the rebels in toppling him. A no-fly zone meant allied forces would shoot down Qaddafi’s planes; but by mid-March, it was Qaddafi’s tanks that needed to be stopped.

Hillary told her aides she was convinced that Libya presented a unique opportunity for America to exercise a new kind of international leadership that relied on building a partnership in which the bulk of the might and money would come from other countries. Potemkin coalitions had cost America blood, treasure, and international prestige, and Obama wasn’t about to commit the United States to taking the brunt of another war. Hillary’s strategy integrated the desire of Rice, Power, Blinken, and Rhodes to intervene with the reluctance of Gates, Biden, and Daley to land Marines on the shores of Tripoli, and it added a much harder punch than a no-fly zone.

Libya was a particularly inviting crucible in which to test the theories of smart power, multilateralism, and democracy promotion
that informed Hillary’s philosophy of American leadership. The country was rich in resources, particularly oil and gas, and had a relatively well-educated population that, absent the repression imposed by Qaddafi, was positioned to build the economic, political, and civil institutions that she believed formed the heart of thriving democracies. With a little help at the margins, Libyans would have all the tools to build an inclusive democratic society. In addition, there could hardly be a more just cause than stepping in to prevent a massacre. In other words, the conditions were ripe for an American-backed intervention.

For some time, a coalition of the Friends of Libya had been discussing possible ways to get involved, but with no commitment from the United States, the plan for assistance was still, as one Hillary aide put it, “to be determined.” When she flew to Paris for a March 14 meeting of the foreign ministers of the G8, a group of the world’s wealthiest powers, Hillary was looking for evidence that would persuade Obama to back a war—essentially assurances that the Europeans would take the lead militarily, that Arab countries would participate in enforcing a no-fly zone so that it didn’t look like the West was attacking another Muslim country, and that the Libyan opposition’s government-in-waiting, called the Transitional National Council (TNC), could really create a democratic Libya. The United States had not yet given formal recognition to the TNC, a key indication that Washington remained skeptical of the organization.

On her first day in Paris, Hillary sat down with Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the head of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), in the living room of her suite at the top of the Westin, just a few blocks from the three-thousand-year-old obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle that, like Abdullah, had traveled to France from the Middle East. The couches in the room were soft, but Abdullah’s tone was not. Having gained an audience with the American secretary of state, he intended to take full advantage of it, knowing that an American ask was forthcoming.

He gave Hillary an earful over what he saw as American meddling in Bahrain, one of the Gulf countries he was in town to represent. The day before, in a statement addressing a violent Bahraini government crackdown on demonstrators, White House press secretary Jay Carney had singled out the Gulf Cooperation Council for condemnation. “In particular,” he had said, “
we urge our GCC partners to show restraint and respect the rights of the people of Bahrain, and to act in a way that supports dialogue instead of undermining it.”

Now Hillary was asking the head of the organization the White House had just slammed to join a partnership dedicated to intervening in Libya.

The room was uncomfortable. Abdullah was “not shy about expressing criticism about some of the things we had said publicly about Bahrain,” said an American source who was there. But the important thing was that Abdullah got to make his point; he could tell officials in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, another ally, that he had lectured Hillary Clinton. (In point of fact, during the tense early weeks of the Libya campaign, the United States softened its criticism of Bahrain and the GCC.)

The Libya portion of the discussion was much more agreeable. Abdullah confirmed for Hillary that Persian Gulf countries, including the UAE, would provide more than rhetorical support for a mission. Arab planes would fly. But it wasn’t a one-way street. The UAE and other Persian Gulf countries needed to know that the United States wasn’t just blowing smoke. It was one thing to say Qaddafi was a problem; it was another to remove him from power. If Arab planes were going to fly—and the GCC represented the rich Arab nations that would put up money and planes—Abdullah wanted to know that the United States was ready to take the dictator out.

If Abdullah was looking for a hawk, he had come to the right person. While European countries were still stuck on no-fly zones, Hillary was thinking about a comprehensive military action that included strikes on Qaddafi’s ground forces—basically an all-necessary-means operation to give cover that the rebels needed to turn the tide.

The term of art at the United Nations, “all necessary means” authority, is, as it sounds, a blank check to go to war. “What the Gulf Arabs were looking for was American leadership on this, follow-through on the public statements about Qaddafi having lost legitimacy,” said a source who was present at Hillary’s meeting with Abdullah. “In that sense, he was reassured by what the secretary had to say, by her activist approach to it.”

In the same room later that night, Hillary sat down with Mahmoud Jibril, the leader of the Libyan Transitional National Council. Deputy Secretary Bill Burns, U.S. ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz, and Chris Stevens, a Libya expert in the foreign service, were among the small group of advisers with Hillary.

Jibril, a low-key Benghazi native with a doctorate in political science from the University of Pittsburgh, had sneaked into Paris from the TNC’s headquarters in Qatar to meet with Hillary. Passionate but also lucid and composed, Jibril told her that if the opposition didn’t get military assistance, Qaddafi’s forces would wreak havoc in Benghazi and likely kill the rebellion. That, he said, wasn’t in anyone’s interest. Qaddafi had called the rebels “rats,” and his threat to destroy them was on the verge of coming to fruition. Jibril offered Hillary what the source called a “chilling reminder” that Qaddafi’s past sins against his people “left no doubt that he was to be taken at his word.”