The Secretary (39 page)

“We’re trying to decipher his words,” one of them said.

Panetta would later issue a correction about his statement to Congress, explaining
that he had been relying on what he’d heard in the media. He made himself look like
a fool: if the CIA director relied on the media for his information, the world was
in trouble. But it was Mubarak who was really in trouble. Panetta knew Mubarak had
promised to resign, but the pharaoh had reneged on his promise.

Obama watched the speech on board Air Force One, returning from a trip to Michigan.
Mubarak had included a special message for him. “It is shameful and I will not, nor
will I ever, accept to hear foreign dictations, whatever the source might be or whatever
the context it came in.”

What on earth was going on? That evening, the White House sent out a written statement
by President Obama.

“The Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of authority, but
it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful, or sufficient …
We therefore urge the Egyptian government to move swiftly to explain the changes that
have been made.”

The focus—at least publicly—was on the Egyptian people.

“The Egyptian people have made it clear that there is no going back to the way things
were: Egypt has changed, and its future is in the hands of the people … In these difficult
times, I know that the Egyptian people will persevere, and they must know that they
will continue to have a friend in the United States of America.”

Later that evening, Defense Secretary Gates called Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi,
Egypt’s defense minister, and told him this was a dangerous crossroads: Mubarak had
to go. The army now needed to clean this up and help manage the transition. The United
States stood ready to mentor them and help the Egyptian army do something they’d never
done before—give birth to a democratic process.

Many in the administration worried that the army would do everything possible to preserve
its own power and privileges, but Washington couldn’t tell how big of a problem it
might become; the country would descend into chaos unless the crowds were calmed and
the protestors got what they wanted. The army was Washington’s only recourse. The
generals were tired and tense, worried about bloodshed. They had so far avoided shooting.
The people kissed soldiers on the streets and praised the army, but it could all be
lost in an instant. The generals weighed their options all night and all of the next
day. Mubarak was a military man, and he had ruled for three decades. The generals
may not have liked being bossed around by the United States, but it was that or risk
destroying the whole edifice.

But it truly was not in Mubarak’s DNA to announce his departure, so he sent someone
else to utter the fateful words. On February 11, at eleven in the morning in Washington,
six in the evening in Cairo, Clinton arrived at the White House for a meeting. In
Cairo, Omar Suleiman faced the cameras in a wood-paneled hallway of the presidential
palace. Standing under neon lights, in a blue suit and tie, the seventy-five-year-old
man looked like death, all color drained from his face. He spoke for thirty-five seconds.
The president had resigned. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was in charge.

“God help everybody,” he said. The people had won.

On Tahrir Square, they celebrated and cried with relief that the decades of frustration,
humiliation, corruption, repression, and poverty had come to an end. All their dreams
had come true, said one woman. Few paused to wonder whether being ruled by the army
was cause for celebration. They thought the revolution was the answer to all their
problems, unaware that revolutions simply lift the veil that concealed the extent
of problems plaguing a country, problems hidden for years by the state’s propaganda.

The State Department briefing for that day was canceled. On big momentous occasions
such as this, the White House spoke first. No matter how big a star Hillary was on
the world stage, the president was the president. Four hours later, Obama stood in
the marble grand foyer of the White House. It had been a roller-coaster few days and
weeks as the battle between American national interests and American principles was
fought in offices in Washington, in people’s minds, in Obama’s heart, and on the streets
of Cairo.

“There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history
taking place,” the president started by saying. “This is one of those moments. This
is one of those times. The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard,
and Egypt will never be the same.”

Nothing would be the same again. Not Egypt, not the Middle East, and not America.

“The word ‘Tahrir’ means liberation,” Obama said at the end of his speech. “It is
a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And
forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people, of what they did, of the things
that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the
world.”

In Tahrir Square, Obama’s speech was carried live on big screens, his words texted
around by jubilant protestors. Though they had been disappointed by what they saw
as America’s initial reluctance to support them, they were now proud to be recognized
by a president they still admired. But this was their victory. They had done it.

Throughout the process, Hillary didn’t call Hosni or Suzanne Mubarak, and they didn’t
call her either. This was politics. Clinton wasn’t cold-blooded, just realistic. Democratic
forces were at work, and leaders lost power. She was a veteran politician who had
faced loss herself. She would shed no tears for a guy because he didn’t get to rule
the way he’d ruled for the last thirty years.

*   *   *

That evening, some 1,080 miles west of the jubilant scenes in Cairo, Yael Lempert
was glued to the television with her husband and some friends. She had recently served
as an American diplomat in Egypt and was transfixed by the scope and pace of events.
She thought of her Egyptian friends who had expressed such frustration about life
under Mubarak. How elated they must be. She was now the acting deputy chief of mission
at the brand-new U.S. embassy in Tripoli.

“It’s such a shame that this will not happen here,” she said. They turned off the
television and went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

An hour later, Libyan state television’s news ticker carried a short sentence about
Mubarak’s resignation. The country’s own much more colorful demagogue, Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi, had been in power even longer—forty-two years—wearing purple or blue silk
suits and epaulets, carrying a gold scepter, and surrounding himself with female bodyguards.
But he was certain of his people’s love. They would not let themselves be used by
foreign plotters. He was convinced that he was different from his neighbors on his
eastern and western borders.

*   *   *

Three days later, on February 14, protests erupted in Bahrain, a small island state
where Sunni monarchs ruled over a Shiite majority. For years, Shiites had faced discrimination
in jobs and society, and now they were taking to the streets. The crackdown was shocking
in its brutality. But Clinton chose her words very carefully when she spoke out about
the violence.

“Bahrain is a friend and an ally and has been for many years, and while all governments
have a responsibility to provide citizens with security and stability, we call [for]
restraint.”

When the United States looked at Bahrain, it didn’t just see protestors demanding
respect for their rights; it saw Iran lurking behind and the picture blurred. Shiite
Iran had long had claims over the small island. But Bahrain was home to the U.S. Fifth
Fleet and a key pillar for the U.S. regional military infrastructure. Sunni kingdoms
like Bahrain and its bigger neighbor Saudi Arabia were a crucial counterweight to
Tehran’s growing influence in the region. The undertone of sectarian tension, real
or imagined, meant the United States was taking no chances. In Egypt, they had gambled
on an army underwritten by Washington, but Bahrain could very well be the first domino
to fall into the Iranian camp. Blinded by its fear of Iran, the United States would
do nothing that risked bringing down Bahrain’s rulers.

With each revolution in each country came a new set of issues, a new set of headaches
for the Obama administration, and challenges to the exercise of American power in
the region and in the twenty-first century. Each one was a lesson about the challenges
and possibilities for the United States as a world leader.

14

SARKO’S WAR

On the night of February 18 when Yael Lempert went to bed in her home in Suqal Jumaa,
Tripoli’s sprawling eastern suburb, she could hear shooting in the distance for the
second night in a row. Earlier in the day, the American diplomat had asked Libyan
officials about it, but they had brushed the gunfire away.

“Just a few excited
shabab
,” they had said.

Shabab
means “young men” in Arabic, and it’s often used to describe a group of them, hanging
out on street corners, rowdy, restless, bored, and underemployed. They harass girls,
smoke cigarettes, and occasionally fire guns for fun or to mark their territory. There
were
shabab
in Lebanon, in Jordan, in the Palestinian territories, places where young men often
had little to do and where the state afforded them some latitude. But the tightly
controlled Jamahiriya of Gaddafi? Not so much.

At three in the morning, Yael’s home phone rang. The cell phone network was out of
commission. It was one of the embassy drivers.

“I’m in Green Square,” he said. “Fifteen people just died in front of me. The revolution
has started.” Click.

All night the shooting continued. In the morning, Yael drove to work in her SUV. Suddenly,
halfway into the fifteen-minute ride, she saw the Arabic writing scrawled on the walls.
Anti-Gaddafi graffiti, pictures of the leader defaced. It was true: the revolution
had started. Her mind raced through the different scenarios. How would this unfold?
Would Gaddafi use violence? Would millions take to the street? The only thing Yael
was certain of was that it wouldn’t be quick like in Egypt. There were no checks and
balances here, no institutions, just a dictator with a Green Book of rules and slogans.
She had to start planning with the embassy staff. And she had to think of her baby;
her first child was due in just a month.

The embassy was a start-up mission. The United States had closed down the mission
in 1979 after mobs attacked the building, the same week that the U.S. embassy had
been torched in Pakistan, all in the aftermath of the siege of Mecca. Libya had started
turning into an international pariah soon after Gaddafi came to power in 1969, as
he waged war against Egypt, supported anti-Western militant groups around the world,
and developed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Gaddafi, or Brother Leader,
as he called himself, was most infamous for ordering the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight
103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, in which 270 people died. In the late 1990s, Gaddafi
had slowly begun his rehabilitation. In 2005, he announced he would give up his WMDs
and then agreed to pay compensation for the Lockerbie victims. In 2008, the United
States reopened its embassy in Tripoli after removing Libya from the list of state
sponsors of terrorism. But unlike every other American embassy around the world, there
were no marines standing guard. Gaddafi had refused to allow U.S. Marines into the
country, and it was difficult to argue with an unpredictable leader prone to tantrums.
Under the Bush administration, the State Department had conceded the point to Gaddafi,
not an unreasonable decision in a police state where no one breathed without permission
from the leader and where crime was nonexistent. The first sign that perhaps the concession
was not so wise came after the WikiLeaks debacle. Gaddafi had been incensed after
the leaks revealed that the newly arrived American ambassador, Gene Cretz, had speculated
about Gaddafi’s health and mentioned his voluptuous nurse. Gaddafi’s security men
started tailing Cretz around town, and out of concern for his safety the State Department
ordered him to leave the country.

Now, at the start of a revolution, with embassy buildings and staff spread out across
the city and no reliable radio communications network, the mission was vulnerable
and exposed—every diplomat’s worst nightmare. Cell phone coverage in Tripoli was already
patchy, and the authorities were trying to cut off the country’s Internet connection.
In a matter of days, Yael and her colleagues would have no e-mail, no working cell
phones, and just one landline at the embassy that could still reach both the sixth
floor of the Building in Washington and the operations center.

*   *   *

In my tiny cubicle in Washington, I waited for e-mails to appear in my in-box. Throughout
the Egypt crisis, I had been in constant e-mail contact with American officials in
the Building. Stuck in endless interagency meetings, they weren’t always free to talk
on the phone, but no matter how busy they were, they always found the time to fire
off a quick reply to my e-mail queries. E-mail was the communication method of choice
in Washington, BlackBerries an extension of people’s hands. In short missives, officials
engaged in a lively back and forth electronic conversation. They had shared fears
about the unknown that was engulfing the region and their hopes about a better future
for Egypt. And they often shared information beyond what was being said in front of
the cameras by P. J. Crowley or White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs. They told me
what they were telling Mubarak, what the generals saying were saying, how frustrated
they were that Mubarak was always one step behind, how they were adjusting their statements
to the clamor on Egypt’s streets.