Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (85 page)

The next day Tantawi told me that neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor others would have the upper hand: “The Egyptian people will have the upper hand in everything and we will encourage them.” Again I asked whether the leaders of the revolution would have the time and space to organize themselves into competitive political parties for the elections. He replied, “We will give them
reasonable
time for political organization” but added that the longer the government waited to hold elections, the worse it would be for the economy. He told me that tourism, Egypt’s main source of hard currency, had fallen since January by 75 percent. I told him the U.S. government thought they would be better off electing a president before electing a parliament as a way of providing secular leadership of the country, which, in turn, could help buy time for alternatives to the Muslim Brotherhood to emerge. Tantawi replied that they had been consulting constitutional experts, who told them to hold the parliamentary elections first. When I asked him about rogue elements of the Interior Ministry and extremists showing up to create problems, he was blandly reassuring: “There are no real problems.” His confidence would not be borne out by subsequent events.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Zayed’s concern about an Islamist
takeover in Egypt initially seemed to have been warranted. In elections that fall, the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultraconservative Islamist Salafist Party, respectively, won 47 percent and 25 percent of the seats in the new parliament—together, nearly three-quarters of the seats. After promising not to nominate a candidate for president, the Muslim Brotherhood reneged and ran Mohammed Morsi, who was elected in June 2012. Not long afterward he “retired” Tantawi, ostensibly taking control of the military. During the fall of 2012, Morsi declared that his decisions could not be reviewed by the courts, a move back toward authoritarianism, but the public outcry forced him to back off, at least partly and for the time being. The new constitution, drafted by an Islamist-dominated constituent assembly, established the role of Islamic (Sharia) law in principle, but the extent of its application was unclear.

As of summer 2013, Morsi has been ousted by the Egyptian army, the Muslim Brotherhood is under attack, and the military—which has led Egypt since 1952—is openly running the country again. Whether they will give genuine democratic reform another chance remains to be seen. While it is hard to believe the clock can be turned back to 2009, Egypt is likely to face difficult days ahead. As I warned, the best organized and most ruthless have the advantage in revolutions.

On February 15, 2011, four days after Mubarak resigned, a group of lawyers in the capital of Libya—Tripoli—demonstrated publicly against the jailing of a colleague. A growing number of other Libyans, perhaps emboldened by what they had seen happen in Tunisia and Egypt via Facebook and other social media, joined the protesters during the ensuing days. Muammar Qaddafi’s security forces killed more than a dozen on February 17, and armed resistance to the government began the next day in Benghazi, in eastern Libya. Unlike the mostly nonviolent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, what began as a peaceful protest in Libya quickly turned into a widespread shooting war between the government and the rebels, and the casualties mounted. The rebels within days gained control of important areas in the east and launched attacks elsewhere across the country.

The ruthlessness with which Qaddafi responded to the rebels prompted a statement on February 22 by the UN Security Council condemning the use of force against civilians, and calling for an immediate end to the violence, and steps “to address the legitimate demands of the
population.” The council also urged Qaddafi to allow the safe passage of international humanitarian assistance to the people of Libya. That same day the League of Arab States suspended Libya’s membership. On February 23, Obama repeated comments he had made the previous week, condemning the use of violence, and announced that he had asked his national security team for a full range of options to respond. He sent Secretary Clinton to Europe and the Middle East to consult with allies about the situation in Libya.

International pressure to stop Qaddafi’s killing of Libyans and for him to step down mounted quickly. The Security Council acted again on February 26, demanding an end to the violence and imposing an arms embargo on the country and a travel ban and assets freeze on Qaddafi, his family, and other government officials. Politicians in Europe and Washington were talking about establishing a “no-fly zone” to keep Qaddafi from using his aircraft against the rebels, and they were becoming increasingly enthusiastic about getting rid of him. Another regime change.

The lineup inside the administration on how to respond to events in Libya was another shift of the political kaleidoscope, this time with Biden, Donilon, Daley, Mullen, McDonough, Brennan, and me urging caution about military involvement, and UN ambassador Susan Rice and NSS staffers Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power urging aggressive U.S. action to prevent an anticipated massacre of the rebels as Qaddafi fought to remain in power. Power was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, an expert on genocide and repression, and a strong advocate of the “responsibility to protect,” that is, the responsibility of civilized governments to intervene—militarily, if necessary—to prevent the large-scale killing of innocent civilians by their own repressive governments. In the final phase of the internal debate, Hillary threw her considerable clout behind Rice, Rhodes, and Power.

I believed that what was happening in Libya was not a vital national interest of the United States. I opposed the United States attacking a third Muslim country within a decade to bring about regime change, no matter how odious the regime. I worried about how overstretched and tired our military was, and the possibility of a protracted conflict in Libya. I reminded my colleagues that when you start a war, you never know how it will go. The advocates of military action expected a short,
easy fight. How many times in history had that naïve assumption proven wrong? In meetings, I would ask, “Can I just finish the two wars we’re already in before you go looking for new ones?”

I had four months left to serve, and I was running out of patience on multiple fronts, but most of all with people blithely talking about the use of military force as though it were some kind of video game. We were being asked by the White House to move naval assets into the Mediterranean to be prepared for any contingency in Libya. I was particularly concerned about moving an aircraft carrier out of the Persian Gulf area to accommodate this request. I ranted with unusual fervor during a meeting at Defense on February 28 with Mike Mullen and others. As usual, I was furious with the White House advisers and the NSS talking about military options with the president without Defense being involved: “The White House has no idea how many resources will be required. This administration has jumped to military options before it even knows what it wants to do. What in the hell is a ‘humanitarian corridor’? A no-fly zone is of limited value and never prevented Saddam from slaughtering his people.” I made the point that, to date, the focus of the opposition in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had been their own authoritarian, corrupt regimes. I expressed the worry that U.S. military intervention risked making us (and Israel) a target for those demonstrators.

“Don’t give the White House staff and NSS too much information on the military options,” I said. “They don’t understand it, and ‘experts’ like Samantha Power will decide when we should move militarily.” At the same time, I authorized moving significant Air Force assets in Germany to bases in Italy and several additional Navy ships into the Mediterranean. I was adamantly opposed to intervening in Libya, but if the president so ordered, it was my responsibility to make sure we were ready. I was blunt and stubborn, but I wasn’t insubordinate.

On March 1, John McCain lambasted the Obama administration for its handling of events in the Middle East. On Libya, he said, “Of course we have to have a no-fly zone. We are spending over $500 billion, not counting Iraq and Afghanistan, on our nation’s defense. Don’t tell me we can’t do a no-fly zone over Tripoli.” Mike Mullen and I held a press conference the same day, and our comments underscored the distance between McCain’s views and our own. My answers reflected my caution. When asked about U.S. military options in Libya, I replied that there was no unanimity in NATO for the use of armed force, that such an
action would need to be considered very carefully, and “our job is to give the president options.” To that end, I said I had ordered two ships into the Mediterranean, including the USS
Ponce
and the amphibious assault ship USS
Kearsarge
, to which I was sending 400 Marines. Asked about the potential follow-on effects of a no-fly zone, I said that all options beyond humanitarian assistance and evacuations were complex, and I repeated my other concerns. Mullen echoed testimony that same morning by Central Command commander General Jim Mattis that enforcing a no-fly zone would first require bombing radar and missile defenses in Libya. Mike and I both pointed out that we had seen no evidence that Qaddafi was using aircraft to fire on the rebels. When asked about the strategic implications of the events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, I said these changes represented a huge setback for al Qaeda by giving the lie to its claim that the only way to get rid of authoritarian governments in the region was through extremist violence.

More than any other previous event, a hearing before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee (HAC-D) on March 2 confirmed for me that my decision to leave my post in June was the right one. I had simply run out of patience and discipline and a willingness to “play the game,” as illustrated by two exchanges during that hearing. The first was in response to several members pressing me about why we wouldn’t just declare a no-fly zone in Libya. I responded with uncharacteristic force and a borderline disrespectful tone: “There is a lot of, frankly, loose talk about some of these military options” in Libya. It’s more than just signing a piece of paper, I said. “Let’s call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy its air defenses. A no-fly zone begins with an act of war.” I went on, “It’s a big operation in a big country” and it’s impossible to say how long it would take or how long it would have to be sustained. I said the U.S. military could do it if ordered by the president, but I warned it would require more planes than were found on a single aircraft carrier.

Several weeks earlier I had asked our four committees of jurisdiction in Congress for approval to transfer about $1.2 billion from several accounts in order to pay for significant additional ISR capabilities requested by Petraeus for Afghanistan. Three of the four committees had approved, but HAC-D, chaired by Bill Young, a Republican from Florida, had not. I learned that Young had blocked approval because the bulk of the transferred funding was to come from the Army’s Humvee
budget. (The Army neither wanted nor needed more of those vehicles.) Young had told me the problem would be worked out before the hearing, but it had not been. I couldn’t understand his actions, so I entered the hearing room prepared to do something I had never done: publicly and directly criticize the chairman of one of my most important oversight committees.

At the end of my prepared statement on the budget, I noted that the reprogramming request for ISR had been submitted a month earlier. “Mr. Chairman, our troops need this force protection equipment and they need it now.… Every day that goes by without this equipment, the lives of our troops are at greater risk. I urgently want to get these items under contract so that I can get these important capabilities to Afghanistan.” I said that cuts Congress was proposing to our FY2011 budget and uncertainty over another continuing resolution left us no source of money for the reprogramming other than the Humvee program. I concluded, “We should not put American lives at risk to protect specific programs or contractors.” Young and the committee staff were infuriated by the public criticism. One staffer subsequently said, “Gates was pretty unprofessional at our hearing.… It is outrageous. I think it was unacceptable. He was out of line.” Another called my comments “a cheap shot.” Young said in an interview later that day that he had “no back-home interest in Humvee production.” But
Washington Post
writer Dana Milbank wrote the next day that AM General—the manufacturer of the Humvee—“happens to be Young’s third-largest campaign contributor. Its executives have funneled him more than $80,000.”

I disliked going after Young like that. He was an old-school gentleman, was always gracious toward me, and had long been a strong supporter of the military and especially the troops; he and his wife often visited our wounded in the hospitals. But after more than four years as secretary, I was fed up with the usual forelock-tugging deference to special interests and pet projects among members of Congress, especially when they got in the way of providing urgently needed help to our commanders and troops. Within a couple of days, Young and I talked on the telephone, and then our staffs worked out a deal—the usual course of action in getting something done with Congress. In the end, $614 million of the $864 million I had requested was transferred from the Humvee program.

As the conflict inside Libya heated up, so did the internal debate inside the administration. The most immediate challenge was the exodus from Libya of tens of thousands of foreign workers of many nationalities—mostly Egyptian—to Tunisia because of the fighting. For a new and weak Tunisian government, 90,000 refugees posed a growing problem. The State Department wanted the U.S. military to establish an “air bridge” to fly these people to Egypt. The size of the undertaking was daunting and, to be effective, would require a number of U.S. aircraft that were already supporting two wars, as well as a lot of Americans on the ground in both Tunisia and Egypt to support the effort. Pointing out these challenges once again made Mullen and me the skunks at the garden party. At a principals’ meeting on Libya the evening of March 2, Donilon told me the president wanted me to provide an air bridge from Tunisia to Egypt to move the Egyptian refugees. Biden then jumped in and said, “No, the president orders you to do the bridge.” I’d had enough of Biden’s “orders.” “The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” I said. If the president wanted to deploy U.S. military assets, I made clear, I needed to hear it from him directly, not through the two of them. At the Pentagon, I went further, telling Mullen and Robert Rangel that no military options were to be provided to White House or NSS staff without my approval, “especially any options to take out Qaddafi.” Ultimately, many nations were involved in sending aircraft to evacuate the refugees, including several from us.