The Long Game (14 page)

T
HE ADMINISTRATION HAD
been deliberating what to do about Libya for weeks, and had come under greater pressure to intervene to prevent what many feared would be genocide. Almost everyone agreed that we should do something—the question was at what risk and cost. By March, key American partners—especially the British and the French, and even the Arab League—were calling for military intervention.
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The NSC meeting on March 15 opened with a customary review of the latest intelligence, and the picture was grim. Our intelligence showed Qaddafi's forces on the move. This was corroborated by what our allies were telling us, what journalists were reporting, and firsthand accounts we were getting from the field. The British and the French were ready to offer a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the establishment of a no-fly zone, and were seeking American support. There was growing pressure from home as well: two weeks earlier, the Senate had unanimously passed a resolution urging the UN to protect civilians from attack, including through a no-fly zone.

But no one inside the Situation Room believed a no-fly zone would actually solve the problem. Qaddafi's threat came mainly from tanks and troops on the ground, not from his aircraft in the skies. A no-fly zone seemed attractive to many because it was a way to appear decisive and take action without carrying many risks. But it wouldn't stop the siege of Benghazi.

“It's just a show to protect backsides, politically,” Obama later said of the idea, giving politicians comfort that they could not later be accused of inaction. He fumed that after weeks of deliberations, the only policy his advisers had come up with was little more than an empty gesture. The choice the president had before him was unappealing: to
refuse to support the British and French proposal, or to agree and participate in something he knew would not work. He said he wanted to see the group again later that night, “and by the time I come back, I want some real options.”
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After the meeting ended, the White House team stayed behind to figure out what to do. We only had a few hours and needed to come up with something. Denis McDonough, who was then deputy national security advisor and knew the president's moods as well as anyone, feared a “major blow-up” when he returned. As we kicked around ideas—everything from attacks on Qaddafi's forces to an attempt to evacuate thousands of innocents from Benghazi, what we dubbed the “Dunkirk Option”—only three choices emerged: do nothing and let the Europeans proceed on their own; join the Brits and French in a symbolic no-fly zone; or enlarge the military objective to protect civilians by attacking Libyan forces on the ground, which would require a more robust intervention and therefore more risk.

When the president and his cabinet officials considered these options several hours later, it became clear that the United States could not stand aside. The circumstances were the inverse of those that had led to the intervention in Iraq nearly a decade earlier: the threat was imminent, the intelligence undisputed, and the world was clamoring for America to do something. In fact, our European allies had made it clear that they would move with or without us.

Under these circumstances, Obama said, the US could not simply act like Russia and China, hanging back and shirking responsibility. He feared that if we stood aside and watched our allies flounder—or worse, a massive humanitarian catastrophe unfold—it would do grave damage to American leadership. “I'm as worried as anyone about getting sucked into another war,” he said. “But if Benghazi falls, we'll get blamed. We can't underestimate the impact on our leadership.”

B
UT CHOOSING TO
act did not mean that the United States should go “all-in.” Despite his sense of urgency, Obama did not believe that Libya was a vital national interest. He sympathized with the arguments of Defense Secretary Gates, who warned that getting involved would be a diversion from more important commitments and not worth the costs and trade-offs.

Gates argued that intervention risked getting the United States into a morass. With just a few months left in office (he had already announced his intention to retire), the defense secretary expressed his frustrations openly, especially angered by those he recalled “blithely talking about the use of military force as though it were some kind of video game.” Keenly focused on the resources that would have to be taken away from Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct a new military campaign in Libya, Gates asked pointedly: “Can I just finish the two wars we're already in before you go looking for new ones?” In his memoirs, Gates says he considered resigning over the decision to intervene.
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The secretary of defense appealed to the president's cautious instincts. Obama conceded the decision was a close one—Gates recalls Obama telling him it was a “51–49” call—and shared concerns about the United States getting in too deeply. While the president believed that what happened in Libya did matter to the United States, it mattered
more
to the Europeans and Arab world, and he wanted to structure America's role accordingly. “[This] is not so at the core of US interests that it makes sense for us to unilaterally strike the Qaddafi regime,” he later explained.
⁷

So the president proposed an innovative hybrid approach, widening the goals but tightly scoping America's involvement. Instead of a no-fly zone, the United States would take on a broader mission of protecting civilians by attacking Qaddafi's forces on the ground (some called it a “no-drive zone”). The US military would lead at the beginning of the intervention, rolling back the immediate threat to
Benghazi and taking down Libya's air defenses, which would set the conditions for the allies, led by NATO, to act. Then, we would continue to help our partners by providing “unique capabilities” such as intelligence assets, refueling, or precision-strike munitions. But we would not seek to dominate the strike missions, and would not put American troops on the ground.

The president came up with the idea himself. He later observed that he was not entirely surprised his advisers had failed to come up with this option; bureaucracies tend to drive toward either-or choices. “What the process is going to do is try to lead you to a binary decision,” Obama said. “Here are the pros and cons of going in. Here are the pros and cons of not going in. The process pushed towards black or white answers; it's less good with shades of gray.”
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Obama sought to develop a new model that differed from the typical post-Cold War military intervention—as in the Balkans or Iraq—in which America's allies often seemed like little more than window-dressing on a US-dominated operation. Now the allies wanted to step up, and the president was happy to let them. “We need to get the international community invested in this to do something meaningful,” he said. Obama saw this crisis as an opportunity to show how he believed countries could work together, relying more on America's uniqueness than on its dominance.

F
OR THE NEXT
seven months, America and its allies bombed Libya, conducting nearly 10,000 airstrikes. The immediate humanitarian nightmare we all feared was averted. In August 2011, rebel forces stormed Tripoli and overthrew Qaddafi's regime, and that October, the self-declared “King of Kings” met his ugly demise when he was found on the run, hiding in a sewer pipe, and killed by rebel forces.

The operation was viewed as a resounding victory for the NATO Alliance. As the analyst Gideon Rose later put it, it was an “immaculate
intervention.”
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Although some of NATO's flaws were on full display (such as the widening gap in military capabilities between the United States and its allies, especially in the Europeans' ability to sustain their operations), NATO had proven its worth by providing the leadership and organizing structure for the operation. This seemed to be an exemplar of how America could divide the labor with its partners. The entire campaign cost just over $1 billion (which at the time was what the United States spent per week in Iraq or Afghanistan), and the allies conducted nearly 90 percent of the airstrikes.

The Libya War was designed straight out of the Long Game playbook. Because Libya was not a vital interest, the United States needed to be careful not to allow its involvement to overwhelm other priorities. America would lead, but do so in a way that only it could, expecting partners to carry a large burden. This looked like a new kind of American leadership, one that was both decisive and inclusive, balancing competing interests and managing trade-offs and risks. Some championed it as a model—striking a sensible balance between the arguments of the so-called “realists” who believed that Libya was not worth it, and those “interventionists” who asserted that the United States needed to go all the way.

Yet to claim success is very hard when considering the chaos plaguing Libya in 2016, when the greatest concern is that it is becoming a hotbed for terrorists. As Obama now admits, Libya is “a mess” and, when measured against our hopes, the intervention “didn't work.”
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In hindsight, it is tempting to see the effort as an abject failure, one that may have been successful in the moment but ultimately contributed to a whole host of problems, from the proliferation of Libya's substantial conventional weapon stockpiles to the rise of extremists groups, thousands of refugees flooding into Europe, and the
violent breakdown of order in the Middle East. President Obama has said that what happened in Libya following Qaddafi's overthrow is one of his greatest regrets—and that he draws lessons from it when considering US military interventions elsewhere.

Could the ruin of Libya have been avoided? Critics assert that the way Libya has turned out reveals the fundamental flaws in Obama's approach. Consider the different arguments: Had the US gone in differently—being less willing to cede control to allies—then maybe we could have averted disaster. Or perhaps the administration should have been more willing to help postwar Libya, taking greater risks by being forceful with Libya's post-Qaddafi leaders or committing US troops to lead an international peacekeeping force. Or maybe Obama failed by not being more willing to sue for peace and negotiate with the Qaddafi regime, sacrificing the goal of political transition in the interest of leaving some semblance of order in place. Finally, some say that, in the end, Robert Gates was right all along: this only could have been prevented by not intervening at all.

W
OULD EVERYTHING HAVE
been better if the US had simply stayed away? It is tempting to think so. While such arguments can be seductive in hindsight, they are out of touch with what policymakers confronted at the time.
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Sitting in the White House, we had overwhelming evidence of Qaddafi's intent on mass slaughter. This was not a case where there was a lack of knowledge about what was going on; instead we were inundated with information that only grew more troubling with time. Moreover, there was nothing in Qaddafi's background—from his past support for terrorism (to include the killing of Americans) to his eccentric, paranoid rants—that gave us any reason to give him the benefit of doubt. The only way to know for sure if Qaddafi meant what he said would have been to let him go into Benghazi
and see what happened—which we viewed as an unacceptable and immoral risk.

Some have attributed Obama's decision to intervene to the influence of an unlikely alliance between Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. But this grossly overstates his susceptibility to such pressures. When those stories first started circulating—most notably a March 2011
New York Times
column by Maureen Dowd characterizing this as the “fight of the Valkyries”—eyes rolled in the White House, including those among the heroines Dowd heralded. The idea that the president was a passive player being shoved around by advisers got the story wrong, and it obscured the key point.

The most important factor in the president's decision to intervene was not pressure from insiders, but the urgency of events on the ground combined with the advocacy and actions of America's allies in Europe and the region itself. Compared to most other conflicts, what made Libya unique was that so many countries around the world not only supported bold action—they were clamoring for it. If the US had opted out, the allies might well have acted anyway—recall the first airstrike was launched from a French plane. So the US played a critical role in bringing the world together and coordinating the effort.

Obama often spoke about this kind of leadership, noting that its logic was laid out explicitly in
The Audacity of Hope.
Beyond matters of self-defense, he argued that the United States should take the time and seek to build a coalition. This does not mean giving a veto to the UN Security Council—a body Obama described as one that “in its structure and rules too often appears frozen in a Cold War-era time warp.” Nor does it mean “that we round up Great Britain and Togo and then do what we please,” with other countries hanging back as the US does all the work. As Obama explains, taking the time to build a coalition has multiple benefits—it allows the United States to carry a “lighter load” and to “look before we leap,” asking the toughest questions ahead of time. It also helps uphold the global “rules of
the road” and gain legitimacy. “Multilateralism regulates hubris,” he later said.
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It's important to remember that in the spring of 2011, Obama was criticized more for acting
too slowly
to confront Qaddafi than for acting at all. At the beginning of the crisis, we were hamstrung by the fact that we needed to get American diplomats and citizens out of the country—there was a lot of reluctance to ratchet up the pressure until they were safe. Nevertheless, Obama got hammered by critics who argued he was dithering and not doing enough to stop Qaddafi, or too passive and letting the Europeans take the lead.