The Secretary (45 page)

“It seems that the American system is not producing fast results,” Dai said.

Clinton laughed gently.

“We can devote the next lunch to talk about the Chinese system if you want,” she said,
gently suggesting that he probably wouldn’t want to open that door. Clinton had no
way of knowing that in less than a year the Communist Party would be rocked by the
biggest political scandal in decades when one of its rising stars, Bo Xilai, would
be purged from the party and his wife detained and later convicted of murdering a
British businessman. The Chinese would get a glimpse of how their rulers and their
relatives, known as princelings, had amassed enormous fortunes in a country where
there is no separation of powers and no independent judiciary.

But in July 2011, while others in Asia had sought assurances from Clinton that the
United States would eventually get its act together and pull through, Dai acted as
though Clinton needed his reassurance. Everything would be okay, he seemed to be telling
her. He always used a pleasant, diplomatic tone, but there was a condescending tinge
to it. Clinton gently pushed back, signaling that neither she nor president Obama
needed China’s pat on the back. Perhaps Dai was trying to reassure himself.

After the 2008 financial crisis, China had boasted about its own prospering economic
model, lording over others that China hadn’t taken a hit. But the possibility of American
default was a very different situation, and Chinese officials got cold sweats just
thinking about it. Over the years, China had bought $1 trillion worth of U.S. Treasury
bills, which meant that the United States owed China $1 trillion. If you owe the bank
$1 million, the bank has you by the neck. If you owe the bank $1 trillion, then you
basically own the bank, and if you default on your debt, you take the bank down with
you. China was trying to diversify the foreign currencies it owned, but the euro was
in crisis and Japan’s economy had taken a hard hit after the March earthquake. America
and China were stuck together. And the lure of the dollar and of America remained
strong.

In public, the Chinese still sounded cocky, condescending of the wasteful Americans
whose government was unable to get its lawmakers to behave.

“China, the largest creditor of the world’s sole superpower, has every right now to
demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety
of China’s dollar assets,” China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said in a commentary.
China also urged the United States to apply “common sense” to “cure its addiction
to debts” by cutting military and social welfare expenditure.

“The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old
days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally
gone.”

A week later, a large advertisement for Xinhua went up on the large facade of the
building located at 2 Times Square: China had made it to the world’s crossroads, as
Times Square was known. No Chinese company had ever had a permanent foothold on the
iconic square. It was just a forty-by-sixty-foot neon sign, but even the news agency
that poured such scorn over America was proud to have a presence in the Big Apple.
China seemed to have confidence in its future but not in its own present. If you wanted
to guarantee China’s continued growth, you had to make it in America, in its private
high schools and Ivy League universities, and on Times Square.

*   *   *

While I watched Libya on the evening news in Beirut every day, I was also keeping
an eye on events to the east, across the border in Syria. The popular uprising there
had erupted in mid-March, after a group of teenage boys scribbled some graffiti on
the walls of their town of Daraa, south of Damascus: the people want to overthrow
the regime, the graffiti said. These words had been the rallying cry in Tahrir Square
as well as on the streets of Benghazi and in Yemen. In Syria, the boys were detained,
beaten, bloodied, their fingernails pulled out. Business as usual for Syria’s secret
police.

Just as Mubarak and Gaddafi had insisted before him, President Bashar al-Assad had
declared in January 2011 that his people loved him, that his country was different,
and that there would be no uprising in Syria. In some ways, Assad was different. Those
who saw the world through the prism of anti-imperialism and resistance against Israel
believed Assad was one of the only remaining leaders in the region, along with Iran’s
president, standing up to the West and pushing back against its hegemonic designs.
But resentment against the totalitarian regime, its ruthless intelligence services
and economic monopoly, had been simmering for several years already. Hundreds of thousands
of Syrians were fed up with oppression for the sake of an abstract concept of someone
else’s freedom, like that of the Palestinians.

Thousands of Syrians started to take to the streets in peaceful demonstrations. “Selmiyya,
selmiyya,” chanted the Syrians, as Egyptians had done a few weeks before them. Syria
was mostly closed off to the international media, so coverage relied on amateur footage
taken with cell phones of protestors in various towns. The grainy shots were fascinating
not only to watch but also to listen to because of the unguarded comments of those
filming. “Look, oh my God, look, they’re coming out. They’re coming, dozens of them.
God bless them. Maybe we should join them?” was the commentary on one of the videos
I came across on the Internet. Just then shooting erupted, and the man holding the
cell phone retreated inside and most likely didn’t join the protestors, at least not
this time.

There was a raw quality to the emotion of people who were discovering their collective
identity as Syrians for the first time. In a country where neighbors didn’t trust
each other and family members spied on one another, reporting any dissent to the local
offices of the ruling Baath Party, people were suddenly finding strength in numbers.

At the start of the Obama administration, Washington had reached out to Assad, as
it had done with other American foes. Obama appointed an ambassador to Damascus, the
first one since the Bush administration had withdrawn its representative in 2005,
in the aftermath of the assassination of Rafic Hariri. Engagement wasn’t yielding
many results yet, but overall the United States could live with Assad as an irritant.
He had shared just enough intelligence about al-Qaeda after the attacks of 9/11 that
the United States considered him mildly useful. Mostly, officials in Washington, as
well as their counterparts in European capitals, hoped that by engaging Assad it could
peel him away from his best friends in Tehran and convince him to make peace with
Israel. Under President George H. W. Bush, Washington had engaged with Hafez al-Assad,
with some success for American interests in the region. The younger Assad was in many
ways more radical and more of an ideologue.

Two weeks after the Syrian uprising had started, Clinton told CBS, “What’s been happening
there [in Syria] the last few weeks is deeply concerning, but there’s a difference
between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities
and then police actions, which, frankly, have exceeded the use of force that any of
us would want to see.” Syrian forces were still behaving with restraint in comparison
to Libya.

“There’s a different leader in Syria now,” she added, trying to highlight the difference
between Bashar al-Assad and his father, who had razed whole neighborhoods to the ground
in 1982 to crush a rebellion in Hama, in the north of the country.

“Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent
months have said they believe he’s a reformer,” Hillary said.

One of those members of Congress was Democratic senator John Kerry, who had traveled
to Damascus several times to meet with Assad. Kerry had said that the Syrian leader
was a man of his word who had been “very generous with me.” He insisted that under
Assad, “Syria will move; Syria will change as it embraces a legitimate relationship
with the United States.”

Such was the conventional thinking in Washington, and it was hard to shake. Assad
was making promises to lift the emergency laws and hold free elections and offering
to hold talks with the opposition, keeping the hope for reform alive. Inside Syria
itself, not everybody was taking to the streets: large swaths of the population also
believed the younger Assad was different. With his gorgeous, British-educated wife,
Asma, by his side, Assad projected the image of a modern leader and had brought a
modicum of change since his accession, mostly by opening up the country’s economy
cautiously and reforming the banking sector. I had reported extensively in Syria from
2000 to 2007 and heard Syrians from all walks of life express their admiration for
the president and their hope that he would continue to reform. They blamed the corruption,
widespread arrests of dissidents, and continued climate of fear on the old guard still
surrounding the young Assad. He just needed more time, they insisted.

After the demonstrations started, the Obama administration released a crescendo of
statements, at first only slowly increasing pressure, as though unable to accept that
yet another dictator was falling. Assad was fast losing his legitimacy, officials
said. The window was closing. The window was almost closed. He was not indispensable.
His legitimacy was gone. They imposed sanctions on his coterie. Then on his generals.
Then on him. Not even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran was personally under sanctions.
As the violence deployed against the protestors escalated and the death toll grew
by several hundred every month, calls increased for the administration to say the
magic words: “Assad must go.”

The Obama administration resisted making that statement. Obama was still eager to
ensure that the United States did not look like it was encouraging the uprisings.
He and his advisors wanted the people on the ground to own their revolution. Public
American support was often the kiss of death. Assad, predictably, blamed a foreign
plot for the unrest in his country. In Washington but also in the region, some people
argued that since Arab leaders used the plot excuse anyway, whether America spoke
out or not, Washington might just as well throw its weight behind the protestors.
But with a war still ongoing in Libya, Obama didn’t want to say anything that could
lead to demands for another intervention: you said he has to go, now take him out.
The U.S. presidential election was also already a consideration.

For outsiders, it seemed simple to call for a leader to step down; once those words
are uttered, however, the United States is essentially declaring it will never deal
with that government again. The United States’ careful deliberations behind closed
doors were seen in the region as intentional inaction, driven by a desire to see Assad
prevail. Yet more proof of America’s nefarious designs and hypocrisy when it came
to supporting human rights and freedom. The cost of saying nothing was rising. Finally,
on August 18, Obama issued a statement.

“We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition
or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time
has come for President Assad to step aside.”

When Obama made his statement, anti-Assad protestors cried victory. But statements
by the United States did not necessarily have an impact on the ground. Obama had said
Gaddafi should go in March, but five months later he was still holding on to power
in Libya, despite a NATO bombing campaign. Now, Obama had said Assad had to leave,
and the Syrian leader did not appear to be shaking in his boots. When nothing happened
after an American president spoke, it made the United States look powerless.

The uprising in Syria was unlike the other revolutions in the Middle East. Tunisia
had happened so fast, no one had had time to think. In Egypt, the United States had
leverage because it gave money to the army and the army hadn’t shot at the protestors.
The revolutionaries had been well organized, bringing millions onto the street. Libya
was a fringe country in North Africa with a fringe leader no one liked. There were
strategic interests involved, but mostly for the Europeans because it was their backyard.
Washington was not developing a comprehensive strategic approach to the Arab Spring.
It dealt with each country separately.

Assad had his hands on many destructive levers, more so perhaps than most dictators
in the region. Syria was a supporter of Hezbollah in Lebanon on its eastern border,
was a friend of Hamas, which had its headquarters in Damascus, and had links to the
networks of insurgents in Iraq. Assad himself, as well as his relatives, who were
all in positions of power, often made veiled threats. Syria, they said, had influence
over groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, so they could rein them in and counsel them
to stay quiet. But the obvious implication was that thanks to these groups, Syria
could unleash chaos across the region. In keeping with that attitude, Assad’s cousin
Rami Makhlouf, the country’s most powerful businessman and a lightning rod for dissent,
had warned in an interview with the
New York Times
in May that if anyone dared touch the Syrian regime, no one could guarantee the stability
of Israel or the region. Ironically, Assad kept his own border with Israel quiet.
Not a shot had been fired since the last conflagration in 1973, and Israel was keen
to keep it that way, often pressing Washington not to push Assad too hard. It was
a classic case of the “the devil we know.”

The biggest problem was Syria’s alliance with Iran. Tehran wasn’t going to let Assad
fall without putting up a fight for him. The United States constantly worried about
Tehran gaining influence and political clout in the region, and when the protests
had erupted in Bahrain, American fear of Iran had come at great cost to the protestors.
Now the problem was reversed. The end of Assad in Syria could deal a strategic blow
to Tehran but American officials worried that, if they pushed to make it happen, the
United States could suddenly find itself at war with Iran.