In
Arab Spring, Obama Finds a Sharp Test
Pete
Souza/The White House
STERN
WORDS FOR MUBARAK
President Obama phoned President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt on Feb. 1,
2011, as some of his senior staff members worked in the Oval Office.
Published:
September 24, 2012 42
Comments
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
GOOGLE+
E-MAIL
SHARE
REPRINTS
WASHINGTON
— President Hosni
Mubarak
did not even wait for President
Obama’s
words to be translated before he shot back.
A
Measure of Change
Articles
in this series assess President Obama’s record.
A
one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times
and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.
Chris
Hondros/Getty Images
IN
THE SQUARE
In Tahrir Square, the center of Egyptian protests, people watched Mr.
Mubarak announce he would not seek office again.
Readers’
Comments
Share
your thoughts.
Post
a Comment »
Read
All Comments (42) »
“You
don’t understand this part of the world,” the Egyptian leader
broke in. “You’re young.”
Mr.
Obama, during a tense telephone call the evening of Feb. 1, 2011, had
just told Mr. Mubarak that his speech, broadcast to hundreds of
thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo, had not gone far
enough. Mr. Mubarak had to step down, the president said.
Minutes
later, a grim Mr. Obama appeared before hastily summoned cameras in
the Grand Foyer of the White House. The end of Mr. Mubarak’s
30-year rule, Mr. Obama said, “must begin now.” With
those words,
Mr. Obama upended three decades of American relations with its most
stalwart ally in the Arab world, putting the weight of the United
States squarely on the side of the Arab street.
It
was a risky move by the American president, flying in the face of
advice from elders on his staff at the State Department and at the
Pentagon, who had spent decades nursing the autocratic — but
staunchly pro-American — Egyptian government.
Nineteen
months later, Mr. Obama was at the State Department consoling some of
the very officials he had overruled. Anti-American protests broke out
in Egypt
and Libya.
In Libya, they led to the deaths of four Americans, including the
United States ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. A new
Egyptian government run by the Muslim Brotherhood was dragging its
feet about condemning attacks on the American Embassy in Cairo.
Television
sets in the United States were filled with images of Arabs, angry
over an American-made video that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad,
burning American flags and even effigies of Mr. Obama.
Speaking
privately to grieving State Department workers, the president tried
to make sense of the unfolding events. He talked about how he had
been a child abroad, taught to appreciate American diplomats who
risked their lives for their country. That work, and the outreach to
the Arab world, he said, must continue, even in the face of mob
violence that called into question what the United States can
accomplish in a turbulent region.
In
many ways, Mr. Obama’s remarks at the State Department two weeks
ago — and the ones he will make before the General Assembly on
Tuesday morning, when he addresses the anti-American protests —
reflected hard lessons the president had learned over almost two
years of political turmoil in the Arab world: bold words and support
for democratic aspirations are not enough to engender good will in
this region, especially not when hampered by America’s own national
security interests.
In
fact, Mr. Obama’s staunch defense of democracy protesters in Egypt
last year soon drew him into an upheaval that would test his
judgment, his nerve and his diplomatic skill. Even as the uprisings
spread to Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, the president’s sympathy
for the protesters infuriated America’s allies in the conservative
and oil-rich Gulf states. In mid-March, the Saudis moved decisively
to crush the democracy protests in Bahrain, sending a convoy of tanks
and heavy artillery across the 16-mile King Fahd Causeway between the
two countries.
That
blunt show of force confronted Mr. Obama with the limits of his
ability, or his willingness, to midwife democratic change. Despite a
global outcry over the shooting and tear-gassing of peaceful
protesters in Bahrain, the president largely turned a blind eye. His
realism and reluctance to be drawn into foreign quagmires has held
sway ever since, notably in Syria, where many critics continue to
call for a more aggressive American response to the brutality of
Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
Mr.
Obama’s journey from Cairo to the Causeway took just 44 days. In
part, it reflected the different circumstances in the countries where
protests broke out, despite their common origins and slogans. But his
handling of the uprisings also demonstrates the gap between the two
poles of his political persona: his sense of himself as a historic
bridge-builder who could redeem America’s image abroad, and his
more cautious adherence to long-term American interests in security
and cheap oil.
To
some, the stark difference between the outcomes in Cairo and Bahrain
illustrates something else, too: his impatience with old-fashioned
back-room diplomacy, and his corresponding failure to build close
personal relationships with foreign leaders that can, especially in
the Middle East, help the White House to influence decisions made
abroad.
A
Focus on Respect
In
many ways, Mr. Obama’s decision to throw American support behind
change in the Arab world was made well before a Tunisian street
vendor set himself on fire and ignited the broadest political
challenge to the region in decades.
Lynsey
Addario for The New York Times
PROTESTS
ARE CRUSHED
In February 2011, protesters occupied Pearl Square in Manama,
Bahrain, before Saudi Arabia sent in tanks and artillery.
A
Measure of Change
Articles
in this series assess President Obama’s record.
A
one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times
and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.
Readers’
Comments
Share
your thoughts.
Post
a Comment »
Read
All Comments (42) »
Mr.
Obama, whose campaign for the presidency was in part set in motion by
his early opposition to the Iraq war, came into office in January
2009 determined that he would not repeat what he viewed as the
mistakes of his predecessor in pushing a “freedom agenda” in Iraq
and other parts of the Arab world, according to senior administration
officials.
Instead,
he focused on mutual respect and understanding. During a speech to
the Arab world in 2009 from Cairo, the president did talk about the
importance of governments “that reflect the will of the people.”
But, he added pointedly, “there is no straight line to realize this
promise.”
Two
weeks later, as large street protests broke out in Iran after
disputed presidential elections, Mr. Obama followed a low-key script,
criticizing violence but saying he did not want to be seen as
meddling in Iranian domestic politics.
Months
later, administration officials said, Mr. Obama expressed regret
about his muted stance on Iran. “There was a feeling of ‘we ain’t
gonna be behind the curve on this again,’ ” one senior
administration official said. He, like almost two dozen
administration officials and Arab and American diplomats interviewed
for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
By
the time the Tunisian protests broke out in January 2011 — an angry
Mr. Obama accused his staff of being caught “flat-footed,”
officials said — the president publicly backed the protesters. But
the real test of the new muscular posture came 11 days later, when
thousands of Egyptians converged on Tahrir Square in Cairo for a “day
of rage.”
Mr.
Obama felt keenly, one aide said, the need for the United States, and
for he himself, to stand as a moral example. “He knows that the
protesters want to hear from the American president, but not just any
American president,” a senior aide to Mr. Obama said. “They want
to hear from this American president.” In other words, they wanted
to hear from the first black president of the United States, a symbol
of the possibility of change.
If
the president felt a kinship with the youthful protesters, he seems
to have had little rapport with Egypt’s aging president, or, for
that matter, any other Arab leaders. In part, this was a function of
time: he was still relatively new to the presidency, and had not
built the kind of cozy relationship that the Bush family, for
instance, had with the Saudis.
But
Mr. Obama has struggled with little success to build better relations
with key foreign leaders like Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
In
any case, after an awkward phone call between the American and
Egyptian presidents on Jan. 28, Mr. Obama sent a senior diplomat with
long experience in Egypt, Frank G. Wisner, to make a personal appeal
to the Egyptian leader. But Mr. Mubarak balked. Meanwhile, the rising
anger in Cairo’s streets led to a new moment of reckoning for Mr.
Obama: Feb. 1.
That
afternoon at the White House, top national security officials were
meeting in the Situation Room to decide what to do about the
deteriorating situation in Egypt. Thirty minutes into it, the door
opened and the president walked in, crashing what was supposed to be
a principals’ meeting.
Attending
were Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; the Joint Chiefs
of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen; and the national security
adviser, Tom Donilon. Margaret Scobey, the ambassador in Cairo,
appeared on the video conference screen.
The
question on the table would have been unthinkable just a week before.
Should Mr. Obama call for Mr. Mubarak to step down?
Midway
through the meeting, an aide walked in and handed a note to Mr.
Donilon. “Mubarak is on,” he read aloud.
Every
screen in the Situation Room was turned to Al Jazeera, and the
Egyptian leader appeared, making a much-anticipated address. He said
he would not run again, but did not offer to step down. “This is my
country,” he said. “I will die on its soil.”
A
Measure of Change
Articles
in this series assess President Obama’s record.
A
one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times
and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.
Readers’
Comments
Share
your thoughts.
Post
a Comment »
Read
All Comments (42) »
In
the Situation Room, there was silence. Then the president spoke.
“That’s not going to cut it,” he said.
Seeing
the Inevitable
If
this were Hollywood, the story of Barack
Obama
and the Arab Spring would end there, with the young American
president standing with the protesters against the counsel of his own
advisers, and hastening the end of the entrenched old guard in Egypt.
In the Situation Room, Mr. Gates, Admiral Mullen, Jeffrey D. Feltman,
then an assistant secretary of state, and others balked at the
inclusion in Mr. Obama’s planned remarks that Mr. Mubarak’s
“transition must begin now,” arguing that it was too aggressive.
Mr.
Mubarak had steadfastly stood by the United States in the face of
opposition from his own public, they said. The president, officials
said, countered swiftly: “If ‘now’ is not in my remarks,
there’s no point in me going out there and talking.”
John
O. Brennan, chief counterterrorism adviser to Mr. Obama, said
the president saw early on what others did not: that the Arab Spring
movement had legs. “A lot of people were in a state of denial that
this had an inevitability to it,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview.
“And I think that’s what the president clearly saw, that there
was an inevitability to it that would clearly not be turned back, and
it would only be delayed by suppression and bloodshed.”
So
“now” stayed in Mr. Obama’s statement. Ten days later, Mr.
Mubarak was out. Even after the president’s remarks, Mrs. Clinton
was still publicly cautioning that removing Mr. Mubarak too hastily
could threaten the country’s transition to democracy.
In
the end, many of the advisers who initially opposed Mr. Obama’s
stance now give him credit for prescience. But there were
consequences, and they were soon making themselves felt.
Angry
Reactions
On
Feb. 14, in the tiny island monarchy of Bahrain, Internet calls for a
“day of rage” led to street rallies and bloody clashes with the
police. The next day at a news conference in Washington, Mr. Obama
seemed to suggest that this revolt was much like the others. His
message to Arab allies, he said, was “if you are governing these
countries, you’ve got to get out ahead of change.”
But
in the following weeks, Mr. Obama fell silent. Away from the public
eye, he was coming under assault from leaders in Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates, even Israel. Angry at the treatment of Mr.
Mubarak, which officials from the Gulf states feared could forecast
their own abandonment, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates drew
a line in the sand. Some American and Arab diplomats say that
response could have been avoided if Mr. Obama had worked quietly to
ease Mr. Mubarak out, rather than going public.
On
March 14, White House officials awoke to a nasty surprise: the Saudis
had led a military incursion into Bahrain, followed by a crackdown in
which the security forces cleared Pearl Square in the capital,
Manama, by force. The moves were widely condemned, but Mr. Obama and
Mrs. Clinton offered only veiled criticisms, calling for “calm and
restraint on all sides” and “political dialogue.”
The
reasons for Mr. Obama’s reticence were clear: Bahrain sits just off
the Saudi coast, and the Saudis were never going to allow a sudden
flowering of democracy next door, especially in light of the island’s
sectarian makeup. Bahrain’s people are mostly Shiite, and they have
long been seen as a cat’s paw for Iranian influence by the Sunni
rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In addition, the United States
maintains a naval base in Bahrain that is seen as a bulwark against
Iran, crucial for maintaining the flow of oil from the region.
“We
realized that the possibility of anything happening in Saudi Arabia
was one that couldn’t become a reality,” said William M. Daley,
President Obama’s chief of staff at the time. “For the global
economy, this couldn’t happen. Yes, it was treated differently from
Egypt. It was a different situation.”
A
Measure of Change
Articles
in this series assess President Obama’s record.
A
one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times
and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.
Readers’
Comments
Share
your thoughts.
Post
a Comment »
Read
All Comments (42) »
Some
analysts credit Mr. Obama for recognizing early on that strategic
priorities trumped whatever sympathy he had for the protesters.
Others say the administration could have more effectively mediated
between the Bahraini government and the largely Shiite protesters,
and thereby avoided what has become a sectarian standoff in one of
the world’s most volatile places.
If
Mr. Obama had cultivated closer ties to the Saudis, he might have
bought time for negotiations between the Bahraini authorities and the
chief Shiite opposition party, Al Wefaq, according to one American
diplomat who was there at the time. Instead, the Saudis gave
virtually no warning when their forces rolled across the causeway
linking Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and the ensuing crackdown destroyed
all hopes for a peaceful resolution.
The
lingering resentment over Mr. Mubarak’s ouster had another apparent
consequence. Mrs. Clinton’s criticism of the military intervention
in a Paris television interview angered officials of the United Arab
Emirates, whose military was also involved in the Bahrain operation
and who shared the Saudis’ concern about the Mubarak episode.
The
Emiratis promptly threatened to withdraw from the coalition then
being assembled to support a NATO-led strike against Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader. The Emiratis knew they were needed to
give the coalition legitimacy. They quickly named their price for
staying on board, according to Arab and Western diplomats familiar
with the episode: Mrs. Clinton must issue a statement that would pull
back from any criticism of the Bahrain operation.
The
statement, hastily drafted and vetted by Emirati and American
officials, appeared soon afterward, in the guise of a communiqué on
Libya.
The
tensions between Mr. Obama and the Gulf states, both American and
Arab diplomats say, derive from an Obama character trait: he has not
built many personal relationships with foreign leaders. “He’s not
good with personal relationships; that’s not what interests him,”
said one United States diplomat. “But in the Middle East, those
relationships are essential. The lack of them deprives D.C. of the
ability to influence leadership decisions.”
A
Lack of Chemistry
Arab
officials echo that sentiment, describing Mr. Obama as a cool,
cerebral man who discounts the importance of personal chemistry in
politics. “You can’t fix these problems by remote control,”
said one Arab diplomat with long experience in Washington. “He
doesn’t have friends who are world leaders. He doesn’t believe in
patting anybody on the back, nicknames.
“You
can’t accomplish what you want to accomplish” with such an
impersonal style, the diplomat said.
Mr.
Obama’s advisers argue that when he does reach out, he is more
effective — as in a phone call last week to Mohamed Morsi, the new
president of Egypt. After Mr. Morsi’s initial tepid response to the
attacks on the embassy in Cairo, a fed-up Mr. Obama demanded a show
of support. Within an hour, he had it.
“Were
he to be calling all the time, it would run counter to our assertion
that we won’t dictate the outcome of every decision in every
country,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a top national security aide.
Limiting his outreach, Mr. Rhodes said, “heightens the impact of
presidential engagement” when Mr. Obama does get on the phone.
Still,
there remains concern in the administration that at any moment,
events could spiral out of control, leaving the president and his
advisers questioning their belief that their early support for the
Arab Spring would deflect longstanding public anger toward the United
States.
For
instance, Mr. Feltman, the former assistant secretary of state, said,
“the event I find politically most disturbing is the attack on
Embassy Tunis.” Angry protesters breached the grounds of the
American diplomatic compound there last week — in a country
previously known for its moderation and secularism — despite Mr.
Obama’s early support for the democracy movement there. “That
really shakes me out of complacency about what I thought I knew.”
No comments:
Post a Comment