Authors: Kim Ghattas
America was perhaps finally learning the impact of its words. Expressions of support
were often misinterpreted. When American leaders winked, strange things happened,
like Georgian presidents going to war with Russia thinking America would back them
up. The Obama administration believed that a somewhat more neutral expression was
best. If the United States had rushed to say Mubarak should step down, but he had
stayed and trampled on the protestors further and with greater loss of life, the United
States would have been lambasted for not stopping Mubarak when all America could really
have done was call for the violence to end. The United States wasn’t going to send
in the cavalry, and cutting military aid for the Egyptian army wouldn’t have had an
immediate impact and was only a last resort.
In May 2008, when Lebanon had descended into another bout of violence with pro-Western
and anti-Western forces clashing on the street, the liberals in Beirut had been buoyed
by expressions of moral support from the United States. And when their paltry forces
were defeated by Hezbollah, armed to the teeth and backed by Syria and Iran, they
accused the United States of abandoning them. But what did they expect the United
States to do? I asked around, and responses ran the gamut. In all seriousness, some
politicians replied that they had requested the White House to buzz Bashar al-Assad’s
palace in Damascus with U.S. fighter jets or, even better, send American marines to
Beirut. Lebanon was definitely not the only country with crazy ideas about how American
power worked.
While people around the world feverishly speculated about America’s plans for Egypt,
officials in the United States were in the dark. “We are entering the unknown. This
could be 1989 or it could be 1979,” one of them told me. The fall of the Berlin Wall
or the Iranian Revolution: two world events in which the United States had been a
player but the consequences and outcome of which it couldn’t and didn’t dictate. The
aftermath had been widely different: one event had ushered in an era of openness in
Europe, the other had brought a theocracy to Iran. No one knew what the revolution
in Egypt would produce, but there were warnings in Washington that America’s influence
in the region would be undermined by events. After all, this was an American ally
being ousted by his own people, and many read it as a rejection of the American order.
Countries that opposed U.S. influence in the region, like Syria and Iran, were gleeful.
In Beirut, some of my liberal friends worried that Hezbollah would emerge more powerful
in what appeared to be a battle for the soul of the Middle East, Iran’s influence
over Lebanon only growing as America retreated from the region. Ayatollah Khamenei,
the supreme leader in Iran, was thinking precisely that and shared as much in a tweet
to the world. @khamenei_ir: “Ayatollah Khamenei: the time has come for an end to the
dominance of the superpowers & a gradual decline in their power.”
I was particularly struck by how, despite all the talk about the end of the American
empire, no one seemed to be curious about what the Chinese were saying to Mubarak.
The Chinese of course had even less leverage over him than the United States did,
but the protestors craving outside recognition were neither asking nor getting it
from China—or from Russia for that matter. Beijing was quiet, too busy blocking the
Internet at home to make sure the Chinese didn’t see what people power could do to
autocrats in the age of Twitter and twenty-four-hour news. Reacting to a major international
crisis by looking inward with paranoia was not exactly the stuff of a superpower.
Even the European countries barely uttered a word. Somehow what America said, what
it did or didn’t do, still mattered, even if people’s grasp of what made up American
power was out of touch with reality.
“This is the irony here,” an American official complained to me. “On the one hand,
we’re being accused of dominating everything and dictating everything. On the other
hand, we’re being accused of not dictating everything and dominating everything. These
are choices to be made by the Egyptian people.” No matter what Washington did, the
world expected something different.
The truth was somewhere in the middle between dominating and not dominating. And so
every day, America waited and listened to the people on the streets of Egypt. When
the crowds roared, the tone in the United States toughened. When the anger ebbed,
Washington spoke more softly. Every day, everyone in Washington called everyone in
Cairo, and they waited for the next speech. But Mubarak was always one step behind.
* * *
On February 1, Mubarak announced that he would not seek reelection. But he said nothing
about whether his son would stand. He gave some hints about reform and dialogue. On
the streets of Cairo, opinions were divided. The president had made a gesture. He
had listened. Some didn’t trust him. Others did. In Washington, there was a sense
that perhaps things were calming down. The pharaoh had announced he was going to retire,
and perhaps Mubarak should be given a bit of time to make those changes. There was
no point making him grovel.
Obama, however, wanted to hold Mubarak to his word. He wanted to clarify exactly what
Mubarak needed to do to make sure the political transition was real, started right
away, and didn’t last forever. No one wanted months of protests on the streets of
Egypt. Mubarak and Obama spoke on the phone in English for thirty minutes. Obama was
respectful of his elder but firm. You are a leader who has served his people for a
long time, Obama told Mubarak, someone who is committed to serving his people. But
this isn’t going to work this way, you are going to have to accelerate the transition
and hold talks with a full range of opposition leaders. Obama appealed to Mubarak’s
sense of pride and love of his country. After committing his whole life to Egypt,
surely the last thing Mubarak wanted was instability.
“You don’t know my people. They know only I can create stability.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“But you don’t know my people.”
“Let’s talk in twenty-four hours.”
“No, no, we’ll talk in a few days. You will see, everything will be fine.”
“You could be right, but what if you’re not. The stakes are high for you too.”
Obama tried to be respectful and empathic as he tried to explain to a man who was
old enough to be his father that it wasn’t because things had been a certain way for
a long time that they would stay like that. Mubarak was too old to listen.
“I know my people. You don’t know them.”
They would never speak again. Obama gave a speech soon after the call. He was frustrated.
He wanted to lock Mubarak into the promises he had made about reform. In a stern address,
Obama put Mubarak on notice.
“I spoke directly to President Mubarak. He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable
and that a change must take place. What is clear—and what I indicated tonight to President
Mubarak—is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful,
and it must begin now.”
The next day, regime thugs forged into the crowds on horseback, beating demonstrators.
Three people were killed, another 1,500 injured. The ferocious attack was a turning
point in the protests and gave the lie to Mubarak’s assurances that only he could
bring stability to the country. Tahrir Square erupted again, united once more in fury,
demanding Mubarak’s departure. Any illusion that there was still time for the president
to be part of the transition was gone.
Clinton called the intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who had just been appointed as
vice president a few days earlier. She was firm: this would not be tolerated. Suleiman
reassured her it wouldn’t happen again and that the violence would indeed be kept
under control. You can’t put the salt back in the shaker, she told him. You have to
preside over a real transition. You can’t just do some window-dressing reforms and
stick around for another ten years. Real change had to come. Fast.
Every day, Clinton went to the White House. She met with Obama alone. She met with
Bob Gates and the national security advisor Tom Donilon. They met all together. Clinton
had always said that what had surprised her most about her job was how often she was
at the White House. Now she was spending half her days there. Obama was surrounded
by his own trusted circle of advisors who saw the world as he did, but over the course
of the last two years, he had been listening more closely to Clinton. And she, in
turn, voiced her views and gave advice with more and more confidence. Clinton had
spent her first year in Obama’s cabinet trying to be, for the most part, the good
soldier. Now she added to that role her own pragmatic views and a voice more forcefully
heard. During national security meetings, the national security advisor would kick
off with the agenda, and if the focus was foreign policy, Obama would turn to Clinton
to ask for her input before the advisor had even finished. If she wasn’t present,
Obama would say, I want to know where Hillary is on this. They didn’t always agree,
of course, and he was still the ultimate decider, but Clinton was a steady hand and,
perhaps most importantly, she was the implementer. If Obama wanted something done,
he needed to know Clinton felt confident she could deliver the outcome that was required.
Hillary took the long view on Egypt, keeping one eye on the bigger picture. She had
warned about moving too fast and making it look like the United States was abandoning
its allies. She believed deeply in empowering people and in the need to support reform,
but she was also the one who had given a speech in Doha just a few weeks earlier warning
that the choice was not between reform and stability but between reform and chaos.
Now, chaos was knocking at the door, and it was important to manage this properly.
The United States had a reputation to think of. It wasn’t just a question of values
but also one of credibility. And it was about money. Washington was already underwriting
the Egyptian army, but the aftermath of any upheaval would require an influx of aid
to fuel the economy. The United States had its own economic woes to worry about and
could soon find itself knocking on Riyadh’s door to ask for their riyals to flow toward
Egypt. It was unwise to alienate the rich uncle in the Gulf just before asking for
his wallet. Israel’s fears about an Egypt without Mubarak also weighed on Clinton’s
mind.
On February 5, a few days after Obama’s call for the transition to “begin now,” Wisner,
by now a former envoy, gave a talk at a conference in Munich. He volunteered his opinion
that it would actually still be best if Mubarak stayed in power to oversee the whole
process of the transition toward democracy. This is what Wisner had been sent to tell
Mubarak, but since then everything had changed. Conspiracy theories erupted across
the globe. What did he mean by that? Hadn’t Obama said the transition started now?
Didn’t that mean that Mubarak himself had to go now? Was Mubarak suddenly part of
that transition? What was America’s plan? Once again, here was proof of America’s
changeability: saying one thing, doing another. U.S. leaders claimed that they were
with the people, but really they were protecting their ally, hedging their bets, waiting
to see which way the wind would blow. The foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit complained
during a television interview with PBS that America was sending mixed messages that
were utterly confusing even to the Egyptian leadership.
The Obama administration was trying so hard to find the right words, to weigh every
message, yet its response looked messy and uncoordinated. But what people often forgot
was that American officials didn’t have it all figured out, every statement was not
part of a methodical plan, and not everybody agreed on the best course of action.
And this was not China, where decision making was hypercentralized and officials did
not deviate from the party line, whether in public or private. The United States was
a country where people loved to express their opinions, and it wasn’t always easy
to stick to one message. If you had been hired as a freelancer and your mission was
over, as in the case of Wisner, surely you could express your own opinions again.
Hillary, who was at the same conference in Munich, was frustrated when she heard the
news. She canceled her dinner plans and tried to fix the damage. Obama was annoyed
by the uncertainty the different statements were creating about Washington’s policy.
The White House issued clear instructions: not a word would be uttered anymore that
hadn’t been approved; no one was to stray from the talking points.
* * *
After days of defiantly poking his finger in America’s eye, Mubarak finally promised
the military he would announce his resignation in a speech on the evening of February
10. The army had been watching with alarm as the protests swelled. Their own power
was at risk. Egypt’s generals told officials in Washington that everything was set
for Mubarak’s departure. Speaking to Congress that morning, CIA chief Leon Panetta
said there was “a strong likelihood that Mubarak may step down this evening.”
Clinton was convinced Mubarak was going to hedge. His first speech had been so ambiguous
that she expected this one would be equally so. Chatting with her aides, she said
she just couldn’t see how this old man could stand up and say, “I’m leaving.” It just
wasn’t in his DNA.
Hillary watched the speech in her office on the seventh floor. Her television set,
usually sitting silently behind a panel in the wooden wall unit to the right of her
desk, had been turned on for the occasion. Mubarak’s speech was so convoluted that
for seventeen long minutes, no one knew what he was trying to say. At some point,
he did utter the sentence “Transfer all powers under the constitution to the vice
president.” On Tahrir Square, barely anyone was listening anymore: there were howls
of rage, tears, and protestors who had been chanting, “The people want the downfall
of the regime,” started singing, “The people want to understand the speech.” When
Mubarak was finished, I asked American officials whether the speech was satisfactory.