The Secretary (49 page)

On our way to Tunis, we stopped in London for another conference, on Somalia. Many
of the ministers who would be attending the Syria conference were there too, and after
spending hours with them on the phone from Washington, Clinton was going to make sure,
in person, that everybody was on the same page.

Behind the scenes, American officials were busy helping the divided Syrian opposition
coalesce into a group that represented all of Syria’s religious and ethnic communities
and could engage in a serious dialogue with the Syrian leadership to start a real
political transition to a post-Assad Syria. If no one wanted to remove Assad and he
wasn’t going to fall any time soon, a negotiated transition was the next best thing.
The opposition was represented by the Syrian National Council, led by Burhan Ghalioun,
a white-haired, uninspiring sociology professor who had lived in exile in Paris for
more than three decades. Since its creation in August 2011, the SNC had been mired
in internal divisions and was accused of being corrupt. The SNC was criticized for
being too close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been banned in Syria for almost
fifty years. SNC members resigned regularly and new rival opposition groups kept springing
up. There was no Mahmoud Jibril here. The SNC also seemed unable to put together a
document laying out its vision for the post-Assad period, one that was inclusive of
all the nation’s communities, including Christians and Assad’s own Alawite sect, which
each made up roughly 10 percent of the Syrian population. The SNC failed to include
any Kurdish representatives, Syria’s largest ethnic community. American officials
were dropping as many hints as they could about what the opposition needed to do to
galvanize support, but they didn’t want to write the program for them: screams about
American interference would erupt, overshadowing the tragedy unfolding in Syria. Washington
also worried about the fact that the SNC did not properly represent the thousands
of activists, trapped under fire inside Syria, risking their lives each day to coordinate
protests and send out news of their rebellion. The last time the United States had
relied on advice solely from an opposition in exile, in Iraq, it had been a disaster.
The State Department hoped that the opposition would manage to smuggle some representatives
out of Syria or have them join the conference by Skype. Clinton wanted the Syrian
opposition and the outcome of the conference to represent the will of people on the
inside who were angry with opposition leaders in exile for failing to galvanize international
support fast enough, if at all.

The Tunisians were nervous about their first foray into international crisis solving
since removing their own dictator. The conference in London provided an opportunity
for some hand-holding before the big day. There, they received help on how to run
the gathering and formulating the final communiqué of the conference and advice about
how to run the conference. Some sixty countries and organizations would be attending
the gathering. There had to be broad consensus on a text that would be powerful enough
to send a clear message to Assad. The Emirati sheikhs gave the Tunisian minister a
ride back to Tunis and provided even further guidance and advice, practically dictating
the text of the statement in an effort to speed things along.

*   *   *

We arrived in Tunis at two in the afternoon and headed to the seaside Gammarth Palace
hotel, where the conference was taking place. We were still on our way to town when
the motorcade came to a standstill on a deserted highway, in the middle of a small
forest. Diplomatic Security agents got out of the car and for a moment I wondered
whether we were in the middle of an ambush of some sort. But DS agents posted at the
hotel had informed agents in the motorcade that a pro-Assad demonstration under way
in front of the hotel had gotten out of hand, and we were hanging back waiting for
the crowds to calm down.

After a brief pause, we were back on our way to the Gammarth and to the mayhem. The
hotel lobby was heaving with delegates and journalists. Tunisian security guards seemed
in a panic, the restaurants out of food. Behind closed doors, key participants in
the conference were giving their speeches. The Tunisians upset the SNC when they abruptly
suggested that Ghalioun shouldn’t take the podium but finally agreed to let him speak.
They had also been unable to find a table large enough to accommodate all the ministers
around it, so they seated delegates in rows and the French, sitting in the third row,
were fuming. No panic, the American delegation thought, the first Friends of Libya
meeting had also been a challenge. Clinton was going to give her own speech at the
conference and then hold a series of talks with several of her counterparts.

The Saudis were there, no longer sulking about America, the fickle friend that threw
its allies under the bus. Iran, their nemesis in the region, seemed to create antibodies
that pushed countries closer to the United States. Fear of Iran and rivalry with Shiites
drove everything in the Sunni kingdoms. Now the Saudis were sulking about something
else. Before his meeting with Clinton started, Saud al-Faisal answered questions from
reporters, instead of sticking to pleasantries in front of the cameras. Was it a good
idea to arm the rebels?

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” he said. “Because they have to protect themselves.”

Sitting next to him on a red upholstered chair, Clinton was taken aback. Arm the rebels?
The focus of the conference was humanitarian aid and the political transition. The
UN and the Arab League were about to name an envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, a former
UN secretary-general, to implement the transition plan suggested by the Arab League,
bringing monitors to oversee an end to the violence. Arming the rebels would only
feed the conflict. This was not part of the agenda. Washington was wary of any move
that would further feed the violence and militarize the uprising. For months, American
officials had repeatedly and publicly exhorted the protestors in Syria to remain peaceful,
“selmiyya,” until the repression by Assad’s forces became so violent that Washington’s
position was no longer tenable. But openly arming the rebels was yet another story.
In Libya, the Transitional National Council, led by Jibril, represented the political
and the military wing of the rebellion. The United States had also sought and received
assurances that the fighters were not affiliated with al-Qaeda. But even then, the
United States had supplied the Libyan rebels only with non-lethal equipment, no weapons.
The Free Syria army, on the other hand, was not the armed wing of the SNC and the
two bodies were in fact often at odds. The SNC had initially rejected the use of violence
in the Syrian uprising. The fighters in Syria were not all under the FSA command and
there were signs that radical Islamists were increasingly taking up arms.

With reporters out of the room, Clinton and her delegation probed some more, asking
who those rebels were exactly that Saudi Arabia wanted to arm. Saud al-Faisal gave
a vague answer.

“We know who they are, we know.”

He suggested putting money in a bank account and letting the rebels use it as they
saw fit.

On the hotel doorstep I bumped into a senior Saudi official I knew from my days reporting
in the Middle East.

“What do you think the conference will achieve?” I asked.

“It’s a waste of time, all this talk about humanitarian aid, fine, but it’s time to
get rid of Assad, and all this talk isn’t going to help,” he said.

“So are you going to arm them? Do you think that’s going to help get rid of Assad?”
I asked.

“We think something needs to be done,” he responded. “All this talk is useless. Assad
is an occupier now. It’s time to take Syria back.”

Those were very strong words. In the Arab world, “occupation” and “occupier” had become
synonymous for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Whenever an Arab talked
about “the occupation,” it was understood he meant the Israeli occupation. The rulers
of Saudi Arabia, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, had now put Assad in the same
category as Israeli leaders.

But no matter how nefarious or violent Assad was, arming the rebels was a risky business.
The last time Saudi Arabia had helped armed rebels, it was in Afghanistan in the 1980s
with Washington’s cooperation, to fight the Russian occupation. That effort gave birth
to a generation of jihadi fighters, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, all of them still wreaking
havoc in Afghanistan and beyond. But my Saudi friend was adamant that concrete action
had to be taken and that actively arming the rebels was a first step. He seemed to
indicate that what was really needed was a military intervention.

“So is Saudi Arabia going to intervene and take him out?” I asked.

The Saudi official looked at me as though I had just lost my mind.

“We’re not a superpower. America is the superpower,” he said.

Superpower or not, Saudi Arabia and the United States had just sealed a $30 billion
deal for eighty-four new F-15 fighter jets. Another seventy fighter jets were being
refurbished. A year earlier, hundreds of Saudi troops and army vehicles had been sent
across the border into Bahrain to help quell Shiite demonstrators rising up against
the country’s Sunni rulers. In 2009, Saudi jets had bombed Yemeni rebels challenging
the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, their neighbor. Though the Saudis had the means to
intervene and had done it before, they did so only when it was in their immediate
backyard and when the solution was straightforward. Syria was a bigger challenge,
a viper’s nest: better leave that to America.

During the Libya crisis, the Obama administration had said it was willing to go as
far as the Arabs; the United States had then led the way to intervention. But on Syria,
the Arabs were divided. The Tunisians opposed arming the rebels. The Bahrainis said
armament was premature. The rebels were not just an unknown quantity, they also held
no territory. Unlike in Libya, there was no safe haven where they could organize themselves
and mount an organized attack against Assad. But the key player here was Turkey, Syria’s
neighbor to the north. Ankara made vague reference to the need for a safe haven but
stopped short of calling for one to be forcibly established.

Erdo
ğ
an and Davuto
ğ
lu had initially been keen to demonstrate the benefits of their zero-problem-neighborhood
policy and their close relationship with Assad. They asked Washington to give them
the time to bring Assad around. They had met and spoken to the Syrian leader repeatedly
at the start of the uprising, counseling dialogue and reform, but Assad had said one
thing and done another. By the end of 2011 Erdo
ğ
an felt personally let down. The Turks started calling for action, in vague terms.
When American officials had asked exactly what they envisaged, it appeared that Erdo
ğ
an and Davuto
ğ
lu had not exactly consulted their generals. Once they actually looked down the barrel
of military action, their public ardor for action became more measured, and Turkey’s
discussion with Washington focused on what Ankara’s red lines were: floods of refugees
and a spillover of the conflict. With Washington, they set up a defensive military
planning contingency cell.

The Syrians themselves were divided about calling for military intervention. After
weeks of working with opposition leader Burhan Ghalioun to help him put his best foot
forward, his performance at the conference had been uninspiring. Even worse, he told
journalists that the gathering “doesn’t meet his people’s aspirations.” Hillary’s
team was furious—the secretary had come all the way from Washington to show support,
Ghalioun had said nothing during the meeting that indicated he was disappointed, and
now he was declaring that all of this just wasn’t enough for Syria. At least the opposition
activists had been able to join the conference, speaking from Syria by Skype.

Night had fallen and the rowdy gathering came to an end. The Tunisian chair gave a
press conference, and at nine in the evening it was Clinton’s turn. Faced with questions
about what had really been achieved and how the talking in Tunisia could end the killing
in Syria, the secretary sounded both combative and reassuring, like a chairman of
the board praising participants for what had been achieved, including pledges of humanitarian
aid, and detailing the path that still lay ahead.
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“Let’s stay focused on what we accomplish today. I’ve been to a lot of meetings over
many, many years—rarely one that was put together with such intense effort on such
a short timetable that produced so much consensus. So let’s stay on the path we have
begun on.”

She appealed to soldiers and officers and others around Assad to defect so the fighting
would end. She reserved her toughest words for the Russians and the Chinese.

“They are basically saying to Tunisians, to Libyans, to others throughout the region,
well, we don’t agree that you have a right to have elections, to choose your leaders.
I think that is absolutely contrary to history. And it is not a position that is sustainable,”
Clinton said.

“It is just despicable. And I ask, whose side are they on? They are clearly not on
the side of the Syrian people, and they need to ask themselves some very hard questions
about what that means for them as well as the rest of us.”

*   *   *

After another half a day in Tunisia and a few hours in Algeria, Hillary awoke on a
Sunday morning, in her suite on the eighth floor overlooking the white Moroccan city
of Rabat, frustrated and angry. The pace had been frenetic since Washington. London
had been a long, busy day. The Tunis conference had been a zoo. The day-stop in Algeria
was exhausting. She had barely had time to reflect on where things stood on Syria.
But that morning, the full extent of the deadlock in Tunisia dawned on her. Hillary
just couldn’t see how this played out, how it ended. When I sat down with her for
an interview in the hotel restaurant converted for the occasion into a television
stage, I asked her the same question I had asked her almost a year earlier: how did
she think the Obama administration would be judged by history if it allowed Assad
to level a town like Homs while Washington dillydallied, wondering what to do.