The Secretary (51 page)

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In Washington, every day my in-box filled up with e-mails in Arabic sent from somewhere
in Syria, a basement, a safe house, someone’s kitchen or living room. The Local Coordination
Committees in Syria were grass-roots activists who initially facilitated contact between
protestors across Syria to help coordinate the movement. They also acted increasingly
like local government in areas that had fallen to the rebels. Slowly, their e-mails
started filling with more news of protestors being shot. Their missives, in basic
English or Arabic, continued to punctuate my days in Washington. I woke up, made coffee.

Subject: Breaking from Homs.

Homs: 75 unidentified corpses were found in the refrigerator of the National Hospital
after the FSA captured it. Local Coordination Committees of Syria.

Lunch break.

Subject: Syria 9PM.

Hama: Atshan. Violent shelling with tanks targeting the village leading the damage
of several houses and displacement of several residents. Damascus suburbs: Hasya:
Martyrs and wounded were reported after the regime’s army, backed with tanks, raided
the town amid heavy and random gunfire.

Afternoon coffee. More death.

There were long lists of links to online videos documenting the shelling, the dying,
and the wounded. I had spent the first months of the Syrian revolution watching them
avidly, all day long. By the summer, they became too violent, and I began to have
vivid nightmares about the war in Lebanon again. My feelings of fear and helplessness,
carefully tucked away and forgotten after four years in Washington, returned. So I
took the selfish and rather cowardly decision to stop watching the videos and shield
myself from the pain. But I didn’t have the courage to ask the LCCSyria e-mail senders
to take me off their listserv.

Usually by the end of the day, all I wanted to do was cry. The e-mails just kept coming,
throughout the night. When I woke up, there would be another five, ten, sometimes
twenty of them in my in-box, staring at me from my BlackBerry screen, a long litany
of death, violence, and fear. I had no right to cry: I was living in the United States,
far from the chaos. My family in Beirut was safe.

But my friends in Damascus were not. I was in touch with some of them and feared for
their lives and their futures. And I was reliving the civil war in Lebanon, wondering
why it was happening all over again right next door. Soon, the rebels themselves would
be involved in atrocious acts of violence, torturing soldiers they caught, hanging
informers. The lines between who was right and wrong, good or bad, blurred occasionally,
just like they had in Lebanon over fifteen years of fighting. But in Syria there was
still one ruthless president mowing down his people.

The e-mails from Syria were a silent version of the news flashes on Lebanese radio
during the civil war that interrupted regular programming to tell us where shelling
had erupted or which road crossings had snipers on them. A burst of music with a punchy
beat would sound on the radio, followed by a phone ring, bringing dread to our hearts.

“News flash from our newsroom,” a woman’s velvety voice would then announce. Whenever
my family was in the car, we kept the radio on to make sure we knew if we were driving
into danger. At home, the moment we heard explosions, we turned on the radio to find
out what was going on. We could tell from the sound that the shells were making whether
they were incoming or outgoing, close or far, but the radio announcers would tell
us who was fighting who, whether it was a minor eruption or something serious. All
of the tidbits of information fed into our decision-making process—stay put or head
down to the shelter? I’ve often wondered how the people who sat in those radio studios
gathered the detailed information that kept so many of us alive for years. Not only
were there no Internet, e-mail, or cell phones at the time, but landlines barely worked.

The Syrian e-mail authors showed the same ingenuity and determination. They even used
some of the same language to describe the shelling: “intense” for sustained bombardment;
“indiscriminate” for shelling not directed at a specific target but just aiming to
destroy as much as possible in as wide an area as possible. Or both “intense” and
“random.”

I thought I had finally left fear behind when I had moved to the United States in
2008 for my BBC job. I had only spent holidays in the United States till then, a few
weeks here and there over the course of fifteen years. Yet the feeling of familiarity
and comfort was instantaneous after I arrived. I felt free of fear, the kind of fear
that makes hundreds of thousands of people around the world seek a way out of the
repression of their country, whether it’s a new life abroad or a second passport that
guarantees a way out to safety.

As I watched the images of children on the backs of pickup trucks fleeing their villages
in Syria, I remembered the escape out of our neighborhood, under the cover of darkness
during a lull in the shelling, my mother driving our old Mercedes, me in the backseat
under a blanket, shivering from fever. My body reacted to every flare-up in the fighting
with its own internal battles. This one happened early on February 4, 1984, when I
was only seven, but snippets of the action are seared in my memory. Over the years,
I’ve expanded the image by adding details from conversations with my family. After
days of fighting, the Lebanese army had lost control of West Beirut, and Muslim militias
had taken control of the territory. The president had the backing of the international
community, and they weighed in, in their effort to shore up what they saw as the legitimate
state and the national army. The marines had left Beirut after the 1983 truck bombing
but were still off the coast of Lebanon. The USS
New Jersey
battleship fired three hundred shells onto the stronghold of the militias, south
of Beirut and the hills southeast of the capital. But the president was a Christian,
so “when the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’
had taken sides,” wrote former secretary of state Colin Powell in his memoir,
My American Journey
.

The feeling that America was at war with Muslims was partly born and solidified in
Lebanon.

My family was stuck in the middle, wondering why we were being attacked by the Americans.
Every front line seemed to cross our neighborhood. We were right on the edge between
East and West Beirut, in a no-man’s-land; our building stood on the western side,
but our front door opened on to the East. We were at the southern end of Beirut, beyond
us the southern suburbs, stronghold of the nascent Hezbollah, and farther along other
Muslim militias.

My father and eldest sister had stayed behind to look after the house and check on
my father’s office on the western side of town. A Lebanese army soldier at a checkpoint
told my mother she was crazy to be on the road, but she insisted we had to leave.
I was sick and had to be taken to a quieter environment. There was always someplace
in the country where there was no fighting. The challenge was getting there. The soldier
told my mom to turn off the headlights and drive slowly so as not to attract the attention
of snipers. The city was in the dark. Streetlights were an exotic feature. We crossed
the big intersection that I would later peer down while driving to the presidential
palace with Clinton during that trip in the spring of 2009.

My mother drove as silently as possible, into the dark, holding on to the steering
wheel, the windows cracked open so we could hear any movement outside. As long as
we made it through the intersection, past the snipers, we would be fine. We were almost
there when my mother started to make out an obstacle in front of her, a strange dark
shape in the middle of the road, with spots of white. She turned on her headlights
just in time to avert a crash: the biggest danger we faced at that moment was a stray
cow taking a rest in the middle of the road.

With every week that passed, Syria looked to me more and more like the violent, fractured
Lebanon I had grown up in. We didn’t have one dictator facing down his people but
a plethora of militias sowing fear. We had the same regional configuration of countries
getting involved—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United States, and Russia. China
was not a factor back in the day, Lebanon didn’t share a border with Turkey, and the
Turks had not been a regional player at the time. But this felt like a replay of the
bigger power game that opposed East and West in Lebanon: the United States with its
friends Saudi Arabia and Israel pitted against Russia and its camp, including Iran
and Hezbollah. Except that Syria was no longer one of the players and the persecutor
of others, but its own victim. In Syria, more and more protestors were holding placards
saying the world had abandoned them. As I had felt during the war in Lebanon, the
Syrian people had no patience to understand what sort of geopolitical stars had to
align before the violence stopped.

Just as in Lebanon, the national army was breaking up, militias were taking over,
great powers were meeting in an effort to find a way forward that suited them all,
but there was no obvious path. The diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing that took place at
every turning point in Lebanon had looked to us like some nefarious plot was being
discussed at our expense. Every time American officials visited Lebanon, or Russian
emissaries visited Syria, or Russians and Americans met, we asked ourselves whether
they would strike a deal—in our favor or at our expense. Now, sitting in Washington,
in Tunis, or at the UN, watching from up close, I could see that it wasn’t an evil
conspiracy in which a country’s people were cheap collateral damage; it was more benign—relentless
work trying to bridge the gaps between two different worldviews with no clear path
forward as long as all the players stuck stubbornly to their position and their interests.
But that didn’t make the pain any easier to bear.

The conflict in Syria dragged on, the death toll growing more rapidly as the rebels
stepped up their attack and the regime’s fight for survival became increasingly brutal.
The United States, after holding out for months, stepped up its support for the rebels
in the summer of 2012, helping to coordinate the supply of arms reaching them without
actually supplying any weapons, and providing with them with communication equipment.
Eager to avoid being dragged into another war or being associated too closely with
the conflict, Obama tried as much as possible to avoid speaking about Syria during
2012. His political opponents were not wading into the Syrian debate either, a sign
of just how intricate and complicated the conflict was—everybody understood that.
The Obama administration was also wary about the growing number of radical Islamist
Salafist fighters and worried that providing anything more than communications equipment
or nonlethal assistance to the rebels could empower Salafists to take over Syria.
But the radicals were getting weapons anyway, mainly from wealthy Gulf funders, and
moderate rebels, frustrated by the lack of Western support, were joining their ranks.
Clinton’s hesitations stemmed from her desire to protect the country’s minorities,
namely the Christians, and ensure their survival in a post-Assad Syria, but the majority
was paying the price. Many expected that Obama would take more decisive action if
he were reelected, but even after November 6 there were still no good options, no
clear vision for a post-Assad Syria. Unlike Libya, it was too big a minefield for
other countries to take bold steps alone—without U.S. leadership there would be no
decisive action. Frustration with the Syrian opposition was growing though, and in
mid-November the United States finally banged heads together to help give birth to
a more credible and representative opposition coalition. Administration officials
admitted the push could have come earlier and that perhaps their eagerness not to
put an American stamp on a popular movement had been taken to the extreme. Soon the
United States and others would also recognize the Syrian opposition as
the
legitimate representative of the Syrian people, mirroring the Libya scenario. But
the cost of direct military intervention remained too high and the onus was on the
opposition outside and on the rebels and Local Coordination Committees inside Syria
to unseat Assad with quiet American backing. At the time of writing, Assad remained
in power.

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Jake had a hard time living with the inconsistencies of U.S. foreign policy. He had
a linear mind—the world had to make sense; everything had to fit. Why had they intervened
in Libya but could not find the tools to do so in Syria? Why had the administration
come out in support of protestors in Egypt but were cautious on Bahrain? Why was Pakistan
getting U.S. aid when its intelligence agency was helping militants fighting U.S.
soldiers in Afghanistan?

Hillary had lived a complex life with many inconsistencies—the details were sometimes
jarring, but the overall picture made sense to her. She applied the same approach
to her work as secretary of state.

She was deeply troubled by the violence in Syria. She felt she had failed the protestors
in Bahrain. She wanted her country to do the right thing, but she was candid about
the choices America had to make.

“Americans believe that the desire for dignity and self-determination is universal—and
we do try to act on that belief around the world. Americans have fought and died for
these ideals. And when freedom gains ground anywhere, Americans are inspired,” she
said in one of her speeches about changes in the Middle East. But America, she added,
also had short-term interests that it had to pursue, not just values to defend.

“There will be times when not all of our interests align. We work to align them, but
that is just reality.”

I had never heard an American leader speak so candidly about the balancing act that
was required in the exercise of American power. American leaders usually spoke publicly
about higher ideals and the pursuit of more noble goals, keeping the discussion about
special interests for private diplomacy, at the risk of making America look like a
hypocrite whenever it failed or refused to help oppressed people anywhere. But there
was no grandstanding here, just a simple and candid statement. People could be upset
or feel disappointed, but it was hard to argue with such a statement. “I get that,”
I thought. I was slowly reaching the end of my own journey.