In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent West Asia. She criticised the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain, even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.
Only the day before, Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the US should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.
Within hours, Clinton and the aides had convinced Obama that the US had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a-half meeting, Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government.
The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.
The shift in the administration’s position — from strong words against Libya to action — was forced largely by the events beyond its control: the crumbling of the uprising raised the prospect that Qaddafi would remain in power to kill “many thousands,” as Obama said at the White House.
The change became possible, though, only after Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity. Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the US failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide, which Clinton has called his biggest regret.
Now, the three women were pushing for American intervention to stop a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Libya.
In joining Rice and Power, Clinton made an unusual break with Secretary of Defense Robert M Gates, who, along with the national security adviser, Thomas E Donilon, and the counterterrorism chief, John O Brennan, had urged caution. Libya was not vital to American national security interests, the men argued, and Brennan worried that the Libyan rebels remained largely unknown to American officials, and could have ties to Al Qaeda. The administration’s shift also became possible only after the US won not just the support of Arab countries, but their active participation in military operations against one of their own.
©2011 The New York Times News Service
