4 1GT Monday November 16 2020 | the times
times2Obama in his own words
X standards and laying out how my
administration would approach
counterterrorism going forward. The
second, scheduled to be given in Cairo,
would address a global audience — in
particular, the world’s Muslims. I had
promised to deliver a speech like this
during the campaign, and although
with everything else going on some of
my team suggested cancelling it, I told
Rahm that backing out wasn’t an
option. “We may not change public
attitudes in these countries overnight,”
I said, “but if we don’t squarely address
the sources of tension between the
West and the Muslim world, and
describe what peaceful coexistence
might look like, we’ll be fighting wars
in the region for the next thirty years.”
To help write both speeches I enlisted
the immense talents of Ben Rhodes,
my thirty-one-year-old National
Security Council speechwriter and
soon-to-be deputy national security
advisor for strategic communications.
If Brennan represented someone who
could act as a conduit between me and
the national security apparatus I’d
inherited, Ben connected me to my
younger, more idealistic self. Raised in
Manhattan by a liberal Jewish mother
and a Texas lawyer father, both of
whom had held government jobs
under Lyndon Johnson, he had been
pursuing a master’s degree in fiction
writing at NYU when 9/11 happened.
Fuelled by patriotic anger, Ben had
headed to D.C. in search of a way to
serve, eventually finding a job with
former Indiana congressman Lee
Hamilton and helping to write the
influential 2006 Iraq Study Group
report. Short and prematurely balding,
with dark brows that seemed
perpetually furrowed, Ben had been
thrown into the deep end of the pool,
immediately asked by our understaffed
campaign to crank out position papers,
press releases, and major speeches.
There’d been some growing pains: In
Berlin, for example, he and Favs [Jon
Favreau] had landed on a beautiful
German phrase — “a community of
fate” — to tie together the themes of
my one big preelection speech on
foreign soil, only to discover a couple
of hours before I was to go onstage
that the phrase had been used in one
of Hitler’s first addresses to the
Reichstag. (“Probably not the effect
you’re going for,” Reggie Love
deadpanned as I burst into laughter
and Ben’s face turned bright red.)
Despite his youth, Ben wasn’t shy
about weighing in on policy or
contradicting my more senior
advisors, with a sharp intelligence
and a stubborn earnestness that was
leavened with a self-deprecating
humour and healthy sense of irony.
He had a writer’s sensibility, one I
shared, and it formed the basis for a
relationship not unlike the one I’d
developed with Favs: I could spend an
hour with Ben dictating my arguments
on a subject and count on getting a
draft a few days later that not only
captured my voice but also channelled
something more essential: my bedrock
view of the world, and sometimes even
my heart. Together, we knocked out
the counterterrorism speech fairly
quickly, though Ben reported that
each time he sent a draft to the
Pentagon or CIA for comments, it
would come back with edits, red lines
drawn through any word, proposal,
or characterization deemed even
remotely controversial or critical of
practices like torture — not-so-subtle
acts of resistance from the career
folks, many of whom had comeand police escort sped down a wide,
spotless highway under a blanched
sun, the massive, unadorned office
buildings, mosques, retail outlets, and
luxury car showrooms quickly giving
way to scrabbly desert, I thought
about how little the Islam of Saudi
Arabia resembled the version of the
faith I’d witnessed as a child while
living in Indonesia. In Jakarta in the
1960s and ’70s, Islam had occupied
roughly the same place in that nation’s
culture as Christianity did in the
average American city or town,
relevant but not dominant. The
muezzin’s call to prayer punctuated the
days, weddings and funerals followed
the faith’s prescribed rituals, activities
slowed down during fasting months,
and pork might be hard to find on a
restaurant’s menu. Otherwise, people
lived their lives, with women riding
Vespas in short skirts and high heels
on their way to office jobs, boys and
girls chasing kites, and long-haired
youths dancing to the Beatles and the
Jackson 5 at the local disco. Muslims
were largely indistinguishable from
the Christians, Hindus, or college-
educated nonbelievers, like my step
father, as they crammed onto Jakarta’s
overcrowded buses, filled theatre seats
at the latest kung-fu movie, smoked
outside roadside taverns, or strolled
down the cacophonous streets. The
overtly pious were scarce in those
days, if not the object of derision
then at least set apart, like Jehovah’s
Witnesses handing out pamphlets in a
Chicago neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia
had always been different. Abdulaziz
Ibn Saud, the nation’s first monarch
and the father of King Abdullah, had
begun his reign in 1932 and been
deeply wedded to the teachings of the
eighteenth-century cleric Muhammadpeople off guard, I figured, and
perhaps open their minds to other
hard truths: that the Islamic
fundamentalism that had come to
dominate so much of the Muslim
world was incompatible with the
openness and tolerance that fuelled
modern progress; that too often
Muslim leaders ginned up grievances
against the West in order to distract
from their own failures; that a
Palestinian state would be delivered
only through negotiation and
compromise rather than incitements
to violence and anti-Semitism;
and that no society could truly
succeed while systematically
repressing its women.W
E WERE STILL
working on the speech
when we landed in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
where I was scheduled
to meet with King Abdullah bin
Abdulaziz Al Saud, Custodian of the
Two Holy Mosques (in Mecca and
Medina) and the most powerful leader
in the Arab world. I’d never set foot in
the kingdom before, and at the lavish
airport welcoming ceremony, the first
thing I noticed was the complete
absence of women or children on the
tarmac or in the terminals — just rows
of black-mustached men in military
uniforms or the traditional thawb and
ghutra. I had expected as much, of
course; that’s how things were done
in the Gulf. But as I climbed into
the Beast, I was still struck by how
oppressive and sad such a segregated
place felt, as if I’d suddenly entered a
world where all the colours had been
muted. The king had arranged for me
and my team to stay at his horse ranch
outside Riyadh, and as our motorcadeto Washington with the Bush
administration. I told Ben to ignore
most of their suggestions. On May 21,
I delivered the speech at the National
Archives, standing beside original
copies of the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution,
and the Bill of Rights — just in
case anybody inside or outside the
government missed the point. The
“Muslim speech,” as we took to calling
the second major address, was trickier.
Beyond the negative portrayals of
terrorists and oil sheikhs found on
news broadcasts or in the movies,
most Americans knew little about
Islam. Meanwhile, surveys showed
that Muslims around the world
believed the United States was hostile
toward their religion, and that our
Middle East policy was based not on
an interest in improving people’s lives
but rather on maintaining oil supplies,
killing terrorists, and protecting Israel.
Given this divide, I told Ben that the
focus of our speech had to be less
about outlining new policies and more
geared toward helping the two sides
understand each other. That meant
recognizing the extraordinary
contributions of Islamic civilizations
in the advancement of mathematics,
science, and art and acknowledging
the role colonialism had played in
some of the Middle East’s ongoing
struggles. It meant admitting past U.S.
indifference toward corruption and
repression in the region, and our
complicity in the overthrow of Iran’s
democratically elected government
during the Cold War, as well as
acknowledging the searing
humiliations endured by Palestinians
living in occupied territory. Hearing
such basic history from the mouth of
a U.S. president would catch manyKing
Ab dullah’s
complex
looked like
a Four
Seasons
hotel
plopped in
the desert