The Most Charming Man In Washington
Yousef Al-Otaiba is the most charming man in Washington: He's slick, he's savvy and he throws one hell of a party. And if he has his way, our Middle East policy is going to get a lot more aggressive.
Last September, as Islamic State militants rampaged through Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon hosted a top-secret meeting to debate strategy. At the invitation of the Defense Policy Board, which advises the secretary of defense, a small group of foreign policy eminences, including former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, gathered in a conference room in the E-ring of the building.
The assembled experts were trying to make sense of a Middle East in greater turmoil than it had been since World War I. Starting in 2010, the Arab Spring had toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. A protest movement in Syria had morphed into an armed revolution, while sectarian violence in Iraq split the country apart. The Islamic State, or ISIS, surged to fill the resulting power vacuums, exploiting long-held resentments and capturing an extraordinary amount of American-provided weapons and equipment. In June, it swept across Syria, claimed Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, and declared a global caliphate.
And so the group assembled at the Pentagon played out multiple scenarios and weighed policy options that ranged from awful to slightly-less-awful. Bombing ISIS in Syria meant effectively coming to the aid of dictator Bashar al Assad. Arming Syrian rebel groups against Assad risked empowering ISIS and other extremists, either directly or indirectly. Attacking both ISIS and Assad would essentially mean fighting on both sides of the same conflict.
The policymakers were split between those who wanted to intervene aggressively in Syria in support of moderate rebels against Assad, and those who hewed more closely to President Barack Obama's position that there is no military solution to the conflict. There was one proponent, however, for wiping Assad off the map entirely. He made a curious participant at a private gathering on U.S. strategy, as one of only two foreign officials at the meeting (the other, predictably, was the British ambassador). Yousef Al-Otaiba, the ambassador for the United Arab Emirates, was known to be a forceful advocate for an aggressive U.S. military intervention in Syria. A bald, handsome 40-year-old with an extravagant air of self-assurance, he argued that the hands-off approach had only emboldened ISIS and other extremist groups.
But Otaiba was prepared to help the U.S with its predicament. At another private meeting with Wendy Sherman, a top State Department official, he struck a dramatic tone. "Our F16 is ready, Madame Sherman. Tell us what time you need them," he said, according to one participant and confirmed by others briefed on the meeting.
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From Top: Alex Belomlinsky; Associated Press; Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images;
France in the U.S./Flickr
Story by Eve Fairbanks