As Muammar Gaddafi’s troops closed in on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi on March 15, President Barack Obama put the fate of the city’s 1 million residents in the hands of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. At a meeting of the National Security Council that afternoon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, leery of another war in the Middle East, told Obama a U.N.-proposed no-fly zone would not stop Gaddafi from taking the town. Rice, participating via video teleconference from New York City, said she could get a tougher resolution allowing broader intervention — including the ability to attack armor and ground troops — that would do the trick.
Obama gave Rice the go-ahead — and in doing so, put her on the spot. Rice, 46, was a staffer at the NSC in 1994 when the world failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda. A participant in deliberations on the crisis, she later said the White House failed to see the larger moral imperative to act and told Harvard scholar Samantha Power, now an Obama NSC aide, “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”
