Don't Screw It Up Inside Obama's White House

CHANTING: Yes, we can!

You and I, we're going to change this country,

and we will change the world!

For millions, the election of Barack Obama

marked a new era of hope.

The President turned around with this great smile on his face

and he said, "Of course I'm feeling lucky."

Let's go get 'em. It's game time.

The young, energetic president

was eager restore America's reputation in the rest of the world.

We want to reset our relationship.

Let's do it together.

My administration will seek engagement with Iran.

We believe in dialogue.

I am temperamentally optimistic

and tend to take the long view.

Above all, Obama was determined

to undo the damage done by George W Bush's wars.

Our combat mission in Iraq will end.

In tonight's programme,

Obama and his inner circle tell how his ambitions were undone

by the chaos of the Arab Spring.

PROTESTORS CHANT

As President, you have to deal with the unexpected.

This is arguably the hardest policy problem that we've encountered.

We were going to see a tumultuous period in the Middle East.

Six months into his presidency,

the most powerful man in the world

came to what was once the most powerful civilisation.

Barack Obama was in Egypt

to launch a new relationship with the Arab world.

It's awe-inspiring.

All right, I guess we gotta go back to work.

My job is to communicate the fact

that the United States has a stake

in the wellbeing of the Muslim world.

I have Muslim members of my family.

I have lived in Muslim countries.

Assalamu alaikum.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I know there has been controversy

about the promotion of democracy in recent years,

and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq.

But I do have an unyielding belief

that all people yearn for certain things.

The ability to speak your mind

and have a say in how you are governed.

The freedom to live as you choose.

These are not just American ideas,

they are human rights,

and that is why we will support them everywhere.

CHEERING

In Cairo, the President underscored that,

for long-term stability and growth

and the success of the governments in the region,

they had to be more open, more responsive,

frankly, more respectful of the rights of their citizens.

Then came Arab Spring.

The popular protests called the Arab Spring started in Tunisia,

then moved to Egypt.

Hundreds of thousands took over Cairo's Tahrir Square,

demanding the removal of President Hosni Mubarak.

The huge crowds demanding the democracy Obama had called for

presented him with a dilemma.

Obama phoned Mubarak.

The President told Mubarak that, as a friend and ally,

we were trying to encourage him to reach out more to

the other side, to the young people who were in the square,

and to convey that he got at least their message of a need to change.

President Mubarak said, "This will go away,

"these are just agitators, they'll be home within a day or two,

"there're just a few Muslim Brotherhood elements

"that are a problem, but don't worry about it," essentially.

The President talked it over with his advisers.

Mubarak's departure was going to happen and the question was,

would it happen with us kicking and screaming

or would it happen with us

understanding that it was a natural evolution?

And in my view, there was no option to support Mubarak at that time.

That would have been...would have led to lots of death,

lots of fighting in the streets.

I actually live next door

to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

and, once he knew I was home,

he asked to come over and talk with me

and he told me that there was a strong move at the White House

to tell Mubarak he had to get out.

I thought it was a crazy idea.

Obama went for the crazy idea.

He decided to urge Mubarak to stand down

and he had a discreet way to pass the message.

Vice President Omar Suleiman

had been Mubarak's intelligence chief for decades.

The real question was, how could we get the message across to

Suleiman and to others

that they were playing with fire here?

What we thought made sense was for my deputy to have

a set of talking points and tell Suleiman very clearly,

if they do not provide for a transition that they were

jeopardising the relationship with the United States.

Here is what we suggest.

Mubarak needs to announce that he's going to step down,

and he needs to announce the creation

of a transitional government that will rule Egypt

until there can be new elections and a new government formed.

TRANSLATION:

So Suleiman reached back to me to say that he had talked to Mubarak

and that Mubarak agreed to do what we had asked.

The President joined his national security team in the situation room

to watch Mubarak announce his resignation on television.

After the opening remarks, which still gave us

the impression that this was going to happen,

suddenly, near the end of that speech, he said no.

President Obama said, that's just not going to cut it.

Obama now had to decide whether to go public

and call for Mubarak's resignation.

There was clearly a distinction between Secretary Clinton

and Secretary Gates, who were taking a more cautious approach

and some of the younger people in the room who felt,

this is a moment for the United States to issue a clarion call.

I said, if we support Mubarak in this instance,

it's going to be impossible to make the case

that we're consistent in our support for democracy.

We have been his closest ally for 30 years...

..and the message, if you...if you just throw him under the bus,

is a huge one throughout the entire region.

You don't want to be caught on the wrong side of history, erm,

you don't want the United States to be implicated in a violent crackdown

against young people in Tahrir Square protesting for their rights.

If I, in fact, had publicly stood by Mubarak

and tanks had, you know, shot into the crowds in Tahrir Square

similar to what happened in Tiananmen Square,

it's very hard to see how that ends up resulting in a better outcome.

The President decided to give Mubarak one last chance to go

before he was pushed.

As I sat there on the sofa,

I thought, this is going to be very tough

to expect Mubarak to do what many around the world were hoping

he'd do in short order.

And there was a tenseness in the room.

The President said,

"I think, for the sake of your country, you need to step down.

"You need to make clear that you're leaving office,

"not at the end of your term, but you're going to do it now."

President Mubarak was very defiant and he is not going anywhere

and he basically told the President that he had a better handle

and understanding of the Middle East than President Obama did.

Good evening, everybody. Now, it is not the role of any other country

to determine Egypt's leaders, only the Egyptian people can do that.

What is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak,

is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful,

it must be peaceful and it must begin now.

While we didn't have the agency to say, "This must happen, do it",

we have a multibillion dollar assistance relationship with Egypt,

we had very close relationships with the Egyptian military.

Egypt's generals had refused to choose between Mubarak

and the protesters.

Obama's security advisers started making calls.

What I tried to stress was that they were in the leadership

of their country.

That there was a bigger issue here, which was the future of Egypt

and, if we were to avoid chaos,

that they would have to step up to the plate.

For the first time ever, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces

met without the President in the chair.

It was past 11 o'clock when I called Field Marshall Tantawi

and he was a little oblique with me.

He said that the process of transition is underway,

and the President will soon be leaving Cairo.

And I said, "Well, does that mean he's stepping down?"

And he said, it will all be resolved very shortly.

We turned on Al Jazeera and, you know, Ben Rhodes

and other people at the White House came over

and we toasted that this was a good day.

Lot of bad days came later but that was a good day.

THEY CHANT

There are very few moments in our lives

where we have the privilege to witness history taking place.

This is one of those moments.

This is one of those times.

The people of Egypt have spoken. Their voices have been heard

and Egypt will never be the same.

This Arab Spring now swept across the region.

THEY CHANT

In neighbouring Libya, protesters rose up against a dictator

who had ruled for more than 40 years.

When Obama came out

and he did not protect Hosni Mubarak,

that was very inspiring.

There is glimpses of hope coming out that nobody is going to

protect those dictators from the people.

The Libyan opposition begged for help.

Our backs were to the wall, you know.

We had no other escape.

The young people were slaughtered in the streets by the minute

and we know that, for us,

there is no other exit.

Either we win, or we die.

All eyes turned to America.

A few discreet phone calls had helped in Egypt.

Stopping Gaddafi would take force.

We were still trying to wrap up Iraq,

we were trying to wrap up Afghanistan

and to now be confronted by a situation that would

involve another war in the Middle East was really conflicting for him.

Obama had thought deeply about the use of force.

Two years earlier, to the amazement of the world,

he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

APPLAUSE

The morning of our departure for Norway,

he said that he'd basically stayed up all night rewriting

the speech, which he almost never does.

He edits things, he makes suggestions

but he actually had sat down and written out

in his own handwriting several pages to make it about, how do

we square the necessity of war with the necessity of pursuing peace?

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of

Dr King's life work,

I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence.

I know there's nothing weak, nothing passive,

nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King...

..but as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation,

I cannot be guided by their examples alone.

I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds,

as it was in the Balkans.

America's commitment to global security will never waver,

but in a world in which threats are more diffuse

and missions more complex, America cannot act alone.

Now, two years later,

Obama's words were being tested by the violence in Libya.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to Paris for

an emergency summit hosted by President Sarkozy.

The large gathering that President Sarkozy hosted

was a critical meeting to make clear that we were all in this together

and we were all moving forward.

The moment that the Secretary walked in, Nicolas Sarkozy was

already starting to launch into his case.

I don't think they'd even sat down before

he was laying out all of the reasons for why

the international community had to act and had to act fast.

Before making a recommendation to the President,

Clinton wanted to know who might take over from Gaddafi.

She was waiting in a very nice room,

a meeting room, you know?

And she was very cordial.

I wanted to be able to assess what he thought was the way forward,

to get a feel for the seriousness that the

Transitional National Council would be a real alternative to Gaddafi.

It was like an interrogation, but I knew that if I can get to her

maybe we can win the support - a real heavy support

for the no-fly zone.

I did not want to give him false hope because there was still

an internal debate going on within our own government.

So I could not say yes and I could not say no.

Resolving that debate was urgent.

Gaddafi's forces were now just 90 miles from the rebels'

stronghold, Benghazi - home to one million people.

We knew that there was going to be a massacre.

If something didn't happen soon, there was going to be

a massacre in Benghazi

and many hundreds, if not thousands, of people would be killed.

Obama asked his National Security Council

whether he should agree to a no-fly zone.

I said, "How would we go before the world and explain why we're

"not doing this and say,

"'OK, there are all these other countries

"'who are willing to step up and engage in a no-fly zone and try

"'to protect civilians on the ground,

"'but we're going to sit this one out'?"

I turned to the President and said, "Can I just finish the two

"wars that I'm already in before you go looking for a third one?"

Hillary Clinton phoned into the meeting

and raised a fundamental question.

She said, "This isn't the United States doing this by itself,

"the United States is part of an international coalition."

But that if it was just planes buzzing around in the sky

while tanks crushed towns and killed people below, that was

not going to be a successful military operation.

He went around the room and he asked, you know,

"Does anybody think that a no-fly zone

"is going to actually do what we need?"

And nobody did.

When Obama asked for other military options,

his advisers had nothing to offer.

The Secretary of Defense had been playing hardball.

I'd told Admiral Mullen and my staff

that I didn't want any military options

being sent to the White House staff,

that if there were going to be military options presented,

that the Chairman or I or the Vice-Chairman would do that

directly with the President and the principals,

that I wasn't going to allow

these junior staffers to exercise their

"military expertise" on our behalf.

The President immediately said,

"Look, we're having the wrong meeting.

"Let's get together later tonight where

"there can be real options that will actually address this issue."

As Obama drove off, the military put together a plan to allow the

allies to strike Gaddafi's ground forces, as well as his planes.

The Obamas went on a long-arranged visit to Latin America,

starting in Brazil.

As soon as we got to Brazil, what we heard is that Gaddafi's

forces were still advancing

and they were literally on the outskirts of Benghazi.

And if they got into the city, it would be very hard

from the air to stop them.

Here we were in a rather non-descript holding room,

in an administrative office building in Brasilia,

with the President giving the final OK to do a military action.

It was a very bad feeling for all of us because these were the

sort of things President Obama was intent on trying to avoid,

but some things are unavoidable when

you're the President of the United States.

For the next three days, Obama had to juggle between his

responsibilities as an appreciative guest and as commander in chief.

We're not invading a country.

We're not acting alone.

We are acting under a mandate issued

by the United Nations Security Council,

in an unprecedented fashion and with unprecedented speed.

We have a limited task, a focused task,

and we've saved lives as a consequence.

It would take another seven months before the allied campaign ended.

Wow!

Huh.

Unconfirmed, yeah.

Unconfirmed reports about Gaddafi being captured.

-Oh, wow.

-Really?

-Unconfirmed.

Yeah. We've had too many... We've had a bunch of those before.

We've had him captured a couple of times.

This time it was true.

Gaddafi was captured and shot with his own gun.

CHEERING

But the euphoria was short-lived.

GUNSHOTS

The opposition group Clinton had met in Paris was soon pushed aside

and the country collapsed into anarchy.

A year later, in Benghazi, Islamic militants burnt down

the US consulate, killing four diplomats.

I think we underestimated,

our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force

the day after Gaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good

and everybody is holding up posters

saying, "Thank you, America".

At that moment, there has to be

a much more aggressive effort

to rebuild societies that didn't have any civic traditions.

So that's a lesson that

I now apply every time

I ask the question,

should we intervene militarily?

Do we have an answer the day after?

FANFARE

It was the war to unseat President Bashar al-Assad of Syria that

would force Obama to keep asking that

question for the rest of his presidency.

The Arab Spring in Syria had turned into a civil war that pitted

many rival opposition groups, both moderate and extremist,

against the dictator.

Syria is arguably the hardest policy problem that we've encountered.

And it's hard because of the complexity of the opposition

and it's hard because of the nature of the Assad regime

and its external backers.

It's hard because of the neighbourhood.

A year into the conflict,

the CIA came to Obama with a plan to help moderate rebel groups in Syria.

The argument was, if we are going to have a chance at establishing

an effective opposition force then we simply have to be able to

provide the training and the arms to be able to do that.

Look, we provided arms to the Libyans -

the opposition forces in Libya - and they became pretty effective

as a result of that.

I thought the same thing could be true in Syria.

This idea that we could provide

some light arms or

even more sophisticated arms to what

was essentially an opposition

made up of former doctors, farmers,

pharmacists and so forth

and that they were going to be able

to battle not only a well-armed

state, but also a well-armed state

backed by Russia, backed by Iran,

a battled-hardened Hezbollah -

that was never in the cards.

Before I take some questions...

But the President did make one exception to his refusal to

involve America in this war.

A red line for us is... we start seeing a whole bunch of

chemical weapons moving around or being utilised.

That would change my calculus.

A year after Obama's warning,

this video shot in a Damascus hospital was posted on social media.

The images from this massacre are sickening.

Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas.

A father clutching his dead children, imploring them

to get up and walk.

It was vile, horrendous, you know, hard to watch.

The President absolutely understood

and knew that he needed to take action.

We had to ensure that, first of all,

these kinds of attacks couldn't be replicated,

and secondly that there would be a significant price

for the Assad regime to pay.

The President asked the military to prepare options and they

quickly put something together that would consist of very significant

US air strikes over a couple of days.

It started to look like

the best time for that was going to be that Friday, August 30th.

America's allies were told that the strikes

would begin in less than a week.

Well, we thought we should be part of any military action on this

but the United States was keen at the beginning to consider

this quickly - to consider quite rapid military action -

and that was part of the reason why we decided

in Britain to recall Parliament.

But Parliament hadn't forgotten Iraq.

We're not going to be supporting a government motion which was

briefed this morning as setting out an in-principle decision to

take military action. That would be the wrong thing to do,

and on that basis we will oppose the motion.

The ayes to the right 272,

the noes to the left 285.

CHEERING

So the noes have it, the noes have it.

We had many tough moments in the time I was Foreign Secretary

but I think that was the worst.

Prime Minister Cameron said, "You know, Barack, I support you

"but I took this to my Parliament and they said no and I just

"can't do it, and I feel terrible about that."

After the President spoke to Cameron on the phone,

some of us huddled in the Oval Office.

It was a challenging moment for all of us.

This would be the first time on a military operation

the United States would be undertaking in quite some time,

where the UK wouldn't be at our side.

What we were doing here was potentially taking

a military action without a clear United Nations

mandate against a sovereign country.

And this was a military action

of choice, not of necessity, we weren't threatened at the time.

There's no doubt that the failure of the vote

in Parliament had some impact.

Then one of Obama's legal advisers spoke up.

She reminded the President that, during the campaign,

he had taken a pretty strong stand that presidents should have

Congressional authority for military action.

And I remember the President, almost in a sort of irritated way,

saying, "I remember very well

"what position I took during the campaign."

The President started to have second thoughts.

I was concerned that I might be contradicting my own, er...

my own position.

I'd actually written that,

where American core interests are not immediately threatened,

it is important for us to take pause

and to try to mobilise public opinion as much as possible.

That evening, he gathered his closest advisers

to tell them he had changed his mind.

Shortly before coming into the Oval Office,

I'd been given a heads up that that might be coming

and, yes, I was surprised when I first heard it.

By the time I got in the Oval Office,

I was prepared to hear directly from him how he was thinking about it.

You know, the expectation was

we might take military action that weekend.

He said to us that he knew that if we were going to act

in this time window, we'd basically be doing it alone with France,

without UN support, and he'd be very isolated.

It was, in my mind at least, important for Congress,

the representatives of the American people, to weigh in on this effort.

I've made a decision that America should take action.

But I also believe that we will be much more effective,

we will be stronger, if we take action together as one nation.

I certainly knew that it was going to be a problem for me politically.

A couple of days later, Obama went to Russia,

where President Putin was hosting a meeting of the G20.

He was in no mood to talk to Putin, Assad's protector.

Well, the first day, they didn't meet -

our people were sweating that. It's like, "Hey, man, when are you

"going to actually talk to President Putin?"

And the Russians, of course, were quite nervous about that.

But, on the second day, they finally did find time, just one-on-one.

Putin had a proposal for Obama.

President Putin said to President Obama,

"Why don't we return to this issue

"of whether or not we can co-operate to get the chemical weapons out,

"without using a military force?"

We'd been talking about this

long before Presidents Putin and Obama met,

but to have Putin agree to put his personal,

you know, reputation on the line,

that he will get Assad to go along, that was a big moment.

And then the President had to decide -

er, take that deal or go back to Washington and try to get the votes.

But Obama was hearing increasingly pessimistic reports from Washington.

Members of Congress were explaining

that their Constituents were telling them,

"We want no part of this.

"We don't want to get bogged down in another war."

So that's churning in the back of his head, you know?

And, as we're driving out to the airport,

the President said to Susan Rice,

"Let's figure out what we're going to do with this offer."

I'd worked with the Russians enough in New York

to know that it's not about trust,

it's about whether we had a mutual interest that overlapped.

Before he landed, Obama had made up his mind.

Over the last few days, we've seen some encouraging signs.

I have, therefore, asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote

to authorise the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path.

I can't say that, when I made the decision,

that I was absolutely certain that it was the right one.

In retrospect, it's actually one of the decisions

that I'm most proud of, in part because, er, it...

..pushed against the conventional wisdom in this town

and the ease with which military actions gain momentum,

the greater difficulty in pulling back

and ensuring that diplomacy is given a chance.

The Russian compromise did get the chemical weapons out of Syria.

But the civil war continued,

killing hundreds of thousands

and forcing millions to flee.

Obama continued to resist calls for the use of force.

BABY CRIES

The United States might have been in a position

to take on the burden of trying to impose peace inside of Syria,

if we hadn't had a previous decade that had drained our military,

drained our treasury,

drained the political capital required to mount

what is essentially a largely humanitarian

and long-term strategic effort.

In the chaos, the most radical opposition group -

Isis, or Isil - grew stronger.

In the summer of 2014, Obama and his team were caught by surprise

when Isis fighters crossed the border into Iraq

and threatened its capital, Baghdad.

The President sent his special envoy there.

I had to say, "Mr President, I don't know what is happening,

"particularly outside of Baghdad.

"I don't know whether the Iraqi Security Forces will be able to hold

"and I also don't know whether Isis is launching an attack on Baghdad,

"it's very difficult to tell."

And even our intelligence community was divided

on exactly what was happening.

There certainly was an overriding concern that Isis had grown rapidly

and that, if they weren't checked in Iraq and Syria,

they could potentially pose a threat to us here at home.

It was not an outcome that we could tolerate,

for Isil to continue to march with that speed and efficiency

through other population centres of significance in Iraq.

He said to everybody in the room,

"We have to get this back in the box."

He said, "This is really important,

"and we have to get this back in the box."

Obama ordered airstrikes against Isis in Iraq.

Not an easy choice.

We knew any decision we made could potentially have repercussions

for those American citizens being held by this terrorist group.

Tragic news from overseas late today.

It's about an American journalist named James Foley

who went missing in Syria two years ago now...

It's horrific.

I mean, people can die in lots of different ways,

but this way was the most horrific.

And it haunts me, that he...

How much pain he was in, and how...

how cruel this method of execution is

as opposed to so many others.

We had all been very closely following James Foley's case

and working hard to try to locate him

and ultimately to secure his release.

I'd met a number of times with his mother

and other members of his family, so I had a sort of personal, um...

interest in him, and in his family, and in the outcome.

And then, of course, when we learned of his tragic killing,

I mean, we were all heart-broken.

And I felt it very personally because I could only imagine,

having had that direct engagement with his family,

how hard this must be for them.

Two weeks later, another US journalist was beheaded.

These murders of American hostages spurred Obama

to set the strategy for fighting Isis

that he has stuck with ever since.

We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, Isil.

He built a coalition of 65 countries

to carry out airstrikes in Iraq and Syria...

EXPLOSION

..trained and armed local forces...

..but he kept his promise to not send the US Army

back into the Middle East.

Now, it will take time to eradicate a cancer like Isil.

EXPLOSIONS

This is a core principle of my presidency -

if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

There are probably some things that we might have done

at the margins that might have made a difference,

but we were going to see a tumultuous period in the Middle East

and a breakdown of the order that had been established decades ago.

In one instance,

Obama seized the initiative to prevent a war before it started.

He set out to tackle the threat of a nuclear Iran.

In Obama's first five years in office,

Iran was building centrifuges to enrich uranium at a furious pace.

The world worried that Iran was close to building a nuclear bomb.

Israel's Prime Minister threatened a pre-emptive strike.

The world tells Israel, "Wait, there is still time."

And I say, "Wait for what?

"Wait until when?"

The biggest concern that we had was that

if the Israelis felt the situation was growing out of its control,

that they would seek to use military force themselves.

Obama asked his team to come up with an approach

that would prevent America being dragged into a new Middle East war.

We know that a military strike or a series of military strikes

can set back Iran's nuclear programme for a period of time,

but almost certainly will prompt Iran to rush towards a bomb.

I said, "If you could negotiate over the idea

"of having a peaceful nuclear programme,

"you were far better off in terms of managing this problem

"than getting on automatic pilot

"and heading towards the potential of a war."

Kerry's deputy pointed out that one key policy had to change.

For a decade, the US had refused to consider any agreement

that would allow Iran to enrich uranium.

I argued that the most effective way to get a serious negotiation started

was to make clear that we were willing to explore the possibility

of a domestic enrichment programme.

That was a question that really got at

whether or not we wanted a deal,

cos there was not going to be a deal with Iran

that didn't involve some domestic enrichment capacity.

What we know is that this has become a matter of pride

and nationalism for Iran.

So for us to say, "Let's try,"

understanding that we're preserving all our options,

that we're not naive...

But if, in fact, we can resolve these issues diplomatically,

we are more likely to be safe.

In that situation, why wouldn't we test it?

Obama sent two of his most capable diplomats

to meet the Iranians in secret.

The President took us aside and said he trusted us

and we knew what the contours would be and, um...

basically, don't screw it up!

They travelled to Oman, where the Sultan had made available

a private beach club close to the airport.

The Iranians came to the table

and essentially, from the first moment, said,

"This is all a giant misunderstanding,

"this is a peaceful programme,

"we have only ever intended to have it be for civilian purposes."

Iran has been accused of wrongdoing which we believe

has no basis in reality.

We made clear that there were

reasons for mistrust, you know, on our side.

That, you know, there was a long history here

of Iran not meeting its obligations.

How do you proceed in this conversation,

where the folks on the other side of the table

are simply asserting something you believe not to be true?

The Americans demanded Iran open up

all its nuclear facilities to inspection.

But Iran had its price.

Obama had imposed sanctions that were crippling Iran's economy.

We wanted to get rid of the sanctions.

We consider these sanctions as unjust and illegal,

based on international law.

What they were looking for for just the first six months

was somewhere in the order of tens of billions of dollars

in sanctions relief, all in,

when you added up everything that they were requesting.

And I recall sort of looking at them

and really not making an argument, so much as just saying,

"You know, we could end the negotiation right here

"because that's not even in the right sport,

"let alone the right ballpark."

The negotiators looked to the President to make a gesture

that might ease decades of stand-off between the two countries.

We began talking to the President

about whether it would make sense for him

to have a brief encounter with Rouhani

simply to give the stamp of approval from the two presidents

for this effort.

President Hassan Rouhani was due to address the UN

on the same day as Obama.

When we got to New York,

it was still uncertain as to whether this meeting would take place.

Every time it was just about to be set,

it felt like they were being pulled back from Tehran,

and ultimately the meeting proved too difficult for them to do.

I know that people were disappointed

that a meeting had not taken place, on both sides.

And we wanted to find an opportunity to...

somehow redress that.

The Iranians suggested a phone call.

This should have been a moment where I was excited

and thinking, "Gosh, I'm here to witness history."

But, truth be told, I was just nervous

because I had arranged this call to be taken on a cellphone

and there was a moment where I had a bit of a panic

about whether or not the cellphone was actually President Rouhani

and not somebody else.

As they were speaking, I got more comfortable.

But I never could be quite sure that at the end of the call

they wouldn't say, "Hi, I'm a radio DJ from Montreal."

It was good when Rouhani tweeted on his official account

because at that point I felt I was entirely in the clear.

The President, when he hung up the phone, you know,

he looked at us and he essentially said,

"Well, that was pretty significant!"

Good afternoon, everybody.

Just now I spoke on the phone with President Rouhani

of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement.

A month later, the two sides agreed a draft deal

and brought it to Geneva.

Here, the international group

that had been trying for ten years to negotiate with Iran

was about to meet.

We had a text of something like four or five pages.

The basic proposition

was that they would not advance their nuclear programme

in any of its existing pathways

and we would not advance sanctions.

But we were also looking to roll back their programme

in return for some relatively modest relief of the sanctions.

Wendy Sherman was the head of America's delegation

to the international group.

Make sure we don't leak details of what's gone on

because that's part of what people are looking at.

Is this serious, are they keeping it to themselves?

She had to persuade the other five negotiating with Iran -

Germany, Russia, China, Britain and France -

to endorse the secret US-Iran draft.

And she had to confess that she had been deceiving them.

I said, "We've had this channel.

"You all have diplomatic relations with Iran, you can talk to them.

"We have no way to talk to them,

"this was the only way we could do it."

Et j'ai dit, "I'm sorry.

"I can't live with this text. We just cannot accept it.

"I don't have two formal objections,

"I have five or six or seven substantial objections."

Was it comfortable, was it a lot of fun?

Not particularly.

Was it difficult? Yes.

If the draft text had upset the French,

then how would the Israelis react?

Well, it's a pleasure to welcome Prime Minister Netanyahu

back to the Oval Office.

A month earlier, Obama had a chance to warn Israel's Prime Minister

what sort of draft might be on the table.

The President had to make a judgment call.

Could he trust Netanyahu not to leak it

when he knew that Netanyahu was opposed

to the whole idea of a negotiated deal

if the negotiated deal was going to leave

some of Iran's nuclear programme intact.

Iran is committed to Israel's destruction.

So, for Israel...

'The President did not tell the Prime Minister'

that the negotiations were going on

and in fact were making considerable progress.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Now, a month later,

the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the US

were coming to Geneva to try to turn the secret draft into a deal.

The very fact that four foreign ministers,

including John Kerry,

have decided to cancel whatever else they are doing

and come here to Geneva to take part in this final day of talks

I think shows you how important they are.

Secretary Kerry stopped off in Israel

for what promised to be an awkward meeting.

Netanyahu had agreed to meet Kerry at the airport

because he was just stopping on the way to Geneva.

The Secretary arrived, Netanyahu came into the room

and said to Kerry, "Wait here,"

and he went out and he briefed the press.

I understand the Iranians are walking around

very satisfied in Geneva,

as well they should be,

because they got everything and paid nothing.

Everything they wanted. They wanted relief of sanctions

after years of a gruelling sanctions regime.

They got that.

They're paying nothing because they're not reducing in any way

their nuclear enrichment capability.

So Iran got the deal of the century

and the international community got a bad deal.

This is a very bad deal.

'And then he goes into this one-on-one meeting

'with the Secretary of State.'

Well, I explained to him

that we were only in the beginning stages

of trying to figure out what was possible,

that whatever we would do

would protect Israel, would protect the region.

Netanyahu was shouting so loudly that we could hear him

through the walls

and it went on for quite a long period of time.

Kerry came out, got into his car

to drive to the tarmac, to his plane,

and he looked at me and he said,

"That was really unpleasant."

As soon as he got to Geneva, Kerry faced the French.

France wanted to stop Iran from completing the plutonium reactor

they were building near the city of Arak.

When Syria tried to build a similar reactor

Israel had bombed it.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

Kerry agreed to toughen up the proposal.

The new draft was taken to Iran's Foreign Minister,

Javad Zarif.

We were negotiating with the understanding

that whatever we do in the back channel

will converge into an agreement.

Zarif reacted, "Wait a minute, you're presenting me something

"that's different from what we had worked on with you bilaterally."

It wasn't OK for the United States to start renegotiating.

Zarif is a really good negotiator, a very accomplished diplomat.

And if you are a really good negotiator

and you're put in that position you really lay it on thick

about how difficult this is,

"It may be totally unsailable back in Tehran."

He doesn't have to do this job -

if we don't do a deal with him,

who do we think we're going to do a deal with in the future?

All of that sort of stuff.

Our scientists developed it

in spite all the odds from abroad.

That is why it has become a source of pride,

a source of national dignity.

This is not about weapons, this is about respect.

This is about dignity.

It was, um...a weekend,

it was a Saturday

and I was very concerned

about where the negotiation was.

We were not moving.

Secretary Kerry was reporting back almost in real time to the President

and saying, "OK, here's where we are,

"here are the remaining sticking points.

"We need your guidance, what do you want to do?"

"Mr President, we are not certain these guys have the authority

"and have the will and the capacity to make an agreement."

Kerry told Obama that Iran was not willing to stop construction

of the plutonium reactor.

What the President said is, "Look,

"I don't care if they are building some road or building a wall,

"I care about whether they are advancing the programme via Arak."

And so Kerry said, "Well, what if we said there's still construction

"but none of it is relevant to Arak functioning as a reactor?"

And the President said, "That's what I'm talking about, that's good."

The final issue was a matter of national pride.

Iran wanted recognition

that its struggle to create a nuclear programme

was the legitimate act of a great nation.

In the text, Iran insisted on words affirming

it had the right to enrich uranium.

He was insistent that they had no such right,

that as a result of the agreement

it might be that they were allowed to have some enrichment capacity,

but not as a matter of right.

The President had spent a lot of time thinking about this,

he had a clear sense of what he felt he could accept

and what he couldn't accept.

And finally, what Kerry read to the President on the phone

was a mutually defined enrichment capacity.

That allowed the Iranians to say,

"Look, we got an enrichment in the document,"

it allowed us to say, "Well, look,

"it's only going to be an enrichment capacity that we sign off on,

"that we define, and it's not

"some inherent right that they would maintain

"even if these negotiations don't succeed."

And as they're doing that, the President is looking at me and Tony

to see what we thought. Tony and I signal, "Yes, this is good.

"We would definitely recommend you do this."

The US team then put the final compromises to the Iranians.

Well, there were four more things they wanted

and I said, "No, we are done.

"We have closed, we are finished."

I had to say, "Look, if we're in a place here

"where we can't go forward, we're going to have to leave."

At the end of the day,

we decided to accept...

..the outcome - that this was the best that could be achieved.

APPLAUSE

It would take another two years to nail down the technical details.

But by the start of his last year in office,

Obama was able to announce a triumph.

This is a good day

because, once again,

we're seeing what's possible with strong American diplomacy.

Over the years, Iran moved closer and closer

to having the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

And, as President, I decided that a strong, confident America

could advance our national security

by engaging directly with the Iranian government.

We've seen the results.

Under the nuclear deal that we, our allies and partners reached

with Iran last year,

Iran will not get its hands on a nuclear bomb.

INAUDIBLE

At the start of his presidency,

Obama set out to redefine America's troubled relationship

with the Middle East.

THEY CHANT

When a new generation demanded democratic governments,

he helped them topple dictators.

But democracy did not take root in Egypt or Libya.

He stopped one big threat - Iran's nuclear programme -

but could not stop Isis from killing thousands in the Middle East,

Europe and America.

And nothing has ended the massacres in Syria.

-OBAMA:

-I will tell you that I continue to be haunted

by what's happening in Syria.

One of the things that I've learned in this office is

you are constantly trying to see if we can get as much done as possible,

understanding that there are things that are going to be undone

that are tragedies.

And you can speak out against them,

you can try to change opinions

and use your voice

to move things towards a more...

..ethical and moral outcome.

But you're not always going to be successful.

Next week...

..Obama tackles the most intractable social issues

of his presidency -

race,

immigration...

Stop illegal immigration!

..and guns.

The President walked in and his first words were,

"Friday was the toughest day of my entire time in the presidency."