No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  After the brief stop in the northern Kurdish region, we took off in the military’s human transport plane, the C-17. The flight’s commander asked if I’d like to sit in the cockpit, which I readily agreed to do. With about thirty minutes left until landing, the flight crew brought me my armored vest and seat—yes, an armored plate that you sit on just in case a missile comes from below. On that occasion we landed without incident, though that was not always the case. Once, flying into Baghdad, we suddenly diverted upon approach. “What was that?” I asked the pilot.

  “The airport is being mortared,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s random or if it’s meant for you.”

  “I guess it doesn’t really matter,” I joked. We eventually landed about forty minutes later.

  On another trip, I was to fly from Baghdad to Israel, which required us to fly over Jordanian territory. I spotted a plane off our right side and asked the pilot what it was.

  “Oh, ma’am, that’s just a Syrian fighter making sure we don’t cross into his airspace,” he said calmly.

  “Well, I hope we have good navigational gear,” I quipped.

  “Ma’am, don’t worry about ours,” he replied. “Worry about his.”

  Iraq was very much a war zone, but I loved going there despite the secrecy and extraordinary security. And I always felt preternaturally safe. On my first trip I wore the helmet that I was given, making me look like a re-creation of the much-maligned photograph of Michael Dukakis riding in a tank during the 1988 presidential campaign. After that I decided to forgo some of the armor, particularly the headwear, when getting off the plane.

  The final step in the trip was boarding a Black Hawk helicopter with young gunners protecting its flanks. Swooping down into the fortified International Zone, more commonly known as the Green Zone, I felt tremendous anticipation and excitement. I was finally in Baghdad and ready to carry the message that the United States maintained its confidence in the ability of Iraqis to secure a democratic future. Arriving at the beautiful Presidential Palace, I was reminded that Baghdad had indeed been a cradle of civilization—the source of ancient wonders and antiquities of Mesopotamia and Babylon, including the Code of Hammurabi. This was not Afghanistan; Iraq’s cultural and political weight really could reshape the Middle East.

  My certainty was shaken somewhat once I entered a room with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He enjoyed a reputation for honesty but had hardly been chosen to lead the transitional government because of his widespread popularity; the Sunnis had by and large not participated in the January legislative elections, and he had run unchallenged for the office largely because no other consensus candidate had emerged. Jaafari was an odd man with the bearing of a humanities professor. He spent the first thirty minutes of our meeting waxing lyrical about U.S. history, various founding fathers (usually confusing them somewhat), and the inspiration that he had drawn from my personal story about having grown up in the segregated South.

  I thanked him but turned quickly to my agenda. The great challenge in the spring of 2005 was to include the Sunnis in the county’s political institutions and especially to gain their support for a new Iraqi constitution. There would be a referendum on a draft charter in October, and though the Shia and Kurds might be able to bring the constitution into force without the support of the Sunnis, it would be disastrous if a sizable minority did not endorse the new Iraq’s founding document. Under Saddam the Sunnis had represented roughly 30 percent of the population but nearly 100 percent of the political power. Now they were 30 percent of the population and terrified of being marginalized by a Shia-led government. It was that fear that had helped fuel the Sunni insurgency.

  If a democratic state is to be stable, “one man, one vote” cannot mean the disenfranchisement of minorities. Respecting that reality is one of the hardest problems of democratic governance anywhere. But getting this right in Iraq would mean a new start for marginalized groups across the Middle East. Today in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia (where Sunnis rule over largely disenfranchised Shia populations), we can see the urgency of finding a political formula that works.

  It was unsettling that Jaafari seemed to have only a marginal interest in that fundamental problem. He said the right things about wanting to reach out to the Sunnis but gave no indication that he knew how to do it. Perhaps, I told myself, he was just unfocused in our conversation. One thing was clear, though: he was not the man to lead Iraq.

  IRONICALLY, MY CONVERSATIONS with the Iraqis were better than my interactions with General George Casey, the U.S. commander of coalition forces on the ground in Baghdad. I liked George. We’d both studied at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies, and he was a decent, honest four-star officer. But I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the Pentagon’s attitude toward Iraq, and the tensions between us were growing.

  Toward the end of 2004, the briefings for the President had devolved from incomprehensible to inexplicable. The reports about the security situation usually focused on “metrics”: How many weapons caches had we destroyed? How many Iraqi security forces had been trained? How many incidents of live fire had there been? Few of those metrics bore much relationship to the deteriorating security situation and the strengthening insurgency. Attacks on reconstruction projects, particularly on the pipelines and electrical grid, were rising. Suicide bombings seemed to occur almost daily. And the highway between the airport and Baghdad had become virtually impassable because the bad guys owned the road.

  When pressed on those facts, the Defense Department’s answer was largely the same as before: the security situation would improve when the political situation improved. That, of course, begged the question of how Iraqis could run for office while running for their lives.

  Shortly after arriving at State, I asked my counselor, Phil Zelikow, to take a quiet fact-finding trip to Iraq. He was accompanied by then Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, my liaison from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had led the 4th Infantry Division during the initial invasion. The Pentagon assigns a senior officer to advise the secretary of state on the military aspects of her job and provide connectivity to the Defense Department. I had the remarkable good fortune to inherit Ray from Colin. He is a giant of a man—an imposing six feet, five inches but soft-spoken, decent, good-humored, and generous in spirit. Dealing with him every day, it would have been easy to overlook his toughness until one remembered that it was he who had commanded the unit that captured Saddam Hussein. We immediately hit it off, drawing on our common love of football to break the ice; he loves the New York Giants and was always too kind to ridicule my Cleveland Browns.

  Ray was a “thinker” too. Military officers who had led the early campaigns in Operation Iraqi Freedom—David Petraeus, James Mattis, Peter Chiarelli, H. R. McMaster, Ray, and others—had returned from the battlefield between 2004 and 2006 determined to understand why we were not succeeding. The initial effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power had largely been accomplished, but stability had not been restored, and relations with the Iraqi population lay somewhere between indifference and outright hostility toward our presence. In part because we could not protect them from the growing insurgency, people were hedging their bets. In warfare of this kind, a population that is passive toward or intimidated by the terrorists enables their success. When you cannot separate friend from foe, it is hard to win, and increasingly the insurgency and the population were blending into one.

  Moreover, in this dense, urban, complex fighting environment, our heavy military firepower in pursuit of insurgents and terrorists often ended up inadvertently alienating the population even further. U.S. soldiers raided towns and villages in search of enemies and often returned to the safety of their bases. The average Iraqi was left to deal with the consequences of those actions. The population had to believe that our forces had the capability and the will to protect them.

  A new Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was emerging out of those concerns. Either militarie
s adapt on the battlefield, or they die. It was impressive to watch men like then-Colonel McMaster, an officer who had written a highly influential history of the Vietnam War for his PhD dissertation, and other young officers under the protection of the senior generals look for answers. Their thinking was not immediately welcome in the highest reaches of the Pentagon, but it would eventually lay the groundwork for the successful military surge of 2007.

  I understood that it was not my role to change the military’s doctrinal approach to the Iraq war. But I, too, had studied counterinsurgencies in history, and I knew that they require civilian support to succeed. David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer who served as my special advisor on counterinsurgency, gave the State Department deep expertise in these issues. Winning the support of the local population required economic assistance, reconstruction, and good governance. Tensions were growing between the Foreign Service and a military whose most common assessment was “State is not in the fight.” It was true that too few diplomats, especially experienced ones, were deploying to Iraq. There were huge gaps in civilian expertise, often filled by military reservists or National Guardsmen. And there was a perception in the military, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House that the situation reflected the State Department’s ambivalence at best and resentment at worst toward the Iraq war.

  My charge to Ray and Phil was to look over the situation in Iraq and come back to me with recommendations about how we could improve State’s support of the military effort and be responsive to the growing clamor for a change in the United States’ approach to the war. Their findings would lead to the deployment of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq, a kind of hybrid force first established in Afghanistan that included military officers, diplomats, and reconstruction workers from various civilian agencies, including the Departments of Agriculture and Justice and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The struggle to improve State’s contribution was just beginning at the time of that first trip; it was one that would take enormous effort and a redefinition of what diplomats are expected to do in war.

  The most immediate conclusion of Phil and Ray’s trip was the need to clarify what we were trying to do in Iraq. During my October 2005 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I used a phrase that seemed to capture the essence of the effort. “In short, with the Iraqi government, our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold, and build,” I said in my opening remarks. “To clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable national … Iraqi institutions.” It was a rather catchy phrase but very descriptive of the tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine. In fact, it was an articulation of the strategy that Colonel McMaster had successfully used to retake the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar. Because it was one of the few statements of our objectives that was easy to understand, it captured enormous press attention. I heard through the grapevine that Don was annoyed and told some that I was out of my lane. I really didn’t care. Somebody has to be able to explain what we’re doing, I thought.

  I had not intended, however, to blindside anyone, most especially George Casey. I had thought that Ray had briefed him on my testimony. So when I returned to Iraq in November to inaugurate the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in the country, I was surprised when George asked to see me alone. “Clear and hold” are military functions, he fumed. “I don’t like the State Department talking about military doctrine.”

  I tried to stay calm, reminding myself that he was under enormous pressure. “George, I’m sorry that you were blindsided,” I said. “That’s wrong. But let’s get one thing straight. I’m the secretary of state, not the State Department. That means I am one of the President’s chief advisors on this war, and I will say what I please.” I then repeated that I thought he had been briefed and would make sure that we had better coordination.

  This wouldn’t be the last time we would clash. More disagreements over the direction of the war effort would come later. But when I took off from Iraq after my first visit as secretary, I looked down on the terrain—two glorious rivers, fertile agricultural land to the north, oil to the north and south, and the majestic buildings of the nation’s beautiful capital. I called the President from the plane. “Baghdad will be a great city,” I told him as Iraq faded into the distance. “This will truly be a great country.” And I sat back thinking of all that had to be done before that prediction could come true.

  IRAQ WAS ONLY one of the pieces of the puzzle in transforming the Middle East. The region seems always to mix hope and despair, and that was certainly the case in the spring and summer of 2005. On the one hand, Lebanon was free of Syrian forces; the Iraqis were debating a new constitution with the participation of Sunni Arabs; Egyptians were moving rapidly toward the most open presidential elections in their history; and the Kuwaiti Parliament had passed a law that gave women the right to vote and run for office. In Kuwait, I was presented with a T-shirt that I still wear—“Half a democracy is no democracy at all,” it said. On the other hand, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the lightly regarded but undeniably hard-line mayor of Tehran, had been elected in Iran to succeed the more moderate Mohammad Khatami.

  Yet the outlines of a different Middle East—one that was more modern and democratic—were emerging and might, if given time, provide less fertile ground in which al Qaeda and Islamic extremists could spread their hatred. It was critical that the United States continue encouraging, cajoling, and persuading our friends to reform. We knew that each nation would move at a different speed. Iraq would need to stabilize its new democracy and reintegrate itself into an Arab world that had essentially expelled it at the time of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Lebanon was an unusual state, with its confessional groups locked into a formulaic sharing of power. Still, in the elections just three months after the withdrawal of Syrian troops during the Cedar Revolution (named for the cedar tree on the Lebanese flag), the moderate March 14 political alliance had won a major victory. With our help the Lebanese stood a chance of diminishing not just the role of Damascus but also the destructive influence of Hezbollah. Anti-U.S. forces seemed to be falling back across the region. We believed that we could use the momentum to unite our Arab friends to resist and counter Iranian aggression and penetration into the Middle East.

  The role of Egypt in the overall equation was crucial. Iraq, bordered by six neighbors, including Iran, was one of the most important countries geographically. But Egypt was the cultural and political heart of the Middle East. A democratic Egypt would change the region like nothing else.

  It was in that spirit that I went to the American University in Cairo in June 2005 to deliver a speech on democracy in the Middle East. Before leaving Washington, I sat with my speechwriter, Chris Brose, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch, and other key advisors. I told them that I needed to be bold. In his second inaugural address, the President had challenged the world to end tyranny by supporting democratic movements in every nation and culture. I saw the upcoming speech in Cairo as an opportunity to expand on that theme and lay out its implications for U.S. policy in the Middle East. I asked Mike Gerson, who had drafted the President’s address, if he wanted to join me on the trip. He did, and there in my cabin as we flew toward Egypt, Mike, Chris, David, Phil Zelikow, Sean McCormack, Brian Gunderson, and I went over every word, saying each one aloud, teasing out its meaning. I wanted to make clear that the United States meant it: the time had come for change—democratic change.

  Before arriving in Cairo, I met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh, as I would many times over the next years. The aging president increasingly preferred to work at the seaside resort city. We reviewed a number of issues, including the upcoming Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Then I asked him if we could speak alone. I wanted to talk about democracy and reform, but I didn’t want to embarrass the president in front of others. After he shooed everyone from the room, I moved closer to him. Mubarak was very hard of hearing and to
o proud to wear a hearing aid. So I talked loudly and looked directly at him, hoping that the elderly leader could hear me or, if necessary, read my lips. “Mr. President,” I said, “you have a chance to do something great for your country. It’s time to give your people a voice. You don’t have forever to do it because soon they will demand it. Do it now.”

  Mubarak sat up straight, leaned forward, and looked directly at me. With his broad nose and hooded eyes, he looked like a pharaoh. “I know my people,” he began. “The Egyptians need a strong hand, and they don’t like foreign interference. We are proud people.”

  After listening to him for several minutes, I tried to appeal to that pride and his vanity. “You saved your country from ruin after Sadat’s assassination,” I told him, referring to his predecessor, who had been gunned down in 1981. “Now take your people forward.” I ended our encounter by telling him what I would say in Cairo. “I don’t want you to be surprised,” I said. He nodded and reminded me that Egyptians don’t like to be told what to do.

  I felt immediately at home in the academic setting of the American University in Cairo’s auditorium. About six hundred students, faculty, and members of civil society were crowded into the relatively small room, made very warm by the glaring television lights. Mubarak’s warning was in my head, and I knew that there was great skepticism about the United States in this audience. Yet, as I made my way through the speech to the lines about our mistake in supporting authoritarian regimes, the mood in the room shifted. “For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East—and we achieved neither,” I said. “Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” At that moment and later with a group of democracy activists, I felt elated by the connection I’d made with Egypt’s impatient patriots. Only later would I wonder if I’d unintentionally promised more rapid change than anyone could deliver, most especially the United States.