As I watched the increasingly isolated Hosni Mubarak struggling to hang on to power in February 2011 while his people ridiculed him from the streets, I thought back on my conversation with him and my speech at the American University in Cairo. He would allow relatively free and very noisy presidential elections that fall of 2005. Steve Hadley and I had invited Mubarak’s confidant Omar Suleiman, the head of Egypt’s intelligence service, to dinner at the Watergate restaurant prior to the elections. There, in a dark corner of the room, we talked about how the United States could support a democratizing Egypt and what would be required if Egypt’s upcoming elections were to be truly democratic. I talked to Mubarak twice in August, urging him to keep the electoral environment free and fair. Then we watched as he campaigned from city to city for the first time in his life, seemingly rejuvenated by the democratic process. Egyptian coffeehouses were alive with political debate, and the Egyptian press commentary exulted that Egypt’s politics would never be the same.
But soon thereafter Mubarak reversed course. During the subsequent parliamentary elections in November and December, the regime was accused of deploying attackers wielding machetes and other weapons to intimidate voters. The next year Mubarak refused to carry through on his promise to repeal the hated “emergency law,” which limited free speech and assembly. In 2007 he held a public referendum on constitutional amendments that would, among other things, give him authority to dissolve the Egyptian Parliament without the public’s consent. The government announced that nearly 76 percent of voters approved the amendments, leading to allegations of election fraud. When we criticized his handling of the elections, Mubarak fumed that U.S. foreign assistance didn’t give Washington the right to interfere in Egypt’s internal affairs.
His problem, though, was not with us; it was with his people. I thought at the time that they’d never accept going back to the old ways where they were denied a voice in their political future. It was that frustration and anger that spilled out into the streets six years later and swept the confused and isolated Mubarak from power in 2011.
AFTER MY TRIP to Egypt I went on to meet with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the first time I’d meet him as secretary. Abdullah, then in his early eighties, would soon ascend to the throne with the death of King Fahd and, like his predecessor, become the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques in recognition of the Saudi monarch’s role in overseeing the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina.
I had met the crown prince during my time as national security advisor. He had initially been suspicious of me at the time, given the rumors that I’d told other Arabs that the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t a threat to the region. I never knew where that misquote had come from but chalked it up to the kind of gossip that ricochets around the Middle East regularly. I had a theory that the Egyptians might have started it. Fortunately, I’d had the opportunity to clear up the misconception when Abdullah visited Crawford in April 2002. I’d received him at the airport and escorted him back to the President’s ranch by bus. The Saudi leader had refused to ride in a helicopter.
During that roughly hourlong trip, the crown prince and I had talked about religion and values. I wasn’t sure how he’d react to the news that my father had been a Presbyterian minister and that I was unmarried. The latter he thought sad, but he reassured me that I’d probably still find a mate. The former, though, he found reassuring. It was good that I was a believer—even if in Jesus Christ, not Mohammed. By the time we arrived in Crawford, Abdullah had decided that I was a good person and conveyed those kind words to the President himself.
Arriving in Riyadh as secretary years later, I experienced that night what every former secretary of state had described to me. I went to the hotel about nine and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally at about eleven o’clock the crown prince was ready to see me. It seems that the Saudis prefer late-night meetings, having gotten out of bed in the afternoon, dined after nine, and then and only then readied themselves to receive guests.
The crown prince welcomed me warmly at his palace and then said that he wanted me to meet several other Saudi ministers. The princes were lined up in order of seniority, and each came forward, nodded, took my hand, and greeted me. The princes near my age all said hello with an accompanying “I’m a Trojan” (for USC) or “I’m an Aggie” (for Texas A&M). There was even one “I’m a Pioneer” (after my own alma mater, the University of Denver). Some of the most senior princes, such as my counterpart Saud al-Faisal, had attended elite American schools. Saud was a graduate of Princeton.
I’d read that the kingdom had educated the young royals in the United States until the 1980s, when there had been a turn toward conservatism in response to the Iranian Revolution. The younger princes had thus been sent to King Fahd University, where they had studied mostly religion at the expense of gaining technical and linguistic skills. This encounter vivified for me Abdullah’s preoccupation with sending more students to the United States, something that had become harder in the post-9/11 environment. By the end of the administration, thanks largely to a push by the President and our ambassadors to the kingdom, James C. Oberwetter and Ford M. Fraker, the number of Saudis studying in the United States exceeded pre-9/11 levels. Education in the West was not a guarantee of liberal thinking; three of the 9/11 suicide hijackers had studied in Germany. But going to school in the United States created more familiarity with—and hopefully more respect for—our system than if Saudis remained isolated from the West.
After the introductions were made, the crown prince and I went into his sitting room with only my trusted interpreter Gamal Helal joining us. The crown prince pulled out a gift-wrapped package. “I have a gift for you,” he said. I had become accustomed to Abdullah’s gifts, usually jewels that I couldn’t afford to keep, given federal ethics rules requiring me to purchase any offering over a certain minimal value. This time, though, I opened the package and realized that it was a full-length, beautifully embroidered abaya, the black robe and veil Saudi women traditionally wear. “I had it made especially for you,” he said tenderly. “Our women wear them.”
Yes, as a sign of oppression, I thought. But it was so dear, and he meant well. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” I said. “It’s so beautiful.”
We then sat together for two hours, reviewing the landscape of the Middle East, talking about Saudi Arabia and the “modernization” of the country and, of course, Iran. The crown prince exhorted me to deal with Tehran and to resolve the Palestinian conflict by pressuring Israel. Those were views with which I was familiar. But his discussion of his own country was more surprising. I’d come to know Abdullah as something of a reformer in this most conservative of countries. He spoke of the need to hear his people to know what they were thinking and stressed the importance of getting out of the palace and visiting remote parts of the country. He’d authorized the practice of elections for half of the seats of the country’s municipal councils, prompting lawyers, businessmen, professors, and tribal leaders to stand for election. Women weren’t permitted to vote or run for office, but Abdullah thought that might come in time. He did receive groups of women from time to time to hear their concerns.
The crown prince talked of his plans to change his country’s higher education system by building a technical university to give Saudi men—and women—the skills needed for the twenty-first century. One shouldn’t overstate the case, but Abdullah was different from his half brothers, who were known for their wealth, even corruption, and their death grip on power. He was a pious man who wanted to change his country—albeit slowly and within very conservative parameters. Later President Bush and I would talk about how we could help Abdullah guide Saudi Arabia toward reform. We felt that we would be pushing on an open door; we might not be able to expect national elections anytime soon, but we could encourage the kingdom to continue redefining the relationship between rulers and ruled. In Saudi Arabia that would be revolutionary in its own right. I could not help but wonder, though, At eighty-one years old, does he have e
nough time?
The Arab world had been isolated from the worldwide movement toward democracy during the second half of the twentieth century, but change was coming, even if it was frustratingly slow. Another key part of the equation would be to find an answer to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian question. It was not that reform in the Arab world was dependent on resolution of the conflict, though our friends often made that claim. In fact, it was a kind of talisman of legitimacy for otherwise illegitimate governments. When the authoritarian rulers needed to appease “the street,” as they referred to their people, the plight of the Palestinians was a convenient rallying cry.
That led me to challenge a group of Arabs on this point early in my tenure as national security advisor. “If you care so much about the Palestinians,” I asked, “why have each and every one of you expelled them from your country at some point in time?” It was a slightly exaggerated rhetorical point, but indeed there sometimes seemed to be more concern for trumpeting their cause rather than actually helping the Palestinians. I can’t count the number of phone calls I made to the rich Arabs, begging them to give just a little bit of their excess oil revenue to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. It was sad to watch the dignified Palestinian leader visit his Arab brethren, begging for money, and then have to call me, the U.S. secretary of state, and ask me to press his case with them.
Yes, reform in the Middle East needed to take place whether or not a Palestinian state came into being. That did not, however, diminish the urgency of finding a solution for those beleaguered people. The Palestinians and their leaders were admirable for their perseverance, their relative tolerance of religious difference (some Palestinians are Christian, others Muslim), and their industriousness. They needed their own state, and a democratic Middle East would be incomplete without a democratic Palestine.
In the spring and summer of 2005, the pending Israeli withdrawal from Gaza offered the potential to jump-start movement toward a two-state solution. President Bush had insisted that the Israelis cooperate and coordinate with the Palestinians so the withdrawal wouldn’t leave chaos in its wake. James Wolfensohn, who had recently retired as president of the World Bank, agreed to be an envoy on behalf of the Middle East Quartet (an association of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia) to facilitate that coordination.
Jim was indefatigable in pushing the process forward, though he was outwardly suspicious of the Israelis, causing some heartburn in Tel Aviv. But through his efforts funding was put into place for the Palestinians to take advantage of the Israeli withdrawal as a step toward statehood. There were, for example, massive greenhouses in Gaza growing world-class vegetables. Private sources, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Jewish Americans such as Mort Zuckerman and Leonard Stern, put up the money to buy them from the Israeli settlers. Also, USAID prepared several social projects, including much-needed water purification efforts, that could immediately be started in the newly Palestinian-controlled territory.
We all worried about settler violence, so I went to Israel in July, the third time since becoming secretary, to check in with the prime minister. This time Sharon asked if we could meet at his farm in the Negev in southern Israel to speak in a more relaxed atmosphere. I was somewhat surprised at the invitation; I guess I had never thought of Sharon relaxing. But he was different in that environment, calmer and more reflective. He’d lost his beloved wife several years before, and her photos were everywhere. He talked about how in the years after being viewed as responsible for the tragedies in the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, he’d effectively retired to the farm. The Sharons would get up in the morning and have breakfast, and he’d go out to work the fields. “Sometimes I got so carried away out on the land that I forgot to come home for lunch,” he said. Referring to his wife, he added, “She hated that.” It was such a tender moment with this very tough man.
Then he asked if I wanted to see his sheep. I told him that I was a city girl and hadn’t ever seen sheep up close and personal. He delighted in giving me my first experience, explaining that he knew them individually, not just as a flock. Walking among the smelly creatures, Sharon suddenly turned serious. “I want you to come back in the fall,” he said. “Come back here to the farm. We need to talk about the future.” I nodded in agreement.
As I was getting ready to leave, I asked a second time how he felt about the prospects for a peaceful withdrawal from Gaza. My first inquiry had elicited a perfunctory though reassuring answer. The IDF was disciplined and would succeed, he said. This time, though, he took another tack. He told me a story of going to visit settlers to explain why they had to withdraw from Gaza. “One man asked me to get up and come with him,” Sharon said. “He took me to the door, and above it was a mezuzah,” a Jewish symbol containing portions of the Torah that deal with keeping God in one’s everyday life. “ ‘You nailed it up there yourself,’ the man said to me,” Sharon continued. “ ‘You told me that it was good for the Israeli state that my family moved here to Gaza to claim Jewish lands. Now you tell me to leave.’ ” Sharon was suddenly very emotional. Now I understood that his speech a few years before about “painful sacrifices” had not been meant just in the political sense. Those sacrifices were deeply personal for him.
The Israelis would complete their withdrawal on September 12. As it turned out, it took only four weeks, and settler violence was minimal.
The Palestinians’ behavior in response did not, however, inspire confidence that they were ready for statehood. Hamas took to the streets to celebrate the “expulsion” of the Israelis from Gaza, inflaming opinion in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Palestinian thugs trashed the greenhouses that could have produced food for them. I called Bill Gates and Jim Wolfensohn to apologize for what had happened to their private investments. “I would do it again in the cause of peace,” Gates answered graciously.
Despite those small setbacks, the Israelis were out of Gaza and four small settlements in the West Bank. Soon after, Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s deputy, came to Washington with a message from his boss. The Israelis had further plans for disengagement from the West Bank, and Sharon would leave Likud and charter a new political party, Kadima, to support the establishment of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.
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A HEARTBREAKING PLACE CALLED DARFUR
DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST seemed to warrant my full attention; so much was changing, and so much was at stake. Nonetheless, there were other pressing matters that couldn’t be put on the back burner. The President was heading to the G8 at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, and though foreign ministers didn’t generally travel with their heads of government, we talked about whether I should go. This was a kind of test of our new relationship; I wasn’t his national security advisor anymore, but surely I would continue to travel with him.
I recommended that I go instead to Asia. The North Koreans were acting up, and the members of the Six-Party Talks needed to be corralled into a unified response. China thought the North was ready to return to the table, and South Korea was providing fuel oil again. I thought my time could better be used there. The President agreed.
Further into my tenure as secretary, I traveled less with him and more on my own. As we moved toward the end of the administration, he’d call and ask jokingly, “Is this trip important enough for you to go on?” Maybe we both missed the good old days a bit, but the truth is that when traveling with him I felt a bit like a fifth wheel. As national security advisor you staff the President on the road, deal with the press on his behalf, and manage the other agencies during the visit. Now Steve had those responsibilities. The secretary of state sits there like a potted plant. The President would turn to me fairly frequently, particularly when some leader was complaining about what hadn’t gotten done. But ambassadors were quite capable of handling such situations.
I could hear the echo of Jim Baker telling me that the time would come when I wouldn’t w
ant to travel with the President. He’s got to be kidding, I’d thought then. But he was right; we rarely needed to be in the same place. It made sense, to be sure, for state visits and summits, but for most international meetings it was unnecessary. And frankly, it was better to travel on my own plane with my own schedule. Air Force One isn’t that comfortable when you don’t have a bed.
I did go back to Asia, starting this time in Southeast Asia, specifically Thailand, and then moving on to meetings in China, South Korea, and Japan. While I was on the road, the North Koreans agreed to return to the negotiating table on July 25, so there was a lot of work to do to get ready. For that reason I decided to skip the ASEAN summit scheduled for late July and send the deputy, Bob Zoellick, instead. I was surprised by the reaction overseas. You would have thought that the U.S. had broken diplomatic relations with all of Southeast Asia. My absence was taken as a sign of disinterest in the region. It didn’t matter that Bob was being sent as a direct representative of the President. No matter how much I affirmed the importance of the region to the United States, the charge stuck throughout the Bush administration. That was the problem for the secretary of state. It wasn’t acceptable to insist that there were priorities; everyone needed your time. Having learned that lesson, the next year, when the ASEAN summit happened to be scheduled in the middle of the Lebanon war, I flew all the way to Malaysia from the Middle East and back.
I ended the summer in Sudan, where events had taken a turn for the worse since the conclusion of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) at the beginning of 2005. Sudan had been on the President’s radar screen since we first arrived in Washington. He wanted to end the decades-long civil war between the South and the North that had resulted in the deaths of millions of people. Evangelical Christians in the United States had long championed the cause of Christians in the African South of Sudan, who had been oppressed by Arab Muslims in the North. In 2001 the President and Colin decided to appoint former senator John Danforth as special envoy for peace to Sudan. He could overcome congressional constraints on policy choices, they reasoned, and as an Episcopalian priest, he could mobilize the religious constituency.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 46