The Secretary
Page 7
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By the time Clinton was seen in public again, it was Saturday morning and she was in Baghdad. We had spent the night incognito in neighboring Kuwait and traveled to Iraq on a military aircraft. Our motorcade was now driving into an enclave on the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad—the Green Zone, where Saddam Hussein’s former palaces now housed Iraq’s American masters, the country’s newly elected leaders struggled to lead, and a new parliament was clumsily experimenting with democracy. Nestled in a bend of the river, the Green Zone was protected on its northwest side by concrete blast walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints. Humvees and Abrams tanks stood guard. Outside was the “red zone”—the rest of Iraq, where 240 people had just been killed in four suicide bombs over two days.
Since 2003, the violence in Iraq had ebbed and flowed; mostly it flowed, and recently it was surging. Obama had openly opposed this war as a senator, and now as president he wanted out. At the end of 2008, the Bush administration and the Iraqis had agreed on a plan for U.S. troops to withdraw from the center of cities, retreating to their bases by summer 2009. By the end of 2011, all U.S. soldiers were to leave Iraq. The Bush administration thought there would be time to finagle a way to stay. Obama wanted to make sure the departure would happen.
This war had torn at the fabric of the United States, soured international alliances, and caused a deep schism between the United States and Europe. The war continued to siphon off America’s wealth—the direct cost of the invasion and the occupation hovered around $800 billion. Over the eight years since the invasion, this meant a spending rate of $3,000 per second. Together with the operations in Afghanistan, America’s wars had cost the country more than a trillion dollars. The toll on the economy and the people went even deeper: America’s debt was ballooning and the long-term impact on soldiers and their families was felt across the country. The world perceived America as chastened and weakened. Pundits invoked Vietnam daily. There was talk of imperial overstretch. America’s foes and friendly rivals were inordinately, smugly pleased.
This was some of the damage that Obama and Clinton were looking to repair.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq had overthrown a dictator but the war and the subsequent years of occupation had killed more than 100,000 Iraqis. Although the United States had rustled up a coalition of the willing, it had gone to war on its own terms, without the UN, charging into the region with little planning for the day after. The war unleashed all of Iraq’s internal demons. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the motive for the war, were never found, further feeding the deep mistrust in Iraq and the region of America’s motives. Now, Iraqis were still suffering, not only from military roadblocks and night raids from occupying forces but also from the militants fighting the occupation—their violence killed civilians too. People screamed daily in newspapers, at checkpoints, on television that they’d had enough of being trampled on. Iraqis and their leaders had pushed hard for the troop withdrawal plan, but suddenly, when the moment of withdrawal crept up, many sounded wary. Though it was hard to imagine, they worried that their lives would become more dangerous. What if America neglected them completely once all U.S. troops had left, leaving them alone to face the militants who still planted car bombs and the politicians who were already turning into authoritarian feudal lords, with an army that was barely holding together?
After the invasion in March 2003, those who welcomed the removal of Saddam Hussein—and even those who hadn’t—expected that almighty America would transform their country into a well-ordered, prosperous Switzerland-like bastion on the Euphrates. Exhausted by decades of dictatorship, an eight-year war with neighboring Iran, and years of international sanctions, Iraqis were impatient for a decent life. Just weeks after Iraqis had toppled Saddam Hussein’s statues across Baghdad and stood in front of cameras hitting posters of his image with their shoes, my conversations with people in Baghdad revealed swells of frustration and disbelief: Where was the water? Why was the city power not on? Where were the jobs? The salary raises? The truck loads of medication?
The expectations were beyond what any country could have realistically delivered, let alone a U.S. administration that naively thought things would simply fall into place after the invasion because it had brought freedom to the people. But no one in Iraq wanted to believe that a superpower which could, in just a few weeks of war, remove a dictator as entrenched as the earth itself didn’t have a detailed plan for what was to follow, as well as foolproof means to implement it. Iraqis had lived in fear of Saddam for more than two decades; a whole generation had known only him as a leader. He and his intelligence services instilled widespread fear, spying on everybody and sowing distrust within families. A Sunni ruler, he had crushed Shiite dissent and rebellion ruthlessly. He didn’t spare Sunnis who stood up to him either. But even the Shiites, who had suffered the most and were expected to welcome American soldiers with rose petals, quickly turned against the U.S. occupation. America’s swift removal of their dictator confirmed to them that the United States was evil and all-powerful. The looting and burning of government buildings in the days after the fall of Baghdad, the destruction of the national museum, the power cuts, the chaos—it must have all been part of the plan. Washington wanted to destroy Iraq. It wanted the chaos, they clamored. Now, they were asking what Obama’s plan was. Sure, he wanted to leave, but before that, could he please improve their living conditions? Maybe now American companies could come and rebuild the country?
We had driven into the compound of the U.S. embassy inside the Green Zone—a sand-colored fortress within a fortified enclave that had cost $700 million to build. The size of Vatican City, with twenty-seven buildings, a swimming pool, outdoor tennis courts, and neatly paved walkways with yellowing grass on either side, it was the largest U.S. embassy in the world. No wonder Iraqis thought America was staying forever. But the United States often harbored grand ambitions and wanted quick results; it tried one thing after another, changed course and strategies, hoping something would stick. And then it got tired with the project and started to downsize.
Inside the enclave of the embassy, we walked around freely. Fred reconnected with colleagues he had worked with just a few months earlier. There was even a town hall, always Hillary’s favorite event of the day. Iraqi NGO workers, teachers, and legislators, all known to the U.S. embassy, had been invited to attend and told they were meeting a VIP guest. A human rights activist named William went first. Was America going to abandon Iraq? Others followed: What was America going to do to help modernize Iraq’s agricultural sector? What was America going to do to empower women in Iraq? Could she send more American NGOs to Iraq?
There was a deluge of requests, and, unusually, Clinton seemed to grow weary of the questions. America was the occupier and it had responsibilities toward the country, but the questions carried an abdication of initiative and an undertone of fatalism. After years of being told what to do and think by Saddam, Iraqis were now looking for definitive answers and solutions from someone else. Because of the security restrictions in organizing the town hall, Clinton was facing a soft audience. The participants still believed America had something to offer them, but their anger and despair did not bode well for the day after America’s withdrawal. Across the country, others saw the United States as a hegemonic power preying on their country’s riches, imposing its will and offering nothing in return. Those two worldviews collided every day in Iraq and across the Middle East.
A long day of meetings followed with Iraq’s president, prime minister, and foreign minister, as well as a press conference. We had left Kuwait at 7:30 in the morning and expected to return by early evening. But we were on “Hillary Time.” It was 11:00 in the evening when we landed in Kuwait. We were going to spend the night at the Bayan Palace state guesthouse, which afforded the delegation some privacy to keep Clinton’s next stop, Beirut, under wraps.
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My home country was also on that exclusive list of troubled countries where U.S. o
fficials made unannounced, “surprise visits,” because of a bloody event that had permanently altered how America saw Lebanon. In 1983, a few years into Lebanon’s civil war, a suicide bomber drove his truck into the U.S. Marine barracks near the Beirut airport, killing 241 troops. Shiite Muslim militants were blamed for the carnage, and they coalesced into a group that called itself Hezbollah, Party of God. For them, America was the Great Satan. Israel, which was often referred to as the Little Satan, had occupied south Lebanon since 1978. Hezbollah strived to liberate the swath of occupied land until Israel withdrew in 2000. An ally of Iran and Syria, the Party of God was also working its way into Lebanese national politics while holding on to its arsenal. Though the State Department listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, it formed a part of the country’s social and political fabric: it represented the country’s long downtrodden Shiites. The group now had allies in the coalition cabinet, Lebanon’s mostly pro-Western government. New elections were around the corner, and Hezbollah was always looking for ways to tighten its grip. Clinton was going to Beirut to check in on the state of affairs.
We had spent the whole day on the move, filing our stories in the heat of Baghdad and fading in our chairs waiting for Clinton. We were desperate for some rest before the next day’s packed schedule. But our Kuwaiti hosts had laid out a lavish buffet dinner for the secretary and her whole delegation. We freshened up and took our seats at the tables under the garden tent surrounded by grass and hibiscus and oleander trees. Hillary held court at the middle table, surrounded by Jake, Huma, Philippe Reines, and Jeffrey Feltman, a former ambassador to Lebanon and the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs—the Middle East expert in the Building.
I was helping myself to some of the food from the buffet, scooping up some of my favorite dessert, Umm Ali, when Mark Landler from the New York Times asked how it felt to be going home. I had tried not to think about it till now. I hadn’t been able to tell my family that I was coming because of the security rules. I continued piling up the soft, milky pastry with pine nuts and almonds, staring blankly at Mark, smiling. I didn’t tell him that I felt like an Iraqi would have, sitting on top of an American tank advancing into Baghdad in April 2003, though I wasn’t sure whether the tanks were liberating or occupying. What was I doing on Clinton’s plane? I was a journalist doing a job, but did I want my friends in Lebanon to know I was flying in with the American secretary of state? Or was I going to keep it quiet upon arrival? I was ambivalent about Clinton. I still found it hard to read her, and because of that, I found it difficult to get a feel for America’s intentions toward my country.
At the end of the dinner, Clinton walked around to the different tables to chat. It was the first time we were in a social setting with her. The mood was slightly tense. She tried to appear informal but she wasn’t relaxed; she was still very much the politician on duty. We had regular spats with her gatekeepers, who were intent on protecting her while we pushed for access. She came to a stop behind me, one hand on the shoulder of Matt Lee from the AP, one hand on mine. I stared at my plate, trying to come up with some smart comment about the state of world affairs.
Instead, I turned around, looked up, and said, “Madame Secretary, when I was growing up in Lebanon during the civil war, I never for a second imagined I would one day fly back to Lebanon on the plane of the American secretary of state.”
I blurted it out because it neatly summarized the situation and all my emotions and because obviously it was true. As a kid I’d had my share of wild dreams about my future, but SAM and Hillary Clinton had not even featured. Hillary said she recalled watching the horror of my country’s civil war on television with Bill. She said Lebanon had suffered so much, and that’s why she was going, to show support. I was uncertain what that actually meant.
* * *
The next morning, we checked out of the guesthouse of the Kuwaiti emir with its outdated stuffy brown furniture from the 1980s. We loaded into the vans, almost leaving behind Arshad Mohammed from Reuters, who had overslept, and made our way to the airport.
I was nervous during the two-hour flight to the Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport, named after the billionaire prime minister who ran the country during much of the 1990s and again from 2000 until he resigned in 2004. A Sunni politician with broad appeal beyond Lebanon’s borders he had had an international Rolodex that could rival Hillary’s, and had helped rebuild Lebanon after the destruction of fifteen years of civil war, with all that it entailed of corruption, blind capitalism, and deal making with Lebanon’s masters in Damascus. (Syria had occupied part or all of Lebanon since 1975.) Hariri was blown up by two thousand pounds of explosive as his motorcade drove along the city’s seaside promenade on Valentine’s Day in 2005.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the street, accusing Damascus of killing him. He had started to push back against Syria’s influence, and it was widely reported that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had promised to “break Lebanon on his head.” The demonstrators not only demanded justice; they wanted Syria’s thirty thousand troops out of the country. It was the Beirut Spring. In April 2005, after thirty years of military occupation, fear, and humiliation, the Syrians finally left. Their Lebanese allies, Hezbollah and others, felt exposed. The country was deeply divided between those who had wanted Syria out and those for whom Damascus and Tehran represented a worldview they could connect with: anti-Western and anti-imperialist. Lebanon was a mosaic of faiths and had often split along religious lines during the war. But the divide this time was ideological and partisan: I had Shiite, Sunni, and Christian friends who despised Syria and Hezbollah, and I had other friends, also Shiite, Sunni, and Christian, who either liked Syria and Hezbollah or at least preferred them to the West.
* * *
The Mediterranean was in sight. I could see the tip of Beirut jutting into the dark blue sea. SAM had barely landed when my colleagues’ chatter began to fill the air. They were all on the phone to their editors breaking the news of their arrival while frantically typing on their computers.
I made a very different kind of phone call, to my eldest sister.
“Ingrid, it’s me. I’m in Beirut with Hillary,” I said.
“I thought you might be coming—we heard rumors about her visit early this morning,” Ingrid replied. “Why is she here? Will it be good for us?”
We had been asking ourselves these kinds of questions since we were children. But I didn’t have answers for my sister, not yet.
I walked onto the tarmac and into an armored four-wheel-drive Suburban for the ride to the presidential palace. Along the highway leading out of the airport, yellow Hezbollah flags with a green fist raising a Kalashnikov were hanging from lampposts, and billboards were covered with the election campaign banners of members of the party running for parliament in June. The airport was in a Shiite Muslim area, and this was Hezbollah territory. The palace was a fifteen-minute drive away, in Baabda, a hilly Christian suburb overlooking the capital.
The Bubble, always familiar, felt alien in Beirut. I was a stranger in my own country, separated from the Lebanese by tinted windows, armor, Fred and his team of Diplomatic Security agents, a Lebanese police escort. I was in the motorcade that irritated the hell out of me when I was living in Beirut, stuck in a traffic jam because roads had been blocked off for the American ambassador. For years after the civil war, even as Beirut reclaimed its title as glitzy party town of the Middle East, American embassy motorcades remained an elaborate affair, with machine gun turrets mounted on massive white SUVs. Today the U.S. embassy still has the most visible diplomatic motorcades. We rolled our eyes every time they drove past. In January 2008, an explosion targeted the embassy convoy, but it was a decoy, and the ambassador, Jeffrey Feltman, was unharmed. I was now in his convoy. He was in my convoy.
It was a surreal homecoming; an emotional moment at the end of a tortuous journey from Beirut war child to Washington State Department correspondent. Only much later did I re
alize that on that day I had embarked on another journey, within myself, as I tried to come to terms with my misgivings about American power. For now, all I really wanted was to go for a walk on the Corniche, the city seaside promenade. I didn’t miss Lebanon now that I was living in Washington: too many painful memories. But I missed the Mediterranean, the sea breeze, the endless horizon that made me feel free even during the darkest days of fighting.
* * *
We had called it the war of others on our land: America sent in the marines. Israel invaded a few times, as did Syria, which was a client state of the Soviet Union. Palestinian militants hoping to reclaim what they saw as their lost land, now the State of Israel, used Lebanon as their launchpad, and Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries set up shop on the Mediterranean by helping to form Hezbollah. From 1975 to 1990, at the height of the Cold War, all the different players and countries were fighting out their battles on our streets. America was just one of them, but as the superpower, it received the most attention, the most blame. We were convinced it was pulling all the strings—the war was a plot devised in the Oval Office, on a Sunday afternoon, with people poking pins into maps to divide the city between warring factions, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev discussing war spoils over the phone, deciding our fate. Growing up, that was my favorite image, and it was every Lebanese’s favorite explanation to make sense of the chaos and killing surrounding us. The war didn’t make sense to us, but it made sense to someone. We took strange comfort in that thought; it made our own powerlessness easier to bear; we were too busy trying to stay alive. The blame also allowed our warlords to abdicate their own responsibility to end the war. And just like millions of other people in fragile countries, repressive states, and dictatorships, my two sisters and I, my parents, our friends—we all lived and breathed politics every day: politics happened outside our front door; politics could be loud and dangerous; politics could kill you. My family was lucky to survive unscathed.