by Kim Ghattas
At a press conference with the Qatari foreign minister, Clinton answered four questions, all about Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Iran’s influence. Tunisia wasn’t on anyone’s mind. I called my mother in Beirut. Watching Lebanon from afar, its crises seemed more alarming to me.
“So, the cabinet fell,” I ventured.
“Well, my child, we have been without a government for decades,” my mother said, speaking to me in Dutch as she often did. “Another one goes, another comes, it’s their problem. We just keep going.” Forty years in Lebanon had taught my Dutch mother a thing or two about resilience. Though we were a country at peace, there was barely ever any city water or power. Potholes were everywhere. Landfills of garbage destroyed our coast. Red tape and bribes were normal. But we had adapted. We bought power generators, ordered trucks of cistern water to fill up our tanks, and averted our eyes from piles of rubbish. Like others around the region, we got used to the sad state of affairs; defeated, we endured in silence. My family was luckier than most, but I recognized this attitude in many countries, from Syria to China. It was hard to protest against your government when your day was consumed with trying to feed your children and stay alive, and when dissent was punishable with humiliation, torture, or death, even if you were powerful.
In Lebanon during the Syrian occupation, I was frustrated by politicians who in private complained about the humiliation of being at the mercy of their masters in Damascus. I asked why they didn’t rebel, push back, and wondered whether they were cowards, worried they would lose the privileges that working with an occupying power did provide—until the former prime minister Rafic Hariri was assassinated. Then a spate of car bombs targeted politicians and journalists who vocally opposed Syria’s stranglehold on the country. The country’s upcoming leadership was wiped out. The investigation continues, and no one’s been convicted yet, but there are few doubts about who did it. One politician’s wife told me about the calls she received at work every day from Syrian intelligence officers, recognizable by their accents, warning her that her husband would come back to her in a coffin if he continued to openly criticize Syria.
The politicians who were assassinated did not have pristine records; they had not been perfect democrats or incorruptible, but it didn’t matter who owned the truth, who was right or wrong, good or bad—one party was willing to kill to advance its agenda.
* * *
At two in the morning on the secure floor of our Doha hotel, it was time for Hillary and her team to forget about the day’s crisis in Beirut and take a step back. In makeshift offices in hotels around the world, on the seventh floor of the Building, in the West Wing, at the Pentagon, or aboard SAM, officials went from one crisis to the next, from one urgent matter to the following. The adrenaline never receded. The news cycle was relentless, and long gone were the days when top officials in Washington stopped working at six thirty to watch the evening news and then awaited their morning paper to find out if there were any agenda setters. Every tweet, every blog, every morning, midday, and evening show was a news maker and a crisis alert, and every pundit declared the administration a failure if it hadn’t found a solution within five minutes of a problem erupting. There was hardly any time to think about the long term, but like others in the administration, Hillary, Jake, and the rest of the team tried as best they could.
Clinton was often criticized for not having adopted a signature issue to which she had devoted her heart and soul. By the end of her tenure, Condoleezza Rice was in the weeds of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, negotiating the removal of a checkpoint here and restriction on movement there. She was criticized for losing sight of the bigger picture, shuttling to the region every month and ending up empty-handed. Clinton had steered clear of that approach, partly because none of the problems in her in-box had an easy solution: there was no point tying your reputation to a sure failure. She also believed it was more important to establish long-lasting trends that could deliver more for more people—like empowering civil society and women. This empowerment could, in turn, bring about lasting solutions to conflicts. But she also wanted to manage the bigger picture: America’s position in the world. American power was bigger than just the sum of its successes and failures.
Sitting in a staff office with Dan Schwerin, one of Clinton’s speechwriters, Jake was reviewing the speech that his boss would be giving at the conference she was here to attend. The Forum for the Future was a yearly gathering of government officials, business leaders, and civil society organizations from G8 countries and the Middle East, and Clinton wanted to deliver a warning about the negative trends in the region. On January 3, Jake and Dan had gathered with Huma and Jeff, the Middle East man, in the secretary’s office to prepare for this trip. Clinton wanted civil society to be the focus at every stop, every speech.
In the summer, President Obama gave a directive to review American policy toward the Middle East, a region not only plagued by conflicts but also ruled by dictators, many of them reliable friends of Washington. They provided stability, and America gave them military aid and economic assistance. Those who were not friends with America were somehow part of the system too.
But Washington knew that any perceived stability of the region was false. Condoleezza Rice had spoken in the past about the need to push for reform and not choose stability over democracy, but neither Arab leaders nor Arab civilians were in the mood to listen to America’s talk about democracy after the debacle of the Iraq War. Yet there was a growing realization that the price of being friends with rulers like Mubarak of Egypt or Saleh of Yemen was about to rise exponentially. The presidential study ordered by Obama had come to tentative conclusions: be more assertive on pushing reform, find points of leverage, work more with civil society, and ally with people inside the government who understand the urgency for reform. No formal decisions were made, no plans drafted; after all, there was no rush—the Arab world moved at a glacial pace.
Hillary was personally frustrated. She had been traveling to the Arab world for two years as secretary of state by now, and she had seen the region amble aimlessly forward for years. She had read all the UN reports about the lack of development, the booming demographics. She had pleaded with leaders to embrace reforms and had tried to explain how a more open system would benefit everyone. She was fed up with Arab officials not listening to her. Her admonitions were becoming background noise. During that meeting to prepare the trip, Hillary had got more and more agitated as they delved deeper into the challenges of the region.
“I want to break through,” she said. “We have to come up with a way to wake these people up. They are sitting on a time bomb.”
Not even Hillary knew how prescient her words were. Now in Doha, Jake and Dan were trying to find the one sentence that would help her break through. Was it too harsh? Was the metaphor clichéd or too scathing? Bernadette walked in to pick up a stack of files. They read it to her.
“So what do you think?” asked Jake.
Bernadette paused for a few seconds. She had barely slept since leaving Washington. All she could think of was whether she had prepared enough mini-schedules for the morning. But in the tedium of the grind, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff was asking her what she thought about a key policy speech. Suddenly she was reminded of why she was doing this job and what it was all about.
“I like it. It is tough, but it’s a good line,” she said.
* * *
On the morning of January 13, with colleagues from the traveling press, we met Amr Moussa for a quick cup of coffee in the hotel café. The secretary-general of the Arab League didn’t have his cigar this time, but he offered more pricelessly useless assessments.
“Ben Ali has called for parliamentary elections. He is serious about finding a solution,” he said. He hadn’t spoken to any Tunisian officials yet, but as we all walked out of the restaurant, he said he planned to call the foreign minister in the coming days.
Clinton’s intervention at the Forum for the Future conference was ab
out to start. In going over the speech in the morning with her team, she had decided she liked the line that had given Jake and the others some anguish. She kept it. She didn’t think chaos was around the corner, but the region’s young population was only growing and unemployment only rising, with militants keen to fill the void—a combustible combination. It was time to grab the region’s leaders by their lapels, others by the golden trimming on their bishts, the loose dark coat that men in the Gulf wore over their thobes.
“In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand,” she said to the conference attendees. Silence.
“Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever.” More silence.
Clinton was just getting started. The region’s leaders needed to listen to their people, she continued. They had to view civil society as a partner, not a threat; they had to create opportunities for their people and rein in corruption.
“Trying to get a permit, you have to pass money through so many different hands. Trying to open up, you have to pay people off. Trying to stay open, you have to pay people off. Trying to export your goods, you have to pay people off. So by the time you finish paying everybody off, it’s not a very profitable venture.”
When she was asked why the United States couldn’t stop Israel from expanding settlements in the West Bank, she gazed pointedly across the room full of officials from countries that were U.S. allies—Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia.
“We can’t stop a lot of countries from doing things we disagree with and that we speak out against. We see it all over the world,” she said.
“The United States bears a disproportionate amount of the burden for trying to maintain peace and security and prosperity across the globe. I wish there were a way we could tell a lot of countries what they should do,” she said.
Clinton was frustrated because the United States, along with Europe, was one of the biggest donors to the Palestinians and constantly had to beg countries like Saudi Arabia to pay up too. The Saudis had pledged close to $2 billion in the preceding few years but so far had transferred only a third of it to the Palestinian government. Arab money was often pledged yet rarely made it to the recipients. The United States often tried to shame Arab countries into disbursing the money they had promised, making very public, elaborate announcements whenever the United States released a portion of money to the Palestinian Authority.
Clinton’s role in the forum had come to an end. Our vans were waiting outside the hotel, ready for the race to the airport with the usual detour to the U.S. embassy to rally the troops. No matter how far behind we might have been, embassy stops remained an essential part of our schedule on every trip, in every country. Hillary gave those stops her full attention and her customary warm, energetic thank-you. She felt strongly that embassy employees were the implementers of U.S. foreign policy on the ground. They needed to believe in what they did and feed off her energy to carry forward at a time when doubts about America’s role plagued people’s vision.
After we left, Egypt’s foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit offered his own vision of the urgency for reform.
“History and contemporary practice have both proven that any reform process is by its nature evolutionary, cumulative, and gradual, which are all essential prerequisites in order to guarantee its success and continuity along with the preservation of stability and social cohesion.”
The opaque statement reflected the inability of Egyptian leaders to understand the needs of their people, the urgency of reforms. Their obfuscation blinded them to what was awaiting them and their country.
* * *
We had a twelve-hour journey back home, stopping through Shannon, and would be landing midevening on U.S. soil. In the front section of the plane, staffers were working on Hillary’s speech for the next morning on American-Chinese relations. Jake took a break and came to the back of the plane to chat about the content of her address and all the other preparations that were under way for the visit to Washington the following week by China’s president Hu Jintao. We talked about Richard Holbrooke, who had died suddenly a few weeks earlier. Without the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. policy toward the two countries would soon be adrift. Not everybody had agreed with Holbrooke, and there was much infighting within the administration about him, but he kept people’s minds focused on the issue. Soon, Vali and other people on the team would move on to other jobs inside or outside the State Department. The focus would change, decrease. The Pakistanis would feel abandoned again because Holbrooke’s replacement wasn’t as high caliber.
After her China speech on Friday morning, Clinton had a ten thirty meeting with the Malaysian deputy prime minister, an eleven o’clock meeting at the White House with President Obama and President Zardari of Pakistan, and a one o’clock meeting with all the special representatives for Afghanistan and Pakistan—Holbrooke’s counterparts from all the other countries in the coalition fighting in Afghanistan. They were all in town to attend Holbrooke’s memorial service later that afternoon at the Kennedy Center. Hillary and her husband would each give a speech, alongside all the others paying their respects. It was rare for the two Clintons to share time in the same location. Hillary and Bill spoke almost every day on the phone, but coordinating their schedules was an exercise in improbability.
* * *
There was also an unscheduled event for that Friday, January 14, all the way in Tunisia. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali got on a plane and flew into the night, looking for a country that would take him. As with every significant world event, the American president and the secretary of state sent out statements, e-mailed to journalists around town and farther afield.
“The United States continues to closely monitor the rapidly evolving events in Tunisia, where earlier today President Ben Ali left his country following several weeks of demonstrations and popular unrest. We condemn the violence and urge restraint on all sides.”
No one said anything about history in the making; no one knew for sure what it meant. But at the White House and the State Department, they rushed to the phones and dialed country code (+20): Cairo? We have a problem.
13
THIS IS NOT ABOUT US
The Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Nazif and Omar Suleiman, the country’s spy chief, had no patience for any more lectures by America. A few months earlier, U.S. officials had called them and even spoken to President Hosni Mubarak himself to press on them the need for urgent reform after the country held fraudulent parliamentary elections in October. A bomb explosion on New Year’s Day in Alexandria had also killed twenty Coptic Christians, and in the daily briefing, Egyptian journalists were imploring P. J. and the United States to do something, anything to help protect Egypt’s minority. As usual, Mubarak was not receptive to outside advice. But now, the Americans seized on the popular rebellion in Tunisia to make their case again. This could happen in Egypt, the officials warned. Don’t you think you’re going to have to open things up? No, came the answer. The Egyptians insisted their country was different. It can’t happen here, they said. Well, why not? asked Washington. Egypt was just different, replied Cairo.
Ten days after Ben Ali left Tunisia, Clinton traveled to Mexico for a one-day trip full of meetings and public events. SAM flew her back and dropped her off at Andrews Air Force Base at two in the morning on January 25. Later that day, she would be attending President Obama’s State of the Union Address in Congress, and she was sending her input to the White House. Obama’s advisors were debating whether to mention the events in Tunisia and decided to make an oblique reference to the rest of the region as well. “The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people,” Obama would say that evening. But first Clinton had a meeting at ten thirty with the Spanish foreign minister Trinidad Jimenez after which they took questions in the Treaty Room. Those litt
le press conferences, called press avails, were an occasion for journalists to ask Clinton about any world event, not just the content of her meeting.
Earlier that day, protests had erupted across Egypt. A wave of small-scale demonstrations against Mubarak’s stranglehold on power had taken place in 2004 and 2005 under the slogan “Enough.” Mubarak had been president since 1981, reelected regularly with a surreal 98 percent of the vote. He was grooming his son to take over. The “Enough” movement petered out while another protest group started up: the April 6 movement was launched on Facebook in 2008 and called for a national strike in support of textile workers. Inspired by the nonviolent Otpor! group in Serbia, which helped bring down Slobodan Milošević, one of the movement’s members also attended a youth conference organized by the State Department in December 2008. He told U.S. officials about a plan to replace the Mubarak government with a parliamentary democracy by 2011. In a diplomatic cable, revealed by WikiLeaks, U.S. officials said this was a highly unrealistic goal. The April 6 movement did little between December 2008 and January 2011. But now the simmering anger and frustration in a country of eighty million people had been inflamed by Bouazizi next door, and the youth movement in Egypt seized its chance.