No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  “Not very well,” I said, taking the seat next to him in front of the roaring fire. “We have a tough sell.”

  “Tough sell” doesn’t even scratch the surface, I thought. I’d certainly expected considerable skepticism from the senators; Iraq wasn’t going well, and no one wanted to be in support of our effort. The day before, Senator John McCain had called to warn me. “Don’t take any guff from any of them,” he said. “You’re in a position to stand your ground.” It was a kind of pep talk, and frankly, I appreciated it.

  But the questioning was more brutal than I had expected, with senators essentially implying that the administration could no longer be trusted. In fact, those were precisely the words that Senator Bill Nelson of Florida used. “I have not been told the truth,” the Democratic senator said. “I have not been told the truth over and over again by administration witnesses, and the American people have not been told the truth.” What could I say to that? I tried to stay calm and responded that I’d always told the truth as I knew it—sometimes we’d been wrong, but we’d never intended to mislead. The exchange was one of the lowest moments of my entire career in government.

  Listening to those legislators working to outdo one another in criticizing the President was painful. I kept trying to focus on what the surge would do: integrate military and civilian counterinsurgency efforts and deploy U.S. personnel among the people to deliver population security, reconstruction, and governance. I also emphasized that the new way forward in Iraq would take place against a broader regional diplomatic strategy in the Middle East, pitting moderate reformers against militant regimes in Iran and Syria. Stay focused, I told myself. Keep delivering the message.

  Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel called the President’s decision “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” And he was a Republican. Many senators excoriated Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, with most suggesting that we’d reached the point of no return: the war could not be won.

  After a near-relentless barrage of criticism, California Senator Barbara Boxer provided one of the few openings during which I could take the offensive. She inexplicably suggested that I could not understand the sacrifices of those lost in conflict because I had no children. Not only was it a dumb thing to say, it was deeply offensive. Would anyone have said that to a male secretary of state? I wondered. I didn’t realize that having children had anything to do with one’s fitness to lead. I decided not to engage her on that point and instead responded that I fully understood the sacrifices that our men and women in uniform were making. “I visit them,” I stated. “I know what they’re going through. I talk to their families. I see it.” She backed off but was broadly criticized for the bizarre comment.

  I made it to the end of the hearings without losing my cool and having defended as best I could the strategy about which I’d been an early skeptic. “That was pretty rough,” my chief of staff, Brian Gunderson, said as we drove away from Capitol Hill.

  “Could have been worse,” I replied.

  In fact, I was feeling somewhat better about the prospects for a successful surge. Bob Gates was now at the Pentagon, and we could work together to unify our civilian and military efforts. Later in the year, Lieutenant General Doug Lute would join the NSC staff as the President’s principal advisor on Iraq and Afghanistan, building on the extraordinary work of Meghan O’Sullivan in coordinating these two engagements. Steve Hadley and I had also had dinner with then Lieutenant General David Petraeus just before Christmas, and I had great confidence in him. “This is the second time we were supposed to get together,” Dave said when we arrived at the Watergate restaurant. I didn’t understand what he meant. “I had made an appointment to come and see you at the National Security Council before leaving for Iraq in 2003,” he recalled. “Secretary Rumsfeld found out about it and insisted that I cancel.” Thank goodness those struggles of distrust and secrecy with the Pentagon were over.

  THE DAY after my testimony I headed to the Middle East. I was focused on the upcoming meeting with the GCC that would take place toward the end of my trip, where I was sure I could secure support for the surge. But during my first stops in Ramallah and Jerusalem, I made unexpectedly good progress on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, securing an agreement with Olmert and Abbas to conduct a three-way dialogue, with the United States as an active participant. It was a breakthrough that signaled that the President and I had gained the trust of both sides. The Israelis typically preferred bilateral talks with the Palestinians and separate bilateral talks with us, worried that they’d be forced into a corner in a tripartite framework. They preferred to “agree to a position with the United States” and then talk to the Palestinians. “That won’t work,” I had explained, making clear that I needed to be an honest broker. I announced the deal in Egypt, trying to show respect for Cairo’s special role in the peace process. If we were going to get a deal, we needed the Arabs.

  As I’d expected, Mubarak was focused more on Iraq and Iran than on the Palestinians. He, like King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, was thrilled that the President had doubled down on Iraq. Those leaders had worried that the United States would cut and run, leaving them to face chaos in Iraq and enhanced Iranian influence in the region. They don’t know George W. Bush very well, I thought.

  At the GCC meeting the next day, the surge proved wildly popular. My Persian Gulf counterparts were as supportive as Congress had been dismissive. The ministers of the Gulf states, Egypt, and Jordan tried to outdo one another in thanking the President for his decision, and this time they issued a public statement of support. When facing skeptical questions about Baghdad’s inability to govern earlier that day, I had been delighted to hear Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal come to the Iraqis’ defense. “Why speculate on such dire consequences?” he asked. Invoking Iraq’s historic legacy as part of the cradle of civilization, Saud continued, “I cannot for the life of me conceive that a country like that would commit suicide given the goodwill and the desire of all to help in this.” Standing next to him during the press conference, I was so grateful to him for his comments. I then had a passing thought: I hope to God he’s right.

  One of our biggest concerns during the closed meeting was our decision to engage Baghdad’s neighbors, including Iran, in a conference about Iraq’s future. “Why do you want the Iranians there?” I was asked. I explained that the Iraqis wanted to include all neighbors and the United States wouldn’t object. “Just don’t let them gain a foothold in Iraq that way,” the ministers warned. My announcement a few days earlier that we had arrested Iranian operatives in Iraq helped tamp down their anxiety. President Bush had authorized a series of raids against Iranian agents who were providing sophisticated explosive devices and other weapons and training to the Shia militias. The action had sent shock waves across the region. “Tehran needs to know that its militants will not be permitted to operate with impunity in Iraq,” I’d told the ministers. Since one of those captured was a high-ranking Quds Force officer, Tehran had to worry about the exposure of its clandestine activities inside Iraq. There’s no doubt that for a while the Iranian regime pulled in its horns after his arrest.

  I moved on to discuss the progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The GCC ministers were pleased, but there wasn’t a lot of discussion. This is pretty interesting, I thought. The Israeli-Palestinian issue has fallen down the list of priorities. Iran is number one, two, three, and four.

  I returned to Washington fully prepared to exploit this new reality. I arranged to return to the region a month later, in February, for the first trilateral talks with Israel and the Palestinian Authority. My Middle East Quartet colleagues from the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia joined me at the State Department on February 2 to give a push to the upcoming negotiations. There was considerable optimism about the peace process, now that the United States had taken the lead.

  My goal was to get agreement to accelerate progress on the Road Map—the document developed in 20
03 that outlines the parties’ step-by-step obligations toward the creation of a Palestinian state. But I hoped, too, that we could agree to begin a dialogue on the final status issues: borders, security, refugees, and Jerusalem. I knew that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was reluctant to engage on these “core” points of contention. He argued, as had his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, that the Palestinians needed to show a stronger commitment to fighting terrorism before these issues could be discussed, in effect halting progress on the Road Map at its first stage.

  The argument had become stale, though, and I believed that the Israelis would—in the context of trilateral discussions with me—begin to negotiate these issues seriously. President Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority were locked in a low-level war with their extremist Hamas rivals in Gaza, with near-daily fatal clashes between their respective security forces. It would be hard for the Israelis to claim that they didn’t have a partner against terrorism with the bloody conflict between the Palestinian factions playing out every day.

  Little did I know that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was reading the Palestinian landscape too—but with increasing alarm. He was no friend of Hamas, given its connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, which often challenged the legitimacy of the region’s authoritarian regimes. Yet the sight of Palestinians killing one another was more than he could bear. According to his advisors, the king had been watching a wall full of televisions that he keeps playing at all times in the palace. On every screen, the bloodshed in Gaza was visible. “The Israelis have got to be stopped,” he’d said. When told that it wasn’t Israelis but Palestinians who were firing on one another, he decided to “do something.” The king got on the telephone, called Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, and summoned them to Mecca. When a call comes from the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, no leader in the Arab world can refuse to answer.

  I held my breath as we waited for news of what the agreement would say. There was little doubt that there would be a pact, because the Palestinians weren’t foolish enough to embarrass the Saudi king. When word came that there was a deal, it was a devastating blow. My trusted interpreter Gamal Helal rushed down to my office. He’d been on the phone with Abbas’s people and had been following the Al Jazeera coverage as well. “How bad is it?” I asked. “It’s a piece of sh—t!” he exclaimed, quickly apologizing for his language. Hamas would enter into a unity government with the Palestinian Authority, and the party’s putative leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, would become prime minister. With that agreement, the distinction between the moderate Fatah and extremist Hamas factions was immediately blurred since the Palestinian Authority would now allow officials from a group that we, the Europeans, and the Israelis listed as a terrorist organization into the Palestinian government. Any prospects for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were now dead on arrival.

  Olmert was on the phone in what seemed like a matter of minutes. “I won’t negotiate with terrorists,” he yelled. I didn’t challenge him, knowing that no Israeli prime minister would talk to a Palestinian government that counted Hamas among its members. I said I’d get back to him and tried to phone Abbas, who was, to be frank, ducking my call. The next day I finally reached the Palestinian Authority president, telling him bluntly that any chance for negotiations had been destroyed by the “unity pact.” He begged me to understand that, sitting in Mecca with the king of Saudi Arabia, he had had no choice but to sign it. Our other Arab allies were equally contrite but unwilling to do anything to repair the damage.

  My trip to Jerusalem for the trilateral meeting with Olmert and Abbas was to take place a week later. “I’m going ahead with it,” I told Steve and the President the next morning in the Oval. “Maybe I can keep the whole thing on life support if I can get the two of them in the same room.” After all, if Abbas could not negotiate, by default Hamas’ agenda, “no negotiations,” would win outright. The President agreed, and when Olmert called him to protest, he asked the prime minister to go through with the meeting. After much back-and-forth, the Israeli agreed, making sure we knew that he’d have no discussion of “anything substantive.”

  It wasn’t the best start to a diplomatic initiative, but at least the two had agreed to talk. I had very low expectations for the meeting; I was just hoping to keep the encounter from blowing up. I told the press that we’d discuss how to map out a “political horizon” for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The two parties needed to be convinced that there could be an end in sight to the conflict. The term was deliberately vague and could mean anything from broad philosophical ruminations about the future to the minute details of final-status negotiations. Olmert said he would confine their discussions to the former, Abbas the latter. Throughout the trip journalists would ask if the situation was too complicated for a meeting. “If one waited for the perfect time to come to the Middle East,” I replied, “perhaps you wouldn’t get on an airplane.” But some times were better than others. This one wasn’t very good.

  The David Citadel Hotel was always enormously helpful and accommodating during my numerous trips to Jerusalem. This time, though, we quickly realized that there wasn’t a proper room for a tripartite meeting. Karen Hughes and my advisor Colby Cooper, who had been with me since the White House days, went to look at the one option, a voluminous ballroom that swallowed a little table where the three of us were supposed to sit. They did their best, bringing in potted palms and Israeli, Palestinian, and American flags to make the setting slightly more intimate. And I learned later that there had been a last-minute swap of the table for one that was fair to all parties—the original had a Star of David emblazoned on it.

  After the obligatory camera spray with the three of us smiling stiffly and awkwardly shaking hands—it’s rather difficult to shake the hands of two leaders at once—the press left and we sat down, just the three of us. The table was tiny and the room enormous. “I feel like I’m in a train station,” Abbas said. Olmert took up the hostility in the room. “How could you hug Khaled Meshal?” he asked Abbas. The Palestinian kept trying to explain that he had no choice when the Saudis pushed for an agreement, but Olmert clearly had the upper hand. Soon the two were exchanging a steady volley of insults as I sat silently in the middle. “Well, you should never have had the elections,” Olmert said, referring to the 2006 vote that had brought Hamas to power in Gaza.

  “We didn’t want to have elections,” Abbas shot back.

  I furrowed my brow at that one. What are they talking about? I asked myself. They both wanted elections. But I decided that I had an opening to put them on the same page. “Okay,” I said, “we wanted the elections. The United States wanted the elections. All right?” They sat back in their chairs, satisfied to let the American take the blame. “Now can we go upstairs to my suite and talk about the future?” I pleaded. They agreed, and, much to the surprise of our aides and the hotel staff, we trundled onto the elevator and headed for the ninth floor.

  Once we were upstairs, the mood lightened considerably. We walked out onto the balcony overlooking the Holy City. Olmert pointed out all of the construction he’d overseen when he was mayor—not really a helpful line of discussion. Abbas half-jokingly said, “Yes, and you built those ugly apartments in front of the Damascus Gate.”

  “I built them for the French and the Americans,” Olmert countered. Everyone laughed.

  I then added that I had my own “final-status issue.” “Do you know that the Protestants don’t have a place in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher?” I asked. “I want them to when you finally settle Jerusalem.” That lightened the mood even more, and we went inside where the two talked about their desire to settle the conflict. There were no negotiations and no breakthroughs, but under the circumstances it was a diplomatic victory. At least they were talking.

  I decided to make a press statement on my own—without the two of them—not wanting to risk unraveling the fragile comity we’d achieved. “Can I say that you’ll meet again?” I asked gingerly. They nod
ded in agreement. “I’ll be back next month,” I said, and went out to face the press.

  “They only agreed to meet again?” someone asked.

  “Yes,” I responded. “They will meet again.” You have no idea how relieved I am to be able to say that, I thought. I packed up and headed home.

  THE DEPARTMENT was finally taking the charge seriously to fully mobilize for duty in Iraq. Bob Zoellick had decided to step down as deputy, a step I regretted. We’d worked well together, but Bob acknowledged that he’d never quite accustomed himself to being number two. He remained a good and valued colleague and a sounding board for the various issues I would continue to confront during my tenure.

  His departure came at a bad time, though, with all the trouble swirling around in the Middle East. I knew I wanted John Negroponte to be my deputy, but he was then serving as the nation’s first director of national intelligence (DNI). He wanted to come to State but didn’t want to send the message that the DNI was a job so fraught with bureaucratic infighting that he couldn’t last even a year. The President insisted on finding another candidate for the DNI before he would release John to take the job at State. I understood all of those concerns, but it made the management of the department even more difficult. Though Nick Burns served capably as acting deputy, it looked to the outside world as if the team was falling apart—especially when my counselor, Phil Zelikow, decided to leave too. Since no one knew that Negroponte would become the deputy, there was a good deal of scuttlebutt that I’d run into management trouble at Foggy Bottom. I was relieved when John finally joined me; he was the perfect choice. One of the most revered Foreign Service officers of his generation, he’d been on Henry Kissinger’s delegation during the 1972 opening to China, worked in Vietnam, and served as ambassador five times, including a tour in Iraq. His authority and popularity in the Foreign Service were enormously helpful in supporting some of the tough calls that I had to make regarding personnel assignments to difficult places.