Indeed, the “unmasking” of Hamas was one of the unexpected but welcome benefits of their victory in the elections. I’d often argued that it was preferable to force extremists to prove that they could govern, not just blow up innocent people. Hamas couldn’t do the former, so it decided to launch a preemptive strike against the rapidly improving security forces of Mahmoud Abbas. Everyone knew that Hamas had the upper hand in Gaza but believed that the Fatah forces were at least capable of putting up a fight. They weren’t. While Fatah’s national security advisor (and one of the former security chiefs), Mohammed Dahlan, was in Egypt for surgery on his knee, Fatah forces were routed, the final indignity being Hamas’s takeover of Abu Mazen’s Gaza compound.
The Palestinian Authority had been pushed back into the West Bank. But there was both good news and bad news in that. Obviously Gaza would be an even bigger terrorist safe haven than before. Yet the PA could now concentrate on building reasonable institutions and economic growth in the West Bank. It would have the support of the international community in doing so—including the Israelis, who would restart the flow of tax revenue to the government of Salam Fayyad. It would also allow Olmert to begin, in earnest, to pursue political talks with Abbas, who’d rid himself of the albatross of Hamas.
The timing coincided with Tony Blair’s decision to step down as prime minister and cede the office to his intra-party rival Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Blair sent a private note to the President and asked him to share it with me. It asked whether the United States would support the creation of a position for him as the Quartet’s special representative for Middle East affairs.
“Tony wants to do this, but he doesn’t want to step on your toes,” the President told me, standing at his desk in the Oval. I read Blair’s letter, which laid out an agenda of strengthening Palestinian institutions. He explained to the President that the United States would have to deliver the negotiated solution.
“It’s fine,” I told the President. “I think we can work together and he can go places and do things that I can’t.”
“Like what?” the President asked.
“Go to Gaza,” I answered. The other Quartet members quickly came on board with the idea, and Blair was named to the post.
Tony Blair would bring new energy to the effort to build the Palestinian institutions and foster economic development in the West Bank. Olmert and Abbas were finally ready to negotiate seriously toward a final-status agreement, meeting at Sharm el-Sheik on June 25 and announcing their intention to do so. If they succeeded, Hamas would have to make a choice. If Hamas opted for continued resistance, it would lose the Palestinian people, who wanted decent lives. And if it accepted the agreement, it was finished as a terrorist organization. The pieces were falling into place for a big push toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was during those summer weeks that I began, very discreetly, to lay the ground for what would be the historic Annapolis Conference. There could be no better accelerant for the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East than, at long last, the establishment of a democratic Palestine.
I FELT VERY GOOD about the cooperation that we were achieving in the Middle East. But there were some issues that made me want to pull my hair out in pursuing common ground with the “international community.” Sudan was exhibit one.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, so painstakingly brokered by Bob Zoellick in 2005, was in serious danger of unraveling under the worsening circumstances in Darfur, and the May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement was failing for a variety of reasons including a lack of signatures and limited scope. I’d seen firsthand the suffering in the refugee camps, and the continued reports of violence against civilians were fueling—properly—cries of outrage from human rights groups and NGOs. The crisis was one of those front-page stories with enormous celebrity attention and daily calls for the administration to do more.
In fact, no one wanted to do more than the President. He was fed up with the fecklessness of the United Nations and the international community—and sometimes, I thought, fed up with my explanations for why nothing was moving forward. Why couldn’t the world do a simple thing such as mobilize peacekeeping forces to protect innocent people and deploy them to Darfur, even if it meant ramming them down the throats of the war criminals in Khartoum?
The answer was simple. There was little will or stomach for a confrontation with the Sudanese government, particularly since the Security Council was stalemated due to China’s reluctance to impose penalties on the oil-rich regime. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, did just enough to keep pressures from mounting to the point of action, usually by feigning agreement with entreaties to admit UN forces only to find numerous excuses to keep them from deploying.
He could count on the inefficiency of the United Nations as well. It was like pulling teeth to get the peacekeeping bureaucracy to recruit forces and pay them. When I learned from the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, that he was ready to send forces—capable troops—to Darfur, I was delighted. He called later to say that it would take six months—not because his military was slow but because the United Nations insisted on building barracks for them and that would take time. “I told them the army can travel on its stomachs,” he said, referring to their ability to build their own encampments along the way. I called UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and lost my temper when he defended the peacekeeping office. “This is why people hate the U.N.,” I said, feeling an immediate sense of regret for my rudeness. Ban Ki-moon was not the problem. He was a good man with the right values, but he headed the worst bureaucracy in the world. The secretary-general couldn’t even fire people without a vote of a committee of the General Assembly. “I’ll try again,” he said meekly. “I know, I know,” I answered.
My most uncomfortable meetings with the President were always about Sudan—because I couldn’t give him good options. The Principals Committee meetings that we held in advance of the NSC sessions rarely achieved much as attendees reviewed over and over again the impediments to international action. The President’s frustration finally boiled over, and he told his assembled War Cabinet that he was considering unilateral military action and wanted options. Jendayi Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who’d advocated for a tougher response, was very excited but soon reported that the working-level sessions had become bogged down. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon had made it clear that it opposed any military involvement in Sudan. Its argument was compelling: we can’t take military action in another Muslim country, especially one in which a vital national interest isn’t at stake. As frustrated as he was, the President acceded to the reality of that circumstance.
That left us with no course but to return to the slog of international cooperation. The President did levy new U.S. sanctions in May, and I was directed to consult with the United Kingdom and other allies on multilateral sanctions and an expanded embargo on arms sales to Sudan.
The problem, of course, wasn’t the United Kingdom or any of the Europeans. In fact, the May election of Nicolas Sarkozy in France strengthened the coalition against Sudan. The French president called seventeen countries, including China and Russia, as well as diplomats from regional and international organizations, to Paris for an international meeting on Darfur. He was wonderfully blunt, saying that the international community was not meeting its responsibilities.
That June I went to visit Sarkozy in Paris. The energetic president of France and his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, made quite a pair. Sarkozy had cleverly reached across the political aisle to select Kouchner from the opposition Socialist Party. Kouchner is a Nobel Prize winner for his extraordinary work in founding Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, which delivers medical assistance around the globe. Sarkozy is a pro-American son of a Hungarian immigrant who values freedom and human rights. The two of them were quite a contrast to the cynical Chirac, who thought in terms of French grandeur and great-power politics and had a colonialist disdain for the democr
atic aspirations of people in the Middle East and Africa.
Whenever I met Sarkozy, he greeted me by saying, “I love this woman.” He didn’t mean it literally, of course. But we saw eye to eye on almost everything. I couldn’t help but think how different it might have been to confront the problem of Saddam Hussein with Sarkozy instead of Chirac in the Élysée Palace and Angela Merkel instead of Gerhard Schroeder in Berlin. France could do little, though, to move the needle on Darfur. Beijing was the obstacle. Sudan was perhaps the best example of China’s mercantilist-style foreign policy—concerned first and foremost with its economic interests. Sudan was a major supplier of oil to China, and Hu Jintao, who was chasing an average 10 percent growth at home, was in no mood to challenge Bashir over the cost of human lives in Darfur.
In July we would succeed in securing a UN Security Council resolution, 1769, calling for a joint peacekeeping operation with the African Union. That year, the African Union/United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) deployed 26,000 troops to allay the violence. There was never a doubt that violence against civilians ebbed wherever the international peacekeepers deployed. But until the day that I left the State Department there was no greater source of frustration than Sudan. Sudan represented the international community at its worst—smug and self-righteous about its principles, including the “responsibility to protect,” and almost completely ineffective in actually acting on them in hard cases.
The horrific situation in Burma was another egregious example of the international system’s inability to act. The Burmese junta was so repressive and isolated that it had actually refused international help for its people after a monstrous cyclone devastated the country in 2008. Thousands of people died needlessly while the generals deliberated and stalled. We finally managed to get some assistance through, using the good offices of Admiral Timothy Keating, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, who was able to appeal to his counterparts in the Burmese leadership. Nearly ten days passed before the Burmese military junta permitted the first U.S. aid shipment into the country, and by that time the cyclone had killed up to 32,000 people and impacted millions of others. Even after those initial deliveries, Admiral Keating was forced to withdraw four U.S. Navy ships from the region after fifteen failed attempts to convince the government to allow them to deliver more aid.
This behavior was not surprising given the nature of the regime. Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition, had long been under house arrest and had become a symbol of the junta’s repressions. Laura Bush had taken up her plight as a personal cause, giving voice to the United States’ support for the Burmese people. But India and China always blocked real action in the Security Council, citing their long borders with Burma and fears of instability.
Then, on the second day of the UN General Assembly in 2007, the sheer brutality of the regime burst onto television screens. The activist religious community in Burma, monks who engaged in peaceful resistance, had always been a center of opposition. But on September 26 they took their protest into the streets for the ninth straight day, chanting the name of Aung San Suu Kyi. The junta cracked down hard, and violence soared.
Coming as it did during the UNGA, the events were deeply embarrassing for Burma’s supporters, especially the Southeast Asian states that had maintained a posture of noninterference in their neighbor’s affairs. I happened to have a meeting with the ASEAN leaders the next afternoon. When the press entered the room, I delivered a strong condemnation of the events, turning to face the Burmese foreign minister. I knew that it would make my Southeast Asian colleagues uncomfortable, since they tended to avoid conflict—a cultural trait, I was always told. I continued to attack the Burmese minister when the cameras left. He tried to talk about trade. “You can’t ignore what your government is doing in the streets. You and your leaders are despicable,” I said. Finally, a few ministers spoke up, particularly my friend Alberto Romulo, the foreign secretary of the Philippines, who was more direct than others at the table. But still no UN action followed. There was just a weak UN Security Council Presidential Statement (the mildest form of condemnation). Within a few weeks, we imposed tougher unilateral sanctions on Burma. Multilateral penalties would have been more effective, but we didn’t have that option.
There would be one other example of the international community’s inability to act. The plight of the people of Zimbabwe under the aging dictator Robert Mugabe would capture headlines worldwide, particularly when a cholera outbreak underscored the consequences of his authoritarian rule: a contaminated water supply with no purification chemicals and a collapsed health-care system. Zimbabwe had once been the breadbasket of southern Africa, but it was now experiencing widespread famine. Mugabe’s failure to address these crises was just one example of his callous neglect for his own people. Yet some African leaders, particularly those in South Africa, were reluctant to break publicly with Mugabe because of his fervent opposition to apartheid decades ago. The Russians and the Chinese, too, were reluctant to interfere in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs. This left those who wished to do something about the regime—the United States, Europe, and a few African countries—without the Security Council’s backing for multilateral sanctions.
The United Nations had much to commend, particularly some well-run agencies such as the World Food Programme and UNICEF, ably led by Josette Sheeran and Ann Veneman respectively. It also conducted some very successful peacekeeping missions overseen by talented public servants such as American Jane Hall Lute. In addition, the UN was a place to convene the world to discuss important problems, and the Security Council was a way to express the collective will of the international community on matters of peace and security. But the UN is in the final analysis a collection of independent states. The diplomacy was hard, and I had great help in dealing with the organization. Kristen Silverberg, my assistant secretary for international organizations, was tenacious and fortunately more patient than I. When the time came to do hard things, it was exceedingly difficult to align the interests of its members. I therefore came to value more the ad hoc arrangements, sometimes called “coalitions of the willing,” that could actually get things done.
Thus, I always bristled when the press or experts accused us of unilateralism. Yes, sometimes it would have been better to bring the international community along. But experiences such as Burma and Zimbabwe exposed just how hard it was to get others to do difficult things. The United States was sometimes accused of “moralism,” but at least there was real concern for the plight of those living under tyranny, a quality that seemed in short supply among the broader community of states.
While unilateral sanctions were not always effective, “name-and-shame” efforts were surprisingly powerful. The State Department issued several reports each year that assessed various countries’ progress on human rights and religious freedom. Two of the most watched were the annual human rights report—which was sure to draw a rebuke from countries that were cited for abuses—and the human-trafficking report. President Bush put modern-day slavery on the international agenda with a speech to the UNGA in 2003, followed by the issuing of a National Security Presidential Directive aimed at eradicating human trafficking.
Some of the saddest stories in the world emerged as people began to pay closer attention to the tragedy of human trafficking and slavery: young children sold as sex slaves globally—particularly in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe; children forced into slave labor making cigarettes, bricks, and other items or brutalized and enslaved as household servants, porters, or camel jockeys; children smuggled across borders and sold into “adoptions.” These crimes had been perpetrated for years, but our efforts helped bring them into the light. Each year we ranked countries on their commitment to fighting these awful practices. The ambassador at large for combating and monitoring human trafficking, a position held first by former congressman John Miller and then by Mark Lagon, gave visibility to the cause. And countries hated to be listed in Tier III, the worst offenders. Because virtually
no government wanted to be associated with modern slavery, we were able to make real progress in getting countries to change laws and prosecute offenders. Our efforts were also greatly enhanced by the work of Assistant Secretaries of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Barry Lowenkron and David J. Kramer. Still, as I write this, the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons estimates that 12.3 million adults and children are trafficked for forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution around the world. The struggle against these crimes continues.
43
IRAQ AND THE HOME FRONT
I’D PLANNED TO GO back to Africa during the summer. There was a lot of work to do, including continuing the work of mobilizing the African Union to deal with the mess in Darfur. We had appointed Cindy Courville as ambassador to the African Union, making us the first country to accredit diplomatic representation to the organization. The step was widely welcomed as a sign of our respect for the continent’s efforts to manage its own affairs. Moreover, a number of African leaders wanted me to visit to affirm the popular programs of the Bush administration and give a little domestic push to their initiatives. This was particularly true in Ghana, a Millennium Challenge compact recipient, a partner in disposing of Charles Taylor in Liberia, and a great example of outstanding leaders, John Kufuor.
It seemed as if since 2005 the trip to Ghana never materialized. I’d been on the road one out of every three weeks and sometimes two out of every three weeks, negotiating and trying to advance Middle East Peace, tending to our relations with allies on several continents, and urging Iraqi and Afghan leaders to remain focused on the tasks at hand. My job was to be on the road—because diplomacy didn’t work remotely.
That changed in the summer of 2007. The President and I had one of our periodic dinners late in June. He talked at great length about the situation in Iraq, noting that there were some hopeful signs on the ground. Conditions in Al Anbar province had improved significantly, even before the surge was fully implemented. Like many of our battles in Iraq, success was facilitated by the cooperation of local provincial governors and tribal leaders. In Al Anbar, tribal sheikhs collectively decided to resist al Qaeda and directed their local security forces against the Sunni insurgents. The Anbar Awakening, as it was called, was very much a story of local initiative by the Iraqis and their U.S. military partners, whose innovative application of counterinsurgency principles would become the foundation of the 2007 surge strategy. But the home front was darkening, and the President worried aloud that we might not be able to hold a domestic consensus long enough for the surge to work.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 70
