No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  One month before, the President had vetoed an Iraq supplemental funding bill because the $124 billion had come with strings attached. Included in those strings was an arbitrary deadline for withdrawal of U.S. forces. A revised bill removed the timetable but laid out a series of difficult-to-meet “benchmarks” for progress by the Iraqi government. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker would be summoned back to Washington in September to report on the state of the war. The President and I had met with the Republican leadership, which had told the President that the situation in Iraq was “endangering the future of the Republican Party.” Despite the President’s cool, I could see how much that comment hurt. The Republican Party? I’d thought at the time. What about the future of the country and America’s credibility? But it was crystal clear that the domestic dénouement was fast approaching.

  “I want everyone to stay home and fight the fight here,” he said. “I need you and Bob Gates meeting with Congress, meeting with the press—I need you out there defending the policy and buying time.” At first I didn’t quite get it. Did he mean I needed to stay home too? He did. The next morning, I canceled all but essential travel for July and turned my attention to the war at home.

  More than ever, I needed the State Department fully mobilized and fully behind me. Ryan Crocker had sent a memo saying that he wasn’t getting the personnel that he needed in Iraq. It leaked to the press, and I used the moment to make a more draconian change in our personnel policies. I called the director general, a high-ranking Foreign Service officer with responsibility for all career-related decisions and management of the corps, to come in for an extended session on our challenges in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. Harry K. Thomas had been a good choice for the job. Much like his excellent predecessor, George Staples, Thomas was creative and unafraid of controversy, though his deft touch kept the latter to a minimum. “What more can I do?” I asked. “Do I have to direct people to go?” Coincidentally, both Harry and George were black officers in this position, one of the highest ranking jobs in the foreign service.

  Thomas asked for a few days to think about it, and when he returned he suggested that I declare that no bids would be accepted on posts until the Iraq and Afghanistan jobs were filled. I accepted his recommendation and made a statement to that effect. It was a heavy-handed policy, and I knew that it would be unpopular as officers around the world waited to learn what their next assignment would be. But it worked, and Ryan got the people that he needed. Eventually, four former ambassadors—Charlie Ries, Marcie Ries, Adam Ereli, and Margaret Scobey—would join him, making the Iraq embassy team the most experienced in the world.

  Another crucial step was getting my entire team behind me—not just the political folks such as Brian Gunderson and Brian Besanceney, who’d replaced Jim Wilkinson. I knew where they stood on the war. Eliot Cohen, an extraordinary scholar from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, had replaced Phil Zelikow, and he too was a proponent of the war, though somewhat critical of how we’d conducted it. No, I needed the senior management of the department, particularly the career officers, to be with us.

  The opportunity to discuss with them the challenge of Iraq came at the end of June. I’d begun scheduling annual two-day retreats outside of Washington for the senior staff to review priorities and set direction for the next year. This year, we met at the Airlie Center in Virginia late on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth. The group consisted of just the key regional assistant secretaries, the under secretaries, and my front office.

  Sitting down in an overstuffed chair in front of them, I asked what they wanted to talk about. A few people spoke up about various problems around the world. After a few minutes, I stopped the discussion. “Doesn’t anyone want to talk about Iraq?” Someone later told a journalist that it was like a weight had been lifted from the room. Each assistant secretary related his or her fears that we were losing in Iraq. “We can’t afford to lose—America can’t lose, and the whole world thinks we are losing,” one person said. I let people vent for a long time, and then I talked about what we were trying to do. Everyone, to a person, said that Iraq would become a greater personal priority as they thought about their work. We had to win.

  …

  THE DAYS were long and stressful in the summer of 2007, and I tried once in a while to get away from the pressures by playing the piano or visiting friends. Dog-tired, I decided to take a real holiday for the Fourth of July weekend, inviting my cousin and her husband to Washington. The President’s birthday is July 6, but Laura always threw a party at the White House for him on Independence Day. After launching my own diplomatic reception for foreign dignitaries at the State Department, I would join the White House festivities and watch the fireworks from the Truman Balcony.

  In 2007 Tiger Woods started holding a tournament at the Congressional Country Club over the holiday weekend. The President invited the professional golfers to his birthday celebration. It was great fun to sit with Fred Couples and Phil Mickelson and talk about my newly discovered love of golf.

  Since the tournament honored veterans, I decided to go the next day to support that cause and to enjoy a day outside the office. I sat with wounded warriors, watching those amazing golfers. Suddenly, my security detail tried to dive in front of me as I watched Phil’s duck-hooked two-iron whiz by me. It didn’t come as close as it looked—I’m sure. Boy, he must have really caught that way early, I thought. A week later, the Washington Post published a snippy little piece suggesting that I seemed to have too much time on my hands. I can hardly wait to get out of this town, I thought.

  THINGS WERE STARTING to improve in Iraq, and for the first time in almost two years I felt that we’d turned a corner. The surge was beginning to have an effect on population security, both in perception and reality. Sectarian violence was down due to gains in Al Anbar province, where the military had secured the cooperation of the tribes. My meeting with the sheikhs of the Anbar Awakening on November 1 was encouraging—if a bit odd. Our allies were tough and rough-hewn, and one wondered about their long-term commitment to pluralistic politics. Nonetheless, they were patriots who were determined to take their territory back from al Qaeda, and they represented our best chance for stability in Iraq. More than anything, these men represented what Steve Hadley had talked about the day the statue of Saddam fell in Baghdad. Finally, the Iraqis were determined to liberate themselves—it was their fight now, not just ours.

  Along the way I had seen glimpses of the political evolution in Iraq, too, when I had visited the city of Mosul in 2005 and met with the town council there. Mosul promised to be one of the most difficult places in the country in which to establish political institutions. It was an ethnically mixed city, challenged by Kurdish-Sunni rivalries that had often been violent. The Provincial Reconstruction Team working there was among the most experienced in Iraq—with a seasoned diplomat, Jason P. Hyland, leading the political effort. I walked into the conference room—which was badly in need of a coat of paint—and listened to the briefing by the team. After a few minutes, the Kurdish head of the council was asked to make remarks. He was one of the toughest-looking characters I’d ever seen; “five o’clock shadow” didn’t do justice to the mask covering his lower face.

  The discussion started off pretty well, with the council chief talking about the need for everyone to work together and his commitment to democracy and tolerance. Then he turned to his deputy, a Sunni, who began to talk about the rights of his people and expressing views about elections in the region that were clearly not consistent with those of the wider council. All of the members were now shifting uncomfortably in their seats. I could see that tensions were rising, and my first impulse was to say something to calm the situation. Then something inside of me said, Keep quiet—see how they handle this. I’m glad that I didn’t intervene. The Sunni finished his remarks, and the council chief simply said, “Thank you for your views.” It was killing him, but somehow he knew that in the “new Iraq,” he had to let people have th
eir say. Maybe, I thought, they have a chance at decent politics after all.

  Those moments had been all too rare early on but the Iraqis were slowly maturing politically as the surge took hold. Indeed, I found myself defending the Iraqis more vigorously than I would have thought possible after my difficult encounter with them in October of the year before. Suddenly, it seemed churlish and self-righteous when members of Congress chastised the Iraqis for failure to pass a budget. How long has it been since the United States passed a budget on time? I wondered. I started to draw more and more on the United States’ own experience. How long had it taken for even our mature democracy to deal with minority rights? It was only in my lifetime that black people finally achieved a guarantee of their right to vote. The United States, more than any other country in the world, should be patient.

  Fortunately, the Iraqis were starting to show that they could take advantage of the moment and that they had one great asset that most new democracies don’t have: wealth. They announced that they’d spend $7.3 billion of their own money to train, equip, and modernize their forces. That was relatively easy to achieve. But we had to pressure Maliki to also use the country’s resources for reconstruction in the provinces and to target a substantial portion of it for the Awakening.

  Not surprisingly, the Shia prime minister was suspicious of the loyalties of the sheikhs. We’d go back and forth with the Iraqis about getting support to their new allies in Al Anbar province. Finally, the President’s frustration relative to this led him to convene a meeting in Al Anbar province late in 2007 with Maliki, Talabani, Second Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, and the sheikhs. Maliki looked as if he were being dragged to a hanging. He sat in an almost fetal position as the Sunnis demanded project after project for reconstruction as recognition of their role in securing the heartland. But Jalal Talabani was all over it. “You, the great sons of Al Anbar, will get what you want. Yes, you should have a military academy! We have heard you.” What a politician. It was suddenly clear why this Kurd was the most unifying figure in the country: he knew how to play the game like the best Chicago ward boss.

  But the clock in Iraq and the one in Washington weren’t in sync. The President had been right to focus our attention on the home front, where in September there would be a formal review of progress. We needed to hold the line until then and hope that there would be enough positive news to sustain the effort. Bob Gates and I held briefings for Congress on each aspect of the effort in Iraq, with Bob bringing new credibility to the assessments that we were presenting. In addition to the large briefings in both houses, Bob, Steve, and I met individually with influential legislators and as many members of the press as possible. We were just trying to hold ground in the face of the harsh head winds blowing against the war. When the President released an interim report in July on the congressional benchmarks, Senators John Warner and Richard Lugar responded with a call to begin drawing up plans to redeploy U.S. forces from the front line to border security and counterterrorism. There was no one on the Hill more respected than those two Republicans. They were known for their national security knowledge and steadfastness. Hence their call for troop redeployment was a shot across our bow that time was running out—indeed, it had already run out with the American people.

  Then there was a breakthrough—not in Iraq but in the pages of the New York Times. Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution published an opinion piece in that paper in late July arguing that the Iraq war strategy was accomplishing its objectives and the military should be given more time to play it out. Both men were highly regarded and had been critical of the war effort. And since Brookings was hardly a hotbed of Republicanism, the article sent shock waves through Washington. Maybe the terms of the debate were changing—or at least some of the policy elites were starting to take a fresh look.

  We’d been in discussions about how to respond to the September review—for example, should the President hint at a coming drawdown? I believed that the American people needed reassurance that our combat presence would indeed come to an end someday. Bob Gates and Steve agreed, thinking that it was better for us to control the conversation about withdrawals than to leave it to others. In retrospect, there was less friction inside the administration on that point than one might have thought. Now that things were going better in Iraq, we could talk about the “end in sight” without the implication that we were cutting and running. It was in that vein that we began to consider how a framework arrangement with the Iraqis—both a status-of-forces agreement and a political document to govern the relationship—might bring an end to the war. The President had only eighteen months left; Iraq needed to be on a sustainable footing when our transfer of power occurred.

  When David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker came back in September to testify on progress in Iraq, the mood in Washington had shifted. There were still those who argued for withdrawal on a timetable, but the sense that the war was irretrievably lost had disappeared. The President had courageously played his last card in authorizing the surge. It had turned out to be a winner.

  The progress in Iraq was starting to reverberate in the region as well. Finally beginning to see a pathway to a stable Iraq, the GCC countries agreed to invite Iraq’s foreign minister to join them in a meeting with me. And the Arabs began to make plans to reenter Iraq diplomatically, with Saudi Arabia announcing its intention to send an ambassador to Baghdad. The hard work wasn’t finished, and the Arabs still viewed the Shia-led government with suspicion. But the situation was a far cry from the darkest days of 2006.

  EVEN AS conditions improved in Iraq, a new storm was brewing in the region, this one between the Kurds and the Turks. On October 21, the Kurdish terrorist group PKK launched an attack across the Turkish border from northern Iraq, killing seventeen Turkish soldiers. Instability on the border had already prompted the Turkish Parliament, a few days earlier, to authorize the deployment of forces into Iraq to crack down on the militants. Obviously, this was a provocative and dangerous move, putting the young Iraqi government on the spot in the face of a clear violation of its sovereignty. There was a good chance that it could even ignite a small-scale war, because Massoud Barzani’s militia—the armed wing of the Kurdistan Democratic Party—would likely resist a Turkish incursion. Now, with this latest provocation by the PKK, it wasn’t clear that Turkey could be restrained.

  I called Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Erdoğan, asking him to delay his decision and promising that the United States would put pressure on our Kurdish allies to take action against the militants. I called Barzani and told him that time was running out. Either he would deal with the militants or the Turks would. And I believed the Turks were in the right. Then I told the press about the conversation, leaving out the point about the Turks being in the right. I wanted to calm public opinion in Ankara, but I didn’t want to hand Erdoğan a pretext for invading northern Iraq. I said simply, “I made the very clear point [to Barzani] that the KRG [Kurdish Regional Government] needs to separate itself from the PKK in a very, very clear and rhetorical way.… The [KRG] is not going to prosper in conditions in which there is instability in northern Iraq, and the PKK is a serious source of instability in northern Iraq.”

  I was scheduled to go to the second Iraq neighbors conference in Istanbul at the beginning of November. To buy some time, the President decided that I’d go to Ankara first. We asked the Turks not to do anything until my trip. On October 26 Erdoğan signaled publicly that he would delay his decision to deploy forces until he could meet with President Bush.

  Still, landing in Ankara, the extent of the public’s anger was clear; it was hard to escape patriotic banners and signs denouncing the Kurds. I held a press conference with my colleague, the young foreign minister Ali Babacan, promising to put the full weight of the United States behind an Iraqi crackdown on the PKK. I reminded the press that the United States didn’t discriminate among terrorists, and explained that I had confirmed with the prime minister that we considered the issue
“a common threat—not just a threat to Turkey but a threat to the interest of the United States as well.” I said that the President would meet with Prime Minister Erdoğan on November 5 to further the discussions. Taken aback when Ali seemed to suggest that the PKK’s resurgence was a result of our invasion of Iraq, I gently reminded him that Turkey had had problems with the PKK well before 2003.

  In my meetings with Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, it was easy to see that the Turks really didn’t want conflict. But they were being pushed to the limit by public anger and—it seemed, though they didn’t say it—a military that was spoiling for a fight. When the President and Erdoğan met, they set into motion planning for the United States, Iraq, and Turkey to deal with the PKK. A year before, I had asked retired Air Force General Joseph Ralston to act as a special envoy on the issue. It was tedious work, and he met with considerable bureaucratic resistance inside the U.S. government and in Turkey. He had returned to private life before this crisis unfolded, but he laid significant groundwork toward a solution.