Some members of Congress began a campaign of condemnation of the Uzbek government. Two weeks After the events in Andijan, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham traveled to the capital of Tashkent to deliver a public rebuke. “[H]istory shows that continued repression of human rights leads to tragedies such as the one that just took place,” McCain lectured.12 Around the same time, I received a letter from McCain, cosigned by five other senators, insisting that America not pay the $23 million we owed the government from our military’s use of the Uzbek air base at K2. “[G]overnment security forces in the city of Andijan massacred hundreds of peaceful demonstrators,” they wrote. “We strongly object to making a payment to Uzbekistan at this time.”13
I replied to the senators, “The bills we have from the Uzbeks are for services rendered in the war on terrorism. Our national policy, as a general rule, is to pay legitimate bills presented for goods and services by other nations.”14 Paying our bills, though occasionally politically difficult, was the right thing to do.15 What’s more, failing to pay for the services we had requested and received and the goods we consumed would send a harmful message to all of the other nations helping us that the United States could not be relied on.16
After the facts were uncovered and eyewitness reporting was gathered, it was clear that Uzbek authorities had confronted an effort intended to overthrow the local government. The government’s security forces and public affairs officials functioned poorly, but this was not a simple case of soldiers slaughtering innocents, as had been widely alleged and misreported. At a principals meeting in the middle of the crisis, I argued for a more measured handling of Uzbekistan, to encourage Uzbek leaders to move in the right direction, toward freer political and economic policies. I did not favor berating them and shoving them back in the wrong direction—particularly when we lacked a clear understanding of what actually had taken place.17 Before calling for draconian sanctions and making public statements criticizing the government, I thought we needed to first find out the facts and then balance our clear interests in promoting freer political systems and human rights with national security interests. I argued further that if we handled the human rights issue incorrectly and damaged our relationship with Uzbekistan, we could make their human rights situation even worse, as the Uzbek regime would likely clamp down against those who had been closest to the United States and the West.* Any incentives Karimov once had to move toward a more open society would be undermined. Further, I knew that it would seriously damage our efforts in Afghanistan.
My arguments did not prevail. At an NSC meeting, Condi Rice responded to me by declaring, “Human rights trump security.” I wondered if she had really thought that through. She seemed to be saying that if a country didn’t behave as we did or as we expected, it would be shunned, even if turning it away from us took a toll on our nation’s security, and to make matters worse, it arrested their progress on human rights. If we took such a good and evil view of the world, we wouldn’t be able to count on support from any non-democratic country. “We made a clear choice, and that was to stand on the side of human rights,” senior State Department official Nick Burns echoed in the press.18
Karimov didn’t appreciate the recitation of complaints he heard in meetings with U.S. officials. Uzbek government officials also asserted that the State Department ignored their requests to renegotiate the base lease for the U.S. air base at K2, the critically important lifeline into Afghanistan. On July 29, 2005, two months After the riots at Andijan, the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered a letter to the U.S. embassy in Tashkent, indicating that we were no longer going to be able to use the air base.19 The Karimov government gave us six months to pack up, which left those of us in the Defense Department scrambling to try to come up with alternatives, all of which were considerably more expensive. Our eviction from Uzbekistan came at a critical time, just when it appeared that the Taliban was mounting a renewed offensive After three years of relative calm. American-Uzbek military-to-military relations were cut off abruptly, ending a relationship that, beginning in 2001, had exposed Uzbeks to democratic values and principles, such as freedom of speech and civilian control of the military.
Uzbek leaders then began to strengthen ties with nations that would not berate them regarding democracy and human rights—such as Russia and China. Karimov signed a formal treaty of friendship with Russia in November 2005, a marked reversal in attitude from when I had met with him four years earlier.
“Russia was and remains for us the most reliable bulwark and ally,” Karimov noted at the signing ceremony.20 The treaty, he added, “demonstrates with whose interests our interests converge and with whom we intend to build our future.”21
In July 2006, I wrote Hadley, “We are getting run out of Central Asia by the Russians. They are doing a considerably better job at bullying those countries [than] the U.S. is doing to counter their bullying.”22 We were effectively taking ourselves out of the region, and in the process reversing their progress toward freer systems as well as damaging our national security interests. “We need an Administration policy for Central Asia, and we need the NSC to see that our agreed policy—once we have one—remains in balance,” my memo to Hadley continued.23 I saw our administration’s knee-jerk response as shortsighted and misguided. Human rights had not trumped security. The truth was that human rights and our country’s security had both suffered.
Ironically, while we were lecturing and chastising our friends and partners in the name of democracy, administration officials were reaching out to some of the most brutal and undemocratic regimes in the world, lending them the legitimacy they sought. In the weeks After major combat operations had ended in Iraq, intelligence had indicated that the regimes in Syria, Iran, and North Korea were nervous, since Saddam’s regime had toppled in just three weeks. But by 2006, their worries had been eased. Bush’s first-term initiatives to isolate regimes that pursued weapons of mass destruction and sponsored terrorists were dropped to pursue negotiations with them in the second term. Unambiguous records of deception, provocative behavior, and broken promises stretching back decades were set aside in the hope of obtaining reversals from countries such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea through diplomatic engagement. A risk, of course, was that our apparent eagerness could send the wrong signal and make the situation worse.
One of the finest qualities of Americans is our optimism. We tend to believe that people of goodwill anywhere can find solutions to most problems. But there are limits to diplomacy, just as there are limits to goodwill. Some problems cannot be solved through negotiations. Some despotic governments take advantage of international negotiations to achieve prestige, which is political capital for them. Some regimes use terrorism and WMD programs as bargaining chips to extract concessions from other countries. These regimes, and sometimes members of the world’s diplomatic corps, see negotiations and engagement as useful ends in themselves.
I remembered from my time as Middle East envoy for President Reagan how unproductive the many meetings with the Syrians had been. Because they had little incentive to make concessions, our diplomatic efforts appeared to them as signs of weakness that they could exploit. At the same time, there were occasions when I did see advantages to meeting with adversaries, such as Saddam Hussein, when there seemed to be reasons to believe that we might find some common interests. We had to be clear-eyed as to precisely what our goals were before sitting down at the negotiating table. We needed to understand what our interests were, what the other nation’s interests were, and in what ways they might coincide, if at all. We also needed to know what our leverage was and what the other side’s leverage might be.
Since 1979, Iran has considered itself at war with the United States, which it calls the Great Satan. Iran has taken the Soviet Union’s place in the Middle East, forming the core of a resistance bloc that is ready to ally with any state or organization at odds with the United States, the West, and our Sunni Arab friends in Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf.
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br /> Since the radical Islamist regime came to power there, no other nation in the world has been responsible for as many deaths to U.S. troops as Iran. The 1983 attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon was organized by Iran. Beginning in 2004, Iran began supplying Iraqi insurgents with explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), especially deadly improvised explosive devices. Iran was training Shia insurgent groups in Iraq to use them. “If we know so much about what Iran is doing in Iraq, why don’t we do something about it?” read one of my November memos to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.24 But a country strained by two wars and an administration battling criticism and declining public approval was not ready to be firm with Iran. The prospect of another confrontation left many searching for other options.
With nearly two hundred thousand U.S. troops in two countries bordering Iran, the regime could not discount the strength we had in the region. Since Iranian Revolutionary Guard members and its elite branch, the Quds Force, were training and arming Iraqi militants to kill Americans, I thought we could pursue them within Iraq with special operations raids. We also could seek stricter sanctions—especially on gasoline, which Iran lacked the capacity to refine—putting pressure on the regime and further isolating it from the international community. The possibilities of military pressure and diplomatic engagement were not mutually exclusive. Rather, the task was to closely link the two.
To change the Iranian regime’s behavior, I believed one of our best options was to aid the freedom movement inside Iran. Supporting those locked away in Iranian prisons might eventually lead to something like the Soviet Union’s downfall, which Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II hastened by supporting Soviet dissidents. Millions of Iranians chafed at the rule of the ayatollahs. This became clear After protesters in the Green movement took to the streets in the wake of fraudulent elections in June 2009. DoD policy officials wrote a number of memos suggesting ways to reach out to the Iranian opposition movement: bringing their leaders to the White House, supporting them financially, providing them with technology to communicate with one another and to the outside world, and more forcefully speaking about the nature of the evil regime they were opposing.
Ultimately, the President decided that negotiations were the best way to try to deal with Iran. Every American administration since the Iranian revolution has participated in some form of diplomatic engagement with them; publicly, privately, or both. Beginning with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in December 2001, the Bush administration also authorized American diplomats to hold discussions of one type or another with representatives from Iran, but nothing as substantial as the policy of engagement the State Department began to pursue in 2006. In an April 2006 memo I wrote of the proposed U.S.-Iran talks with the so-called EU Three (France, Germany, and Britain: “I think they are a disaster. We are stepping on a rake.”25 The negotiations yielded no significant concessions. To the contrary, Tehran seemed to have accelerated its illegal weapons programs, continued to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon, crushed its domestic dissidents, threatened to erase Israel from the map in another Holocaust, and escalated their attacks against American servicemen in Iraq.
For decades, Syria has been considered a prized quarry for optimistic American diplomats. After my efforts to engage the Syrians in the early 1980s, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, traveled to Damascus no fewer than twelve times. Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright made more than forty trips between them during the Clinton administration. American secretaries of state spent hours in the Syrian president’s waiting room cooling their heels as they awaited an audience. The Syrian state press played up these meetings with foreign officials, especially from the United States, as signs of Syria’s clout in the world. Although for some time After 9/11, President Bush had carefully denied Syria such injections of prestige, the State Department’s eagerness for engagement eventually resurfaced, with Powell and Armitage both making trips there, hoping for a diplomatic breakthrough that never came.
That hope was not solely the province of diplomats, however. CENTCOM military commander John Abizaid was a proponent of trying to peel off Syria from Iran, encouraging them to forge a historic peace with israel and thus help to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many in our military as well as in the State Department had long thought the stalemate over the Palestinian territories to be an underlying cause of violence in the region. I was skeptical, and even more skeptical of bringing in Syria from the cold. Nonetheless, I forwarded Abizaid’s arguments to the President, thinking it was important that he know his CENTCOM commander’s views on the matter.26
Peace with israel and an accommodation with the United States were not high on the priority list of the Syrian regime—not unless there was something major in it for them. Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar (who took the reins After his father’s death in June 2000) hailed from a small Muslim sect, the Alawites. To maintain power in a nation with a Sunni majority, they burnished their pan-Arab credentials by working against Israel and making a not too hidden effort to oppose American forces in Iraq; they became the hub for gathering suicide bombers and jihadists to travel south across their border.
Throughout the 1990s, Syria built increasingly close ties with Iran and was heavily reliant on it for arms and funding. This alliance was more than just a marriage of convenience, as some have characterized it. The two nations had fashioned a de facto Hezbollah state in southern Lebanon. In exchange for funding and supplies, the terrorist organization Hezbollah worked to advance Syrian and Iranian policies in the region. With weekly flights from Tehran and Damascus shuttling in thousands of small arms and rockets, Hezbollah had amassed a military force to be reckoned with.
In February 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a massive car bomb in front of the St. George Hotel in Beirut. Hariri was a symbol of Lebanese independence, and as such a threat to the Syria-Hezbollah occupation of his country. Unsurprisingly, evidence that Syria and Hezbollah had their hands in the assassination was abundant, though both denied the claims.27
President Bush announced that America supported an international investigation of the murder and would advocate enforcement of UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of Syria’s nearly fifteen thousand troops from Lebanon, as well as its many hundreds of intelligence officials. He recalled our ambassador to Syria.
Hariri’s death helped spark the so-called Cedar Revolution, a Lebanese popular movement against Syrian occupation and meddling, changing the dynamic in the region and at least temporarily stalling the U.S. efforts to win over Syria.* My old acquaintance, Walid Jumblatt, the wily leader of the Druze community in Lebanon, reversed his longstanding truce with Syria. I asked Jumblatt on one of his later visits to Washington how he had happened to switch sides. Recalling our strained relations during the Reagan administration, I said, “You were firing mortars and artillery at us back in 1984.”
“Yes,” Jumblatt replied, “but I’m with you now.” These encouraging signs proved fleeting.
I thought the administration’s early policy of pressure and isolation, despite occasionally mixed signals from State Department representatives, had worked reasonably well in making the Syrian regime uneasy and willing to make important concessions, such as withdrawing its military from Lebanon. In Bush’s second term, however, there was a change of course and the administration reengaged with Syria. The Department of State proposed relieving Syria’s diplomatic isolation and reverting to the practice of sending high-level U.S. officials to Damascus for meetings.
This policy of engagement, combined with our worsening difficulties in Iraq that were at least partly the result of Syria’s actions, sent a signal of weakness to Assad that he was quick to exploit. He reverted to his earlier policies of greater hostility toward America and our interests. Yet even in 2007, the State Department invited Syria back to the negotiating table in pursuit of Middle East peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Seeing that the United States was again t
he supplicant, and with the ill feelings about their assassination of a democratic Lebanese leader seemingly having been forgotten, if not forgiven, the Syrians reverted to their tried-and-true ways: obfuscation and delay at the negotiating table and active support for terrorism and covert pursuit of illegal weapons programs. Proof enough of their true intentions came with the discovery—and later destruction by Israeli aircraft—of a curious facility in eastern Syria: an illegal nuclear reactor nearly identical to one in North Korea. Regrettably, U.S. diplomatic efforts may have emboldened, rather than deterred, one of the world’s most dangerous regimes.
By July 2006, well over a decade of U.S. negotiations with North Korea and its erratic leadership had yielded little of benefit to the United States. North Korea continued to test and launch ballistic missiles, bluster about attacking South Korea, and develop nuclear weapons, detonating what intelligence professionals believed was a low-yield bomb in October 2006. We had confronted North Korean officials in 2002 with the fact that we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment effort, in violation of the Clinton administration’s “Agreed Framework.” As I wrote at the time in a memo to the NSC principals,
We should continue to deny Kim Jong Il the kind of attention he craves and has become accustomed to receiving in response to provocative behavior. . . . Getting us to the table is the trophy that Pyongyang seeks; for us to grant it in response to the latest nuclear provocations would only reinforce Pyongyang’s weak hand and prove that bad behavior pays.28
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