This is no mere photo-op.
Silently, I give Rice credit. It is a gutsy play, designed to boost the political standing of Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, who is hanging onto power by his fingernails. And she is foregoing a dramatic tour of the American rescue operation.
Although her plane must first land in Cyprus, where the evacuation is in high gear, Rice will not detour to the evacuation headquarters. Aides say it would be too distracting for already overburdened relief workers. Perhaps she also cannot be confident of how she would be received.
We touch down at the American embassy in Beirut minutes before seven in the morning, East Coast time—after an hour-long helicopter ride with the tail-gunner hanging out the rear as we try to survey devastated neighborhoods below. Across from the landing zone is the windowless shell of the old embassy building that was bombed in April 1983. Marines brought in to beef up security in the current crisis are now bivouacking there—camping out in the suffocating heat in the skeletal structure that stands as an unintentional memorial to one of Hezbollah’s inaugural acts of terror.
As we hurtle down the switchbacks of the steep hill from the embassy in armored vehicles, I call in to the Today show for a live report by phone with Campbell Brown, anchoring in New York. “Right now we’re on this hair-raising motorcade. You mention the security risks. They say that they manage the risk. They knew that by the element of surprise this would at least get them ahead of the game…. She’s hoping to come home with some kind of solution where the Lebanese government, Lebanese army, supported eventually by multinational troops, will begin to create a buffer zone in the south. And while they say they don’t want an immediate cease-fire, there’s a lot of pressure from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia to do exactly that. So within a week or so, I think you will see efforts toward a cease-fire. Of course the position is that that is basically doing Israel’s bidding by letting Israel have another week to continue its ground and air assaults.”
In fact, that perception, and the fallout from Iraq, had already circumscribed Rice’s ability to mediate a solution. How many American diplomats had tried and failed—even died—over the decades trying to navigate the shoals of Lebanese factional politics? By the time we climb back on our choppers to leave Beirut, Rice had been going for more than thirty-six hours. When we arrive in Israel, our clothes, and the secretary’s pale green suit, are stained with hydraulic fluid, residue of the helicopter flight. A perfect metaphor for America’s muddied diplomatic strategy?
It is a harbinger of the negotiations to come. Throughout this mission, Rice finds her game plan undercut by the Israelis, all the while denying any rift to us. At her first meeting—after hurriedly changing from her soiled suit—she watches stonily as Israel’s foreign minister makes a statement to the local press in Hebrew, despite having assured the State Department there was no need to bring a translator. Only later do we learn that instead of the expected pleasantries, it was a blatant political defense of Israel’s position.
Still, Rice believed she could hammer out an agreement. After giving Israel more time to reach its military goals, Rice returned to Jerusalem five days later, sounding even more hopeful that her peace plan might work. Israel was prepared to give up territory it had held since the 1967 war. Rice would carry that concession to Beirut the next day and close the deal.
That’s as close as she got. During dinner that night, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hospitably filled her wineglass to mark the ceremonial end of the Sabbath, he told Rice he still needed two more weeks to complete the job. But contrary to their agreement that the dinner be private, he brought government television cameras in to record the moment.
Preparing for Nightly News, I made a few last-minute calls to find out how their conversation had gone. I’d written a relatively optimistic story, reflecting Rice’s view that they might be close to an agreement. But after dinner with Olmert, it was clear to me that the mood had shifted dramatically. Rushing to rewrite and get to the Jerusalem rooftop where we were to broadcast live at 1:30 in the morning—because of the time difference with the United States—I toned down my lead. As it turned out, my report was still too upbeat. None of us knew that a tragic accident of war was about to further complicate Rice’s mission: At that very hour Israeli bombs were falling on the town of Qana in southern Lebanon. Israel said it thought it was targeting a Hezbollah stronghold. Instead, it killed twenty-eight civilians, many of them children.
The secretary of state didn’t learn about the devastating attack until the following morning, during a meeting with Israel’s defense minister. Further angering Rice, he didn’t alert her to the unfolding tragedy—she learned about it from one of her own aides, who abruptly interrupted the meeting with a text message from the U.S. ambassador in Beirut. By then, jovial images from her dinner with the prime minister the night before were being broadcast around the world by Arab satellite networks. It was a completely false impression, but the propaganda value was inescapable; contrary to the actual facts, Condoleezza Rice and Israel’s leader appeared to be celebrating an Israeli air strike that massacred Lebanese women and children.
Rice was clearly shaken by the awful events. In a call from Lebanon, Prime Minister Siniora told her she was no longer welcome in Beirut later that day. Rice had already decided she wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything. It was a turning point for her and American diplomacy. There would be no peacemaking for her, no grand gesture that would immediately reshape the politics of the region. She would have to settle for a negotiated and limited cease-fire resolution. Scrambling to salvage something from what looked like a foreign policy debacle, U.S. officials persuaded Israel to agree to a forty-eight-hour bombing pause to help facilitate relief efforts. They announced it at midnight, just in time to reshape the next day’s newspaper stories and our Sunday night newscast back home.
The bombing pause didn’t last long. During a refueling stop on the way home, Rice’s deputies learned that Israel had already launched new air strikes. On the plane, after so many setbacks, Rice faced more personal questioning than she’d ever had to encounter—and she was clearly uncomfortable. One reporter asked: “This seems like it’s been your most difficult week as secretary of state…. Some of the columns back in Washington have been withering. Can you sort of talk about that? Has it been a roller coaster? Or do you just charge on ahead?”
Visibly recoiling, she replied: “Well, I hate to disappoint you. I haven’t had much time to read the columns back home. So you can read them to me later.”
Even more awkwardly, another reporter took another stab at the “feelings” question, unwittingly insulting the secretary of state. “I think a lot of us were seeing that you looked, you’ll excuse me, you looked really bad at several times during this trip. I mean, you always look fabulous, but you looked tense. I mean tell us what you were feeling…give us a sense personally.”
Stung, Rice replied: “I don’t know, maybe I’m just not as self-reflective as you think I am.”
On the surface, she seemed surprised at the inquisition. No one expected this to be easy. It would not occur to her that she was, to a certain extent, suffering the consequences of her own policies. Still, I had a nagging thought. Was she being held to a different standard than her male predecessors? I turned to one of the other women in the press corps and quietly asked, would they be asking Henry Kissinger or Jim Baker how he felt after a difficult week of shuttle diplomacy? Or would they simply focus on the likely next steps?
In assessing the damage, the administration was already being criticized for relying so heavily on Israel’s military strategy. In this case, a novice prime minister, depending at first solely on air power, had seriously underestimated a resilient guerrilla force. His defense minister also had no relevant military experience. His top uniformed advisor was from the air force, not the army. No one involved knew how to plan a ground campaign. There’s no evidence that the president or Rice asked the Pentagon’s Joint Staff to analyze whethe
r Israel could accomplish its military goals before the United States endorsed them.
It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration’s ambitious—and controversial—diplomacy had also been rooted in a naïve conception of what is even possible politically in the Middle East, and whether any of the players can really control Hezbollah. In the short term, the unintended result of this great adventure in creating a “new Middle East,” in the phrase Rice so awkwardly adopted, could be a stronger Iran—perhaps even, a stronger Hezbollah. Two weeks after our trip, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, declared that his Shiite organization, not the government, would rebuild much of southern Lebanon. A prominent Lebanese reform leader called it a “watershed,” in effect, a coup d’état. Iran’s president declared victory. The influential Economist captioned its cover “Nasrallah wins the war.”
It is not the first, or last, time this secretary of state will have to tangle with Iran.
Since 9/11, the war on terror has been the central metaphor for the president’s foreign policy. But in his second term, he has seemed to find a different inspiration from the attack on America. It is an almost religious zeal to democratize the world. People differ about his motivation, and in fact, the president’s second inaugural address remains a political Rorschach test. Conservative critics still complain that it was too Wilsonian, appealing to the aspirations of fledgling democracies and emphasizing human rights above security. Many liberals, and foreign policy pragmatists, found it too interventionist, worrying about his promise to stand with the oppressed against their oppressors. Would Iraq be followed by regime change in Iran?
In the first months of his second term, the president pointed to promising signs for his vision that democracy was on the march—the first elections in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories, pro-democracy demonstrations that forced Syria out of Lebanon. On January 30, ten days after Bush’s inauguration, Iraq confounded most skeptics by electing a national assembly—undeniably, an important milestone. But was it a turning point? The vice president and secretary of defense believed it was, and were ebullient at a small birthday celebration for Dick Cheney that night. Three days later, I was on the road again, this time, with a new secretary of state, as she tested that proposition.
As national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice had helped execute the president’s tough foreign policy during his first term. According to former administration officials, she opposed every attempt they made to open conversations with Iran. And in January 2002, she signed off on language declaring Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the “axis of evil” in the State of the Union address, never questioning a hot-button phrase crafted by speechwriters for maximum political effect. Admittedly, not even seasoned diplomats anticipated its swift impact. Colin Powell, then secretary of state, first read advance copies of the text the day before the president was to deliver it. “Axis of evil” didn’t jump out at him or his top deputies as anything more than the usual Bush rhetoric.
Rice now tells me she was equally surprised by the immediate response, but disagrees about its importance. She says it was more rhetorical than diplomatic. While others believe that the phrase helped shut down any promise of a dialogue with Iran’s previous government, nominally led by Mohammad Khatami, Rice insists that reports of such openings were widely exaggerated.
In an interview for this book, Rice said, “I never really thought that the Khatami government was that fundamentally different in terms of its foreign policy except it had a better face to the world than the current government. But, just to be very clear, all of this talk about, you know, huge approaches toward us in 2003 and so forth, I do not remember any such thing.”
Rice now tells me she’d thought the foreign policy headline out of that speech would be the president’s call for the democratization of the Middle East. According to Rice, “the next day when I got up and there were huge headlines about the “axis of evil,” I thought—because it wasn’t intended to read into it that there was, you know, a group working together and so forth. It was people reading more meaning into it (than was intended). As it turns out, the substance of it was exactly right. You did have these three states that now, when people talk about the proliferation problem, who do they talk about? Iran and North Korea, Iraq having been settled.”
Critics would find her conclusion that anything about Iraq is settled quite breathtaking, entirely aside from the failure to find any unconventional weapons newer than a decade old. But her comments offer an important insight into the thinking of someone who both shaped and reflects the president’s views. And, despite frequent denials, may still evolve into a major political player within the Republican Party, if not a national candidate.
Understanding Bush’s foreign policy—a central focus of my current assignment—requires exploring how his thinking has evolved over the years, and his relationship with his closest advisors. And no one is closer to the president than Condoleezza Rice. She may have acted in loyal lockstep with her colleagues as national security advisor, but she was no caretaker of history, and as soon as she took over as the president’s top diplomat, Rice set out to change some of the policies she’d helped implement during the first term—often, over the objections of Colin Powell. And among these, none was more obvious—or potentially significant—than her role in the administration’s evolving approach to Iran.
On her first trip to Europe as America’s top diplomat in early February 2005, only five days after taking office, she clearly anticipated a storm of criticism over Iraq. Instead, to her surprise, France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder were literally kissing her hand. It was the beginning of a ten-country charm offensive, a march through Europe’s capitals planned like Napoleon’s—all laid out in a 180-page battle plan designed to soften up some of the administration’s harshest critics. Usually blasé, veteran European commentators were smitten, praising her elegance, her polish, and, despite her Ph.D. in international studies, described her exchange with the German chancellor as “coquettish.” She was a diplomatic rock star in both Paris and Berlin.
Did she find that patronizing or chauvinist? She shrugged off the question, telling us: “I don’t think much about it. I will do what I do. I’m a package, you know? I’m who I am, and that includes being female.”
After four years of being ignored by Washington, European leaders were delighted to be getting so much attention from someone who could speak so authoritatively for the president. They had admired Colin Powell, but he’d been closer to Bush’s father than the current president. Powell kept losing crucial policy battles on Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. In contrast, Rice’s unique power stems from being almost a member of the Bush family. During the first term, she had spent most weekends and vacations with the Bushes. At her swearing-in ceremony, the president said of Condi: “We love her. I don’t know if you’re supposed to say that.” But he did. No one could remember him ever expressing his love for Colin Powell.
But for all her style and access, Rice was still confronting attitudes toward George Bush that had hardened over four years. “Old Europe” had failed to stop America from invading Iraq. Now the Europeans were determined to preserve their economic investments by avoiding American military action against Iran. Rice came back from Europe thinking that the president would eventually have to play the diplomatic card of offering to join the negotiations with Iran, but not yet. It was enough to signal during a stop in Brussels that the United States would let Europe be its proxy with Tehran.
Over the next twelve months, the situation deteriorated rapidly, especially after Iran elected Tehran’s untested mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as its new president. Two months later, he took office—an engineer with rough manners, unknown governance skills, and few relationships with the country’s political elites. Even one of his own career diplomats confessed to me that he was a complete unknown. No one could penetrate his complex relationship with the clerics who actually ran the country. Nor could his own aides pr
edict his foreign policy. CIA officials admitted they were again taken by surprise.
Once elected, Ahmadinejad scared his natural allies in Europe by denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Even in Iran, many feared that he was stirring up too much international hostility toward Tehran. But Iran’s large population of educated young people also yearned to prove their status to the rest of the world through technological advances. He appealed to those ambitions with a powerful symbol—Iran’s nuclear research program.
The new leader immediately created a nuclear crisis. He rejected Russia’s offer to enrich Iran’s uranium on Russian soil, a compromise that theoretically would have provided him with energy sources but not weapons-grade fuel. He cut off negotiations with the Europeans. And he alienated the inspectors who would be the arbiters of whether or not Iran’s nuclear research was civilian or military. In a fateful step, Iran broke the seals the International Atomic Energy Agency had placed on its nuclear equipment. Iran declared it was accelerating construction of centrifuges that could be used to create weapon fuel.
In the spring of 2006, Rice went to Berlin for emergency meetings. On March 30, both Russia and China said they would not consider sanctions against Iran. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said, “In principle, Russia doesn’t believe that sanctions could achieve the purposes of settlement of various issues.” China’s vice foreign minister Dai Bingguo said, “There has already been enough turmoil in the Middle East.” They did not trust American intentions after what had happened in Iraq. Whatever their motives, the way America went to war with Iraq was limiting Rice’s diplomatic options toward Iran.
Rice realized she would not be able to forge a unified position with Europe as long as the United States refused all contact with Iran. She knew she needed to orchestrate a diplomatic way out of the crisis. At a lunch with the president in the small dining room behind the Oval Office five days later, she reported that the Berlin meetings had been a disaster. The coalition against Iran was on the verge of falling apart. Despite past opposition from Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, George Bush signaled that he was ready to listen to new ideas. Rice had the green light to start devising a strategy of carefully calibrated inducements to get Tehran to suspend its nuclear enrichment, backed up by punishments if it didn’t.
Talking Back Page 2
