Rice answered, “We certainly hope that Iran will take a few days to think over a very serious proposal.” And, she emphasized, this was not an American proposal but an offer from the entire international community.
Why should the administration now trust Iran? How would anyone verify compliance? In stark contrast to the administration’s disparagement of international inspections before the war with Iraq, she said they would rely on the “competent” verification of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Couldn’t the United States have had the same deal a couple of years earlier, before the president called Iran a member of the “axis of evil” and before secret back-channel conversations were cut off? Couldn’t they have had this deal with a more moderate Iranian government?
Rice said: “We had to take the time to build an international climate of opinion that Iran had certain steps that it had to take,” adding, “This had to be built as a coalition, as a consensus among the international community.”
In my report for the Today show that morning, I concluded that the administration now had no choice but to change its strategy. The president was under enormous pressure from his closest allies to resolve the Iran crisis. And, no matter what Israel claimed, most experts believed a military attack—even an air strike—on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be difficult, especially with the U.S. military already overcommitted in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With only moments to catch the motorcade for the airport and the trip home, we shot my on-camera standup for the Today show in front of the Vienna Opera. My first visit to the Austrian capital—the subject of so many of my musical studies as a child—and that’s the closest I got to a concert hall. During a brief refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland, I dashed off a blog for The Daily Nightly on MSNBC’s Web site about the frustrations of seeing the world on a State Department press pass.
“For the first time in twenty-five years of covering presidents and secretaries of state, I had been to Vienna. I’d spent twenty-four hours across the street from the famed Opera House, with signs everywhere celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, and I hadn’t heard a musical note. Sadly for Condoleezza Rice—a passionate fan of Mozart and Brahms—she had spent the last day in this fabled musical city the same way. But at least her talks were more harmonious than usual.”
I was wrong. Months later, Rice confided that she had in fact enjoyed a secret musical interlude in the city of Mozart, Schumann, and Brahms. During a break in the diplomacy, she had sneaked off to a nearby museum at the invitation of the Austrian government to play a historic piano that had been given to Robert and Clara Schumann as a wedding present and was then inherited by Johannes Brahms. For Rice, an accomplished pianist, it was a thrill to play a piano that had once been owned by the master himself.
Such a private, unrecorded musical moment was unusual—in sharp contrast to public performances her public relations team has organized on most of her trips. These were photo opportunities designed to raise her profile internationally, and ultimately, increase her popularity at home. In China she reviewed young Olympic ice skating performances. In Paris, it was a children’s music school. In Australia, she awarded medals to women swimmers during the Commonwealth Games. And, contrary to her predecessors, she is now greeted by popular sports and music stars when she arrives overseas—a touch of show business never before associated with stodgy diplomacy. All of this is carefully choreographed by the State Department—and it works. Despite Rice’s deep involvement in many of the controversial decisions that preceded the invasion of Iraq, she alone among the Bush foreign policy team remains blameless to most of the public. Her political strengths are obvious—and many Republicans see her as a future vice presidential candidate, if not a candidate for the nation’s top office.
But despite all the swimming medals and music lessons, her political prospects, and her legacy, will now rest largely on her Middle East diplomacy. Having ducked most of the anger over Iraq—a policy more associated with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney—Rice will be tagged with responsibility for Bush policies toward Israel, the Palestinians, and Lebanon. And, as she struggled to contain the war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, the media inevitably drew comparisons between Rice and her Republican predecessors, most notably Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker.
In some ways, the comparisons are not apt. No secretary of state, with the possible exception of James Baker, has ever equaled Henry Kissinger’s sway over policy and president. At this moment, Rice was ascendant, but with power came responsibility. She was now the steward of a foreign policy plagued by multiple disasters: from what was arguably civil war in Iraq to the unconstrained nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran and unprecedented hatred of the United States in the Arab and Muslim world. Much of this resulted from policies Rice had either helped conceive, or at least blessed.
As I trace the frantic pace of American diplomacy and politics in this book, it will become clear that both the politicians and the reporters who trail them suffer from short attention spans. We seem to be able to focus on only one issue at a time. Today it is war in Lebanon; tomorrow, a terror plot against British and American airlines. Nothing illustrates this better than the way we ignored the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, or in Darfur, Sudan since 2003. After a brief peace accord in early 2005, the situation in Sudan deteriorated dramatically. During that time, the administration had focused on Sudan only episodically, except for efforts by the former deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, and a tumultuous trip by Condoleezza Rice.
I’d wanted to go to Darfur and had talked to returning envoys overwhelmed by the human catastrophe. Until the summer of 2005, there had never been a way to persuade the network it was either safe or feasible. After her initial travels that spring and summer, Rice was more influential than ever before. Now she was willing to take on Sudan. Traveling with the secretary of state was a way to open a brief window on the population’s suffering to the outside world. It didn’t turn out that way.
When I titled this book Talking Back…to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels, I was thinking about politicians I’d covered in forty years of journalism, from ward heelers to presidents, and dictators from North Korea to Cuba. I had not yet met Omar Hassan al Bashir of Sudan. But as I was to discover in the summer of 2005, he was all three—president, dictator, and worse than a mere scoundrel. It was Bashir who hosted Osama bin Laden as a guest of Sudan’s government in the 1990s, before bin Laden returned to Afghanistan. I’m not sure why I was destined to tangle with the Sudanese dictator that July, but it turned into an international incident, prompting Condoleezza Rice to demand a diplomatic apology. In response, the government of Sudan issued a statement accusing me of being “in an abnormal state—maybe even drunk” at a morning photo opportunity that dissolved into a brawl. I’d better explain.
We arrived in Khartoum at one a.m., July 21, after a stopover at an African trade conference in Senegal. It was a moment of great potential for Sudan; two weeks earlier, under pressure from the United States, the country’s southern rebels had joined a unity government. After years of civil war, costing as many as 400 thousand lives and displacing two million refugees, there was a small hope for a settlement. Rice was there to lend support to the fragile peace.
That morning, after only a few hours of sleep, she’d met with John Garang, the charismatic rebel leader with a Ph.D. in agricultural economics who had just become first vice president, in his new government office. Seeing him in his fancy office, replete with chandeliers and enormous chairs, Rice said she was struck by how startling a transformation it was from his years as a guerrilla leader in the bush. Garang, whom Rice knew from visits in Washington, now had a title and some leverage within the government. She was counting on the former rebel leader to play a major role in the new government. But first, she had to persuade Sudan’s dictator to stop arming the Arab militias known as Janjaweed who were still raping African M
uslim women, murdering their men, and pillaging villages in the vast western territory of Darfur. Colin Powell, before stepping down as secretary of state, had raised the stakes by calling it what it was—genocide.
While Rice visited with Garang, we assembled for the bus ride to the presidential palace for her meeting with Bashir. From the outset, there was confusion and misdirection. Security officials turned us away, only to have U.S. embassy aides send us back. Then, we were told to wait in a separate building in the complex, at least seventy-five yards from the president’s office. Realizing it might be a deliberate attempt to keep us from covering Rice and the Sudanese leader, our small press group marched down the drive to await Rice’s motorcade.
What happened next was mayhem. The secretary of state arrived, but Sudanese security men separated her from the rest of her delegation, including her translator and top aides. One assistant, Jim Wilkinson, was blocked from entering and shoved against a wall. A laconic Texan, Wilkinson responded drily, “Diplomacy 101 says you don’t rough up your guests.” Especially since they were trying to persuade Rice to lift economic sanctions imposed on Sudan for sponsoring terrorism. With her translator detained outside along with the rest of us, Rice and her host sat awkwardly facing each other for at least ten minutes, neither able to converse in the other’s language.
In the confusion, we thought we were lining up for a photo opportunity, only to discover that we, too, were blocked. Half the press corps was outside. The rest of us were inside, but in an anteroom, arguing that we had been promised we could cover the first few minutes of the official meeting. Wilkinson and Sean McCormack, Rice’s other close aide, both tried to run interference for us. McCormack told the Sudanese information minister, “This is a free press, sir.”
The spokesman for the Khartoum government replied, “No, no, it’s not a free press” in Sudan. On that, he was correct.
With the help of McCormack and Wilkinson, we were finally permitted in. Rice and Bashir were facing each other in armchairs, in obvious discomfort, trying to make small talk with the help of the beleaguered translator, who had also finally persuaded the Sudanese he belonged. Following State Department ground rules for photo opportunities both at home and abroad, I asked Bashir, “Can you tell us why the violence is continuing, Mr. President? Can you tell us why the government is still supporting the militias?”
It was a case where talking back got me in trouble. On a gesture from Bashir, his security men grabbed me from behind. One yanked my left arm, pinning it behind my back. The other grabbed my microphone cord. I could feel my shoulder snap—what turned out to be a rotator cuff injury—and yelled in pain and embarrassment. Wilkinson tried to block them, saying: “Don’t ever touch that journalist again.” While the cameraman tried to keep his balance and stay focused on Rice, I was dragged from the room, shouting one more question: “Why should Americans believe your promises?” I’m told Bashir never answered my question.
Rice was furious. She boarded her plane for the ninety-minute flight to Darfur and came back to see if I were all right. Stone-faced, she told us, “I am about the only person they did not rough up. I expect an apology before we land.” She waited on the plane until Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail called to express regrets for “the mistreatment” of the delegation.
We were later told that although her meeting with Bashir had been truncated by all the difficulties her aides had experienced getting there, Rice had managed to make her main argument; that the government needed to stop arming the militias responsible for most of the violence. Bashir replied, “If you disarm only one side in this conflict, the result is going to be genocide.” They never bridged the gap.
When we arrived an hour and a half later at Al-Fasher in Darfur to tour one of the largest of the refugee camps, hundreds of children greeted us singing in Arabic, “Welcome, welcome oh Condoleezza.” On the tarmac, a small contingent of Rwandan soldiers stood at attention in the blazing sun. They had only just arrived, having been flown in on a U.S. C-130 transport plane by NATO to lend some muscle to Rice’s visit. The Rwandan soldiers were the first wave of an anticipated 7,500 African Union troops commissioned to help protect refugees and surviving villagers from the marauding Janjaweed. But the raw recruits were unarmed and barely trained. They did not inspire a great deal of confidence.
After a brief ride from the landing strip, we found ourselves surrounded by thousands of residents of the camp—all women and children. Encircled by a chain-link fence, Abu Shouk was a tent city, semipermanent home to more than eighty thousand people. Except when an American secretary of state was visiting with her armed security guards the fence didn’t strike me as a great deal of protection from external threats to the women and children inside. Here, rape was not a random crime, but used by the militias as a weapon of war. But, at least for this day, there would be no danger of attacks on these women.
Rice heard about the dangers from aid workers and from listening intently to the accounts of women who had been raped or otherwise abused. She was told that they were being raped both inside and outside the camps, not only by the dreaded militias, but also by the rebels, and even by government soldiers supposedly protecting them.
I talked to some of the women through a UN translator. Not surprisingly, they were shy and intimidated, especially by the camera. But with encouragement from the relief workers, a few opened up. One woman told me she had tried to leave the camp and return to her village with her sister, but was forced to return after other relatives were murdered.
“The government says it is going to protect you. Do you believe the government?” I asked. “No, we don’t believe the government,” she replied, her eyes betraying nothing but weary resignation. Abu Shouk had been created as a temporary way station for displaced persons. But like refugee camps from Lebanon to Peshawar, it was turning into a permanent city. I was drenched in sweat, and bombarded by flies and mosquitoes. I wanted to reach for a bottle of water in my bag but was self-conscious about drinking from it—I didn’t have enough to pass around to these women for whom clean water was a prized commodity.
In the shade of a tent, Rice paused briefly for interviews. I asked her what the women had told her about how rape was being used as a weapon of war.
She said, “It is a difficult thing for these women to come forward and say this. They have to live here. But what I can go back and do is look at what the Sudanese government has said, they are prepared to do to deal with violence against women, to raise this issue more in the international consciousness, that this is a serious issue. We know of the humanitarian efforts that are being made here to feed people, to give them better clothing, to give them shelter. But we also need an international effort on violence against women and I’ll take that message home.”
Following up, I said, “Taking a message home is important. But with all due respect, there have been leaders here, your predecessor Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, your deputy (Bob Zoellick). The Sudanese government keeps promising that they are going to stop the killings. And we have evidence that they are supporting the militias that are doing the killings. What good are their promises?”
“I said this morning that they have a problem with credibility, and I said it directly to them—that people need to see action, not just your words. And it is a new Sudanese government that is coming into being. It is a government that includes people from the south who were once in terrible humanitarian conditions and were brutalized by the central government.”
I pointed out that the government had the same players, including Bashir. The cast of characters was the same, but she said there was a new “flavor” to the government and that the peace agreement gave them a new chance for a fresh start.
Rice was straddling competing interests with Sudan. Her own experts had said Khartoum had progressed from a failing grade on cooperating against terrorism before 9/11 to straight A’s for helping the United States track al-Qaeda funds. The administration did not want to lose this new too
l in the war on terror because of what officials considered a “soft” issue like violence against women. But on that day, in the suffocating heat of that refugee camp, after listening to first-person accounts of torture, I didn’t doubt that Rice was responding as a woman, as well as America’s top diplomat, to the horror of what she’d heard. Other priorities would have to wait.
When I asked her about the incident with me in Khartoum, she said: “Obviously, there was a problem. They have said they will deal with the problem. But we have a serious issue with the Sudanese government.” Still, she noted, there were “new actors” like Garang in the government, whom she hoped would create “a new day.”
My cell phone started ringing. It hadn’t occurred to me that the wire services would have filed reports about the dust-up in Khartoum hours earlier. Now it was almost seven in the morning back home on the East Coast. First, Don Imus and now the Today show wanted me to do live reports by phone. On the air, Katie Couric, then anchoring Today, asked what happened.
Broadcasting live on my cell phone, I explained that the State Department had told the Sudanese we have freedom of the press in America, and they couldn’t restrict questions. But when I kept asking questions, “they kept dragging me out and they had guns. So I got the questions but I didn’t get any answers.”
Katie then asked me about the refugee camp. By then, we were racing back to the military airstrip, rocking back and forth in an open truck. I could barely hear the question. Somehow I replied: “The goal is to push the government here to stop the killing and to improve conditions so that people can go back (to their villages). But I have to tell you, even though the violence has been reduced somewhat, according to everyone’s count, people disagree about the number of deaths. Most people agree that the violence has diminished, but that’s because the villages have all been destroyed. These people have been displaced, two million people displaced…. This is becoming a permanent settlement. It is a human catastrophe.”
Talking Back Page 4
