by Obama Barack
But when it came to two of my specific requests—that the kingdom and other members of the Arab League consider a gesture to Israel that might help jump-start peace talks with Palestinians and that our teams discuss the possible transfer of some Gitmo prisoners to Saudi rehabilitation centers—the king was noncommittal, clearly wary of potential controversy.
The conversation lightened during the midday banquet the king hosted for our delegation. It was a lavish affair, like something out of a fairy tale, the fifty-foot table laden with whole roasted lambs and heaps of saffron rice and all manner of traditional and Western delicacies. Of the sixty or so people eating, my scheduling director, Alyssa Mastromonaco, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were two of the three women present. Alyssa seemed cheery enough as she chatted with Saudi officials across the table, although she appeared to have some trouble keeping the headscarf she was wearing from falling into the soup bowl. The king asked about my family, and I described how Michelle and the girls were adjusting to life in the White House. He explained that he had twelve wives himself—news reports put the number closer to thirty—along with forty children and dozens more grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking, Your Majesty,” I said, “but how do you keep up with twelve wives?”
“Very badly,” he said, shaking his head wearily. “One of them is always jealous of the others. It’s more complicated than Middle East politics.”
Later, Ben and Denis came by the villa where I was staying so we could talk about final edits to the Cairo speech. Before settling in to work, we noticed a large travel case on the mantelpiece. I unsnapped the latches and lifted the top. On one side there was a large desert scene on a marble base featuring miniature gold figurines, as well as a glass clock powered by changes in temperature. On the other side, set in a velvet case, was a necklace half the length of a bicycle chain, encrusted with what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rubies and diamonds—along with a matching ring and earrings. I looked up at Ben and Denis.
“A little something for the missus,” Denis said. He explained that others in the delegation had found cases with expensive watches waiting for them in their rooms. “Apparently, nobody told the Saudis about our prohibition on gifts.”
Lifting the heavy jewels, I wondered how many times gifts like this had been discreetly left for other leaders during official visits to the kingdom—leaders whose countries didn’t have rules against taking gifts, or at least not ones that were enforced. I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better.
I set the necklace down and closed the case. “All right,” I said. “Let’s work.”
* * *
—
THE GREATER CAIRO metropolitan area contained more than sixteen million people. We didn’t see any of them on the following day’s drive from the airport. The famously chaotic streets were empty for miles, save for police officers posted everywhere, a testimony to the extraordinary grip Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak held on his country—and the fact that an American president was a tempting target for local extremist groups.
If Saudi Arabia’s tradition-bound monarchy represented one path of modern Arab governance, Egypt’s autocratic regime represented the other. In the early 1950s, a charismatic and urbane army colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser had orchestrated a military overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy and instituted a secular, one-party state. Soon after, he nationalized the Suez Canal, overcoming attempted military interventions by the British and French, which made him a global figure in the fight against colonialism and far and away the most popular leader in the Arab world.
Nasser went on to nationalize other key industries, initiate domestic land reform, and launch huge public works projects, all with the goal of eliminating vestiges of both British rule and Egypt’s feudal past. Overseas, he actively promoted a secular, vaguely socialist pan-Arab nationalism, fought a losing war against the Israelis, helped form the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Arab League, and became a charter member of the Non-Aligned Movement, which ostensibly refused to take sides in the Cold War but drew the suspicion and ire of Washington, in part because Nasser was accepting economic and military aid from the Soviets. He also ruthlessly cracked down on dissent and the formation of competing political parties in Egypt, particularly targeting the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that sought to establish an Islamic government through grassroots political mobilization and charitable works, but also included members who occasionally turned to violence.
So dominant was Nasser’s authoritarian style of governance that even after his death in 1970, Middle Eastern leaders sought to replicate it. Lacking Nasser’s sophistication and ability to connect with the masses, though, men like Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi would maintain their power largely through corruption, patronage, brutal repression, and a constant if ineffective campaign against Israel.
After Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated in 1981, Hosni Mubarak took control using roughly the same formula, with one notable difference: Sadat’s signing of a peace accord with Israel had made Egypt a U.S. ally, leading successive American administrations to overlook the regime’s increasing corruption, shabby human rights record, and occasional anti-Semitism. Flush with aid not just from the United States but from the Saudis and other oil-rich Gulf states, Mubarak never bothered to reform his country’s stagnant economy, which now left a generation of disaffected young Egyptians unable to find work.
Our motorcade arrived at Qubba Palace—an elaborate mid-nineteenth-century structure and one of three presidential palaces in Cairo—and after a greeting ceremony, Mubarak invited me to his office for an hour-long discussion. He was eighty-one but still broad-shouldered and sturdy, with a Roman nose, dark hair combed back from his forehead, and heavy-lidded eyes that gave him the air of a man both accustomed to and slightly weary of his own command. After talking with him about the Egyptian economy and soliciting suggestions on how to reinvigorate the Arab-Israeli peace process, I raised the issue of human rights, suggesting steps he might take to release political prisoners and ease restrictions on the press.
Speaking accented but passable English, Mubarak politely deflected my concerns, insisting that his security services targeted only Islamic extremists and that the Egyptian public strongly supported his firm approach. I was left with an impression that would become all too familiar in my dealings with aging autocrats: Shut away in palaces, their every interaction mediated by the hard-faced, obsequious functionaries that surrounded them, they were unable to distinguish between their personal interests and those of their nations, their actions governed by no broader purpose beyond maintaining the tangled web of patronage and business interests that kept them in power.
What a contrast it was, then, to walk into Cairo University’s Grand Hall and find a packed house absolutely crackling with energy. We’d pressed the government to open my address to a wide cross section of Egyptian society, and it was clear that the mere presence of university students, journalists, scholars, leaders of women’s organizations, community activists, and even some prominent clerics and Muslim Brotherhood figures among the three thousand people present would help make this a singular event, one that would reach a wide global audience via television. As soon as I stepped onto the stage and delivered the Islamic salutation “Assalamu alaikum,” the crowd roared its approval. I was careful to make clear that no one speech was going to solve entrenched problems. But as the cheers and applause continued through my discus
sions of democracy, human rights and women’s rights, religious tolerance and the need for a true and lasting peace between a secure Israel and an autonomous Palestinian state, I could imagine the beginnings of a new Middle East. In that moment, it wasn’t hard to envision an alternate reality in which the young people in that auditorium would build new businesses and schools, lead responsive, functioning governments, and begin to reimagine their faith in a way that was at once true to tradition and open to other sources of wisdom. Perhaps the high-ranking government officials who sat grim-faced in the third row could imagine it as well.
I left the stage to a prolonged standing ovation and made a point of finding Ben, who as a rule got too nervous to watch any speech he’d helped to write and instead holed up in some back room, tapping into his BlackBerry. He was grinning from ear to ear.
“I guess that worked,” I said.
“That was historic,” he said, without a trace of irony.
* * *
—
IN LATER YEARS, critics and even some of my supporters would have a field day contrasting the lofty, hopeful tone of the Cairo speech with the grim realities that would play out in the Middle East during my two terms in office. For some, it showed the sin of naïveté, one that undermined key U.S. allies like Mubarak and thus emboldened the forces of chaos. For others, the problem was not the vision set forth in the speech but rather what they considered my failure to deliver on that vision with effective, meaningful action. I was tempted to answer, of course—to point out that I’d be the first to say that no single speech would solve the region’s long-standing challenges; that we’d pushed hard on every initiative I mentioned that day, whether large (a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians) or small (the creation of training programs for would-be entrepreneurs); that the arguments I made in Cairo were ones I’d still make.
But in the end, the facts of what happened are the facts, and I’m left with the same set of questions I first wrestled with as a young organizer. How useful is it to describe the world as it should be when efforts to achieve that world are bound to fall short? Was Václav Havel correct in suggesting that by raising expectations, I was doomed to disappoint them? Was it possible that abstract principles and high-minded ideals were and always would be nothing more than a pretense, a palliative, a way to beat back despair, but no match for the more primal urges that really moved us, so that no matter what we said or did, history was sure to run along its predetermined course, an endless cycle of fear, hunger and conflict, dominance and weakness?
Even at the time, doubts came naturally to me, the sugar high of the speech quickly replaced with thoughts of all the work awaiting me back home and the many forces arrayed against what I hoped to do. The excursion we took immediately after the speech deepened my brooding: a fifteen-minute helicopter ride, high over the sprawling city, until suddenly the jumble of cream-colored, Cubist-looking structures was gone and there was only desert and sun and the wondrous, geometric lines of the Pyramids cutting across the horizon. Upon landing, we were greeted by Cairo’s leading Egyptologist, a happily eccentric gentleman with a floppy wide-brimmed hat straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, and for the next several hours my team and I had the place to ourselves. We scaled the ancient, boulder-like stones of each pyramid’s face. We stood in the shadow of the Sphinx, staring up at its silent, indifferent gaze. We climbed a narrow, vertical chute to stand within one of the pharaohs’ dark inner chambers, the mystery of which was punctuated by Axe’s timeless words during our careful descent back down the ladder:
“Goddamn it, Rahm, slow down—your ass is in my face!”
At one point, as I stood watching Gibbs and some of the other staffers trying to mount camels for the obligatory tourist pictures, Reggie and Marvin motioned for me to join them inside the corridor of one of the Pyramids’ lesser temples.
“Check it out, boss,” Reggie said, pointing at the wall. There, carved in the smooth, porous stone, was the dark image of a man’s face. Not the profile typical of hieroglyphics but a straight-on head shot. A long, oval face. Prominent ears sticking straight out like handles. A cartoon of me, somehow forged in antiquity.
“Must be a relative,” Marvin said.
We all had a laugh then, and the two of them wandered off to join the camel riders. Our guide couldn’t tell me just who it was that the image depicted, or even whether it dated back to the time of the Pyramids. But I stood at the wall for an extra beat, trying to imagine the life behind that etching. Had he been a member of the royal court? A slave? A foreman? Maybe just a bored vandal, camped out at night centuries after the wall had been built, inspired by the stars and his own loneliness to sketch his own likeness. I tried to imagine the worries and strivings that might have consumed him and the nature of the world he’d occupied, likely full of its own struggles and palace intrigues, conquests and catastrophes, events that probably at the time felt no less pressing than those I’d face as soon as I got back to Washington. All of it was forgotten now, none of it mattered, the pharaoh, the slave, and the vandal all long turned to dust.
Just as every speech I’d delivered, every law I passed and decision I made, would soon be forgotten.
Just as I and all those I loved would someday turn to dust.
* * *
—
BEFORE RETURNING HOME, I retraced a more recent history. President Sarkozy had organized a commemoration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Allied landing at Normandy and had asked me to speak. Rather than head directly to France, we stopped first in Dresden, Germany, where Allied bombing toward the end of World War II resulted in a firestorm that engulfed the city, killing an estimated twenty-five thousand people. My visit was a purposeful gesture of respect for a now-stalwart ally. Angela Merkel and I toured a famous eighteenth-century church that had been destroyed by the air raids, only to be rebuilt fifty years later with a golden cross and orb crafted by a British silversmith whose father had been one of the bomber pilots. The silversmith’s work served as a reminder that even those on the right side of war must not turn away from their enemy’s suffering, or foreclose the possibility of reconciliation.
Merkel and I were later joined by the writer and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel for a visit to the former Buchenwald concentration camp. This, too, had practical political significance: We’d originally considered a trip to Tel Aviv to follow my speech in Cairo, but in deference to the Israeli government’s wishes that I not make the Palestinian question the primary focus of my speech—nor feed the perception that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the root cause of the Middle East’s turmoil—we had settled instead on a tour of one of the epicenters of the Holocaust to signal my commitment to the security of Israel and the Jewish people.
I had a more personal reason as well for wanting to make this pilgrimage. As a young man in college, I’d had a chance to hear Wiesel speak and had been deeply moved by how he chronicled his experiences as a Buchenwald survivor. Reading his books, I’d found an impregnable moral core that both fortified me and challenged me to be better. It had been one of the great pleasures of my time in the Senate that Elie and I became friends. When I told him that one of my great-uncles, Toot’s brother Charles Payne, had been a member of the U.S. infantry division that reached one of Buchenwald’s subcamps in April 1945 and began the liberation there, Elie had insisted that one day we would go together. Being with him now fulfilled that promise.
“If these trees could talk,” Elie said softly, waving toward a row of stately oaks as the two of us and Merkel slowly walked the gravel path toward Buchenwald’s main entrance. The sky was low and gray, the press at a respectful distance. We stopped at two memorials to those who died at the camp. One was a set of stone slabs featuring the names of the victims, including Elie’s father. The other was a list of the countries they came from, etched on a steel plate that was kept heated to thirty-seven degrees Celsius: the temperature of the human body, meant to b
e a reminder—in a place premised on hate and intolerance—of the common humanity we share.
For the next hour, we wandered the grounds, passing guard towers and walls lined with barbed wire, staring into the dark ovens of the crematorium and circling the foundations of the prisoners’ barracks. There were photographs of the camp as it had once been, mostly taken by U.S. army units at the moment of liberation. One showed Elie at sixteen looking out from one of the bunks, the same handsome face and mournful eyes but jagged with hunger and illness and the enormity of all he had witnessed. Elie described to me and Merkel the daily strategies he and other prisoners had used to survive: how the stronger or luckier ones would sneak food to the weak and the dying; how resistance meetings took place in latrines so foul that no guards ever entered them; how adults organized secret classes to teach children math, poetry, history—not just for learning’s sake, but so those children might maintain a belief that they would one day be free to pursue a normal life.
In remarks to the press afterward, Merkel spoke clearly and humbly of the necessity for Germans to remember the past—to wrestle with the agonizing question of how their homeland could have perpetrated such horrors and recognize the special responsibility they now shouldered to stand up against bigotry of all kinds. Then Elie spoke, describing how in 1945—paradoxically—he had emerged from the camp feeling hopeful about the future. Hopeful, he said, because he assumed that the world had surely learned once and for all that hatred was useless and racism stupid and “the will to conquer other people’s minds or territories or aspirations…is meaningless.” He wasn’t so sure now that such optimism was justified, he said, not after the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Bosnia.
But he beseeched us, beseeched me, to leave Buchenwald with resolve, to try to bring about peace, to use the memory of what had happened on the ground where we stood to see past anger and divisions and find strength in solidarity.
