No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

22 PROMOTING AMERICA’S INTERESTS AND VALUES ABROAD

THE DAY AFTER the State of the Union, I left on my first trip abroad.

I’d been in office just a week, and by going on the road right away, I wanted to send a message of openness and outreach to our friends.

I arrived at Andrews Air Force Base and boarded the plane that said simply, “The United States of America.” The “blue and white,” as it’s called, is a Boeing 757 with dated decor, circa 1980. But as I walked into my cabin at the front of the plane and sat at the desk for the first time, I felt a real sense of wonderment and pride. Before I could sink too far into my thoughts, my spokesman, Sean McCormack, came in and said that after takeoff I’d need to go back and brief the traveling press corps, most of whom were assigned permanently to the Department of State. It was a ritual event just after takeoff to try to set the tone for the trip through the initial press stories that the journalists would file upon landing. I dutifully went to the back of the plane, trying to stand up straight despite the slight turbulence that rocked us back and forth.

The journalists were in a good mood, probably giving the new secretary a bit of a honeymoon. They were senior members of their profession who knew foreign policy issues inside out. Steve Weisman of the New York Times, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, Anne Gearan of the Associated Press, and Andrea Mitchell of NBC News had all been around the block more than a few times. The State Department press corps had a reputation for being “foreign policy nerds,” as opposed to the generalists, who loved the spotlight of the White House beat. They were going to be my companions for four years in a quasi-adversarial relationship that I hoped would generate mutual respect. That would be in the best tradition of the “fourth estate.” We were going to be together a lot, so as a nice gesture I gave each one an atlas with which to track our travels.

Jim Wilkinson, my senior advisor, Sean, and the rest of the team had carefully constructed the trip so that the first stop would be in Great Britain, “our closest friend.” I learned, by the way, never to say that because even though everyone understood the “special relationship,” it was not good to risk insulting other close friends. Indeed, I’d always use the construction “one of our closest friends.” That was safe.

The Brits were anxious to help me get off to a good start. My day began with a solid interview with the venerable journalist Sir David Frost. I then met with Prime Minister Blair at Number 10 Downing Street. Walking into Winston Churchill’s former dwelling was pretty special. Yet I was struck once again (it was my third or so time there) by its modesty. It’s just a town house—but the pictures on the wall go back to the days of nineteenth-century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. I felt very calm before that first encounter as secretary of state because, as national security advisor, I already knew the leaders of most countries well, and I knew Tony Blair best of all; the press availability with him was a comfortable way to begin my public engagement with the world.

The meeting with Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, was also productive and friendly, followed by a formal, extensive press conference. There are two types of press encounters: the “availability,” where the participants will just walk out in front of the press, make a few extemporaneous remarks, and perhaps take one or two questions; and the “press conference,” with podiums in gilded halls, prepared remarks, and what can seem like an endless number of questions. As Jack and I walked out into the ornate gold-and-white room and onto the stage, I was somewhat taken aback by the huge number of press. Steady, I thought to myself. Posture. Stand up straight. You’ve done this a thousand times before. Well, maybe not a thousand but enough.

Jack made his statement, and I made mine. Then the questions began. Much to my surprise, there was very little about Iraq. On January 30 millions of Iraqis had cast ballots in a powerful demonstration of what the path to democracy could look like in the Middle East. Coupled with the breaking news about the involvement of UN personnel in the Oil for Food scandal, our decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein looked a bit better, even to critics, than it had a few months before. The press has a tendency to change the subject when the sense of crisis abates. The journalists’ attention had shifted to Iran and the perceived chasm between the United States and its allies on how to approach Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

As I listened to the questions, it dawned on me that the Europeans somehow saw themselves as mediating between the United States and Iran. Washington was viewed as part of the problem, not a partner in finding the solution. How did we get into this situation? I wondered. Question after question probed for evidence that the United States was intending to initiate military action against Iran. Though Jack tried to moderate the perception of a split, he too seemed to think that Europe and the United States weren’t on the same page. The Iranians must be loving this, I thought. I resolved to talk to the President about that very troubling development by phone that night. He needed to know how much distance there was between our friends and us.

That afternoon we were “wheels up” for Berlin. The German capital is one of my two favorite cities in Europe (the other is Rome) and one that provokes historical memories both good and bad. I’d been deeply involved in the unification of Germany and remembered long conversations in Bonn cafés about whether Berlin should again become the capital of Germany. Some thought the great city too irrevocably associated with militarism and two world wars. Fortunately, the Germans decided in favor of Berlin, a capital that is appropriate for a great power.

But in truth, the unified Germany was still coming to terms with its role as the most populous and economically prosperous country in Europe. When one would say something about German “power,” an interlocutor would delicately remind you that “power” was not a word with which Germans were comfortable. The definition of Germany’s role was complicated, wedded to the European unification project meant to subsume Berlin’s “power” by integrating it into a larger, peaceful framework. The country’s relationship with the United States had sustained the divided Germany throughout the Cold War and helped to successfully overcome that division near the end of the century. Still, the new Germany was still defining its foreign policy identity. Gerhard Schroeder’s decision to link arms with Vladimir Putin in opposing intervention in Iraq was an echo of Germany’s historical tendency to sometimes swing eastward. I didn’t want to make too much of it, but I thought that our relationship with Germany, more than any other ally, had been seriously damaged by the split over Iraq. The unified Germany was still in the process of defining its policy orientation, and I didn’t like the early returns.

We walked into the new building housing the offices of the chancellor. It’s been called the “washing machine” for its cylindrical central tower that mimics a perpetual swirl of motion. I love traditional German architecture but find German modernism unsettling and thought to myself that this building was an uneasy companion to the nineteenth-century Bundestag across the square, even though the stone dome of the Reichstag had been replaced with glass to emphasize the transparency of the Bundesrepublik. That I was so focused on the buildings is perhaps a bit strange, given the importance of the meetings I was about to have, but for whatever reason, the architecture was what caught my attention.

We took the elevator to Chancellor Schroeder’s office, where he greeted me warmly. Then, after a cordial meeting, the two of us walked down a narrow pathway toward the press availability. As we entered the room, I was literally blinded by the camera flashes. There were hundreds of journalists crowded into a lobby intended for far fewer people. They were pushing and shoving one another to get a picture of the two of us. “Condi, over here!” “Look, Secretary Rice!” “Condi, look at me!” Cameras were flashing in every direction. I kept walking alongside Schroeder, but I was absolutely stunned by the commotion around us.

When we reached the podium, the chancellor made warm remarks about the importance of U.S.-German relations and our shared values. He underscored the contribution that Germany was making to rebuilding Iraq, concentrating on the effort to train security forces. I then delivered remarks that also focused on the future, not the past. The question-and-answer period was much like that in London, probing on Iran, not Iraq, and edgy though not hostile.

At one point I called on a German journalist when it was actually Schroeder’s turn to recognize a member of the press. “Woman power!” he yelled awkwardly in his thick German accent. Oh, well, it was meant to be funny—I think. At the end of the press conference, Schroeder leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. The next morning’s coverage of my trip to Berlin included a huge picture of the German chancellor and me in a friendly embrace. That photo said more about putting the past behind us than any words could have, and I was grateful for that. Later that afternoon, on the flight from Poland to Turkey, President Bush called and we chuckled about how close the chancellor and I now appeared to be. But on a more serious note the President said that I was setting exactly the tone that he’d hoped; it was time to move on from the wounds of the Iraq split and unite the alliance in the cause of promoting shared values.

No place was more evocative of the potency of those democratic values than Poland, and my stop in Warsaw was intended to remind everyone to think of history’s long arc, not the day’s headlines. Not only had the Poles participated early and enthusiastically in the liberation of Iraq, they’d done so for the right reasons. They believed in the universality of liberty and were grateful that the free world hadn’t forgotten them during the long twilight of the Cold War. That had led the Poles to want to do the same for captive peoples everywhere.

Four years earlier, when visiting Warsaw with the President, I’d become quite emotional at the arrival ceremony. Listening to the two national anthems under not just the U.S. and Polish flags but also the NATO banner, I reflected on how unlikely this scene would have seemed in the dark days of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. I remembered, too, my trip to Poland in 1989 with George H. W. Bush, who’d helped set off the revolt against the communist regime with his visit to Gdańsk and unequivocal support for the opposition movement Solidarity. Poland was a vivid reminder that U.S. foreign policy, grounded in both power and principle, had helped change what seemed to be immutable circumstances.

If only Europe “old” and “new,” together with the United States, could focus energy and attention on troubled regions, particularly the Middle East, we could build a balance of power that favored freedom. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. But who would have thought in 1945 that the U.S. President, sixty years later, would review a Polish contingent of NATO troops—still goose-stepping, Central European style—thanks to Poland’s recent membership in the Warsaw Pact? Who would have thought it in 1985?

Yet we understood that the challenge was exacerbated by the United States’ uneasy relationship with the Muslim world. My next stop in Turkey would underscore that point.

Turkey was a longtime ally and had been a member of NATO since 1952. But until recently it had been only quasi-democratic, with an assertive military and a political elite that enforced secularism—sometimes brutally—on the population. Kemalism, as the doctrine of secularism was called, had allowed Turkey to modernize but not to fully democratize. Religious expression was all but prohibited outside the mosque. Now, with the election of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), avowedly Islamic leaders had taken the reins. They insisted that they had no intention of turning Turkey into a theocracy but merely wanted to rebalance the society and give religious expression and religious people a place in the public square. Tensions were evident as the old elite (wedded to Kemalism) and the new leaders clashed about the future course of the country. Even the fact that the wives of AKP officials often “covered” with head scarves was a source of discomfort for many Turks, who were fearful of the Islamization of their country. I saw Turkey as the frontline state in the historic struggle to reconcile the principles of Islam and the demands of individual liberty.

That struggle is still playing out in the Middle East today. If there is to be democracy in the region, it will likely evolve as it has in Turkey. As in that country, there will have to be a resolution of the tensions between individual rights, including the rights of women, and the tenets of Islam. The place of religion and religious people in politics, resolved in Europe hundreds of years ago, will have to be determined anew in the Muslim world.

Thus the struggle in Istanbul and Ankara and throughout the vast country is of monumental historic significance. I went to Ankara aware of Turkey’s centrality to the Bush administration’s reorientation of U.S. foreign policy toward the Freedom Agenda.

President Bush’s second inaugural address had put the pursuit of human freedom squarely in the middle of U.S. foreign policy. The President had had a direct hand in the address from the beginning of its development, and it had become a deep reflection of his personal convictions regarding human dignity and freedom. The President was following in a long line of American leaders who believed that U.S. interests, in the long run, are best secured by the advance of freedom. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” he said. Still, U.S. policy for sixty years had pursued something very different in the Middle East: stability at the expense of democracy. We had gotten neither. The decision to cast aside the “stability over democracy” mind-set toward the region became the last element of our foreign policy response to 9/11 and the final piece of the Bush Doctrine.

The evolution of our thinking—from the tactical goal of pursuing al Qaeda to creating a strategic agenda for freedom in the Middle East—did not take place overnight. Of course, from the very beginning the President had a deep personal belief in the power of liberty and an instinct toward a U.S. foreign policy based on values; that was evident in the way he viewed the prospective Palestinian state and in his insistence that the United States would help to build a democratic, not just a liberated, Iraq.

The second inaugural address made the choice of promoting freedom in the Middle East and elsewhere explicit and set off a debate among policy makers, analysts, and academics about the place of idealism and ideology in U.S. foreign policy. Realists ran to the barricades to sound the alarm that “interests,” not “idealism,” should guide the United States’ interactions with the world. What they failed to see was that the Freedom Agenda was not just a moral or idealistic cause; it was a redefinition of what constituted realism, a change in the way we viewed U.S. interests in the new circumstances forced on us by the attacks of that horrible day. We rather quickly arrived at the conclusion that U.S. interests and values could be linked together in a coherent way, forming what I came to call a distinctly American realism.

Our overall response to 9/11 was in one sense similar to the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor and its experience after World War II. Roosevelt didn’t enter the war to democratize Germany and Japan. When the war was over, the Europeans, particularly Great Britain, cared less about the form of the new German government than about containing its power. Churchill is reported to have said that he liked Germany so much that he wanted there to be as many Germanys as possible. In other words, he wanted to dismember it and return it to its pre-1871 state; safety lay in getting the balance of power right, and that meant a weak Germany.

The Americans, though, had a different view. There was indeed a moral dimension to their insistence on democratic processes and institutions. But there was a practical reason as well: Truman, Acheson, Marshall, and others began to equate a new and stable order with a permanent change in the nature of the defeated regimes, a change that could be secured only with democracy. They believed that the balance of power could be improved in our favor if democratic states emerged in Europe. This linking of our interests (the balance of power) and our values (democracy) was at the core of our strategic thinking. Later the United States and our allies would embed West Germany in a new kind of security alliance, one based on democratic values. NATO would both prevent the further advance of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union and create a security umbrella under which old adversaries would become democratic partners in peace. In Japan this would take the form of a defense alliance with a new government and a Constitution that looked much like the American one. This was an early practical manifestation of a belief that would later emerge in an academic theory called the “democratic peace.” Historically, it can be demonstrated that democracies have not fought one another. Therefore democracy and stability—both within states and between them—can be mutually reinforcing.

The belief in the power of democracy to overcome old rivalries and establish a basis for peace and prosperity did not transfer verbatim to the Middle East. Still, the echoes of it were unmistakable in the way that we came to view that troubled region after the horrors of 9/11. The immediate problem was to hunt down al Qaeda, defend our country, and deal with WMD proliferators who might pass the devastating weapons to terrorists. But surely there was some larger message lying in the ruins of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was, we came to believe, the toxic effect of the “freedom gap” in the Middle East and the unforgivable association of the United States with the defense of the authoritarian status quo.

The intellectual origins of the link between the freedom gap and terrorism are complex. The works of Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami were influential with all of us, but the single most impactful document for the President, and certainly for me, was the 2002 Arab Human Development Report, sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme. In the report, Arab intellectuals laid out the costs of authoritarianism in the Middle East over sixty years. “The Arab world is at a crossroads,” they said, and it risked being left behind. The authoritarian status quo had led to three deficits that stifled progress: in knowledge and education, women’s empowerment, and freedom. By identifying the primary sources of the problem, the report helped clarify the way forward.

The absence of freedom in the Arab world had not meant the absence of politics. The comfort many people had in the essential stability of the region was a false comfort. Authoritarians, many of whom were our friends, had set up a false choice: stability or democracy. “Islamist extremists or me,” they would say. They then engaged in self-fulfilling policies that made the dichotomy true. Healthy political forces were repressed, and advocates for reform were jailed, beaten, and prevented from organizing. Meanwhile, the Islamists took refuge in the mosques and madrassas, emerging as political forces and in many places purveyors to the population of social services that the corrupt authoritarians did not provide. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt became associated as much with their good works among the poor as with their radical views.

In the most unvarnished case of a kind of Faustian bargain, the Saudi royal family, frightened by the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, made a pact with the radical Wahhabi clerics. The attitude of the monarch could essentially be summed up as “The mosque is yours; the public square is ours.” Once on a visit to one of King Abdullah’s extraordinary residences, I was flabbergasted to find myself walking through an enormous aquarium—populated by tropical fish and sharks! I asked one of the princes how they kept the sharks from eating the fish. “Oh, if you feed the sharks enough, they have no interest in the fish,” he said. Steve Hadley later joked that it was exactly how the House of Saud had treated the extremists: feed them, and they won’t eat you. That bargain came crashing down with the attack on the World Trade Center and then, two years later, in the brutal attacks on the Saudi kingdom itself. The new virulent ideology had manifested into al Qaeda, which was determined to expel the United States from the Middle East, destroy the “puppet regimes” that we had supported, and clear the way for an Islamic caliphate. So in essence the absence of decent political forces had left a void, which had been filled by extremists who had become the outlet for “politics” in countries experiencing a “freedom gap.”

Only the emergence of democratic institutions and practices could defeat terrorism and radical political Islam. We knew that the path would not be easy and there would undoubtedly be trade-offs in the short term. The United States could not radically reorient its foreign policy, refusing to deal with friendly authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt on matters of strategic importance.

The Freedom Agenda was meant to be a long-term strategic shift in the way we defined our interests, not just a genuflection toward our values. We developed new international institutions through a series of programs called the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative. The Forum for the Future, created in 2004, brought representatives of civil society and governments from throughout the region together to discuss individual rights, women’s empowerment, and economic development. Officials from the United States and Europe joined ministers from monarchies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia and dictatorships such as Syria in sessions devoted to human rights and democracy. The goal was to push on different dimensions, supporting civil society and pressuring governments. The presentations at those sessions were, not surprisingly, sterile and sometimes even a little hostile toward us. Still the participants—representatives of governments and members of civil society—attended, and political reform was on the agenda at every meeting.

In this we attempted to replicate the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which had been formed in 1975. At the time many American conservatives had worried that the CSCE would confirm the status quo, since the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe participated as equals with the countries of free Europe. But it did just the opposite. Its charter enshrined human rights as one of three “baskets” (the others were security and economics), and dissidents repeatedly used the language to embarrass their rulers, who had, after all, signed on to the document. And the many exchange programs and conferences of the CSCE provided an opportunity for Soviet and Eastern European citizens to meet one another and to engage activists from the West in a protected environment. When the Cold War ended, many former dissidents credited the work of the CSCE in hastening communism’s collapse in Europe.

The Freedom Agenda, we knew, would be the work of generations. Nonetheless, in the short term it was important to have some concrete manifestation of the possibility of its success. Iraq’s future was too uncertain to provide that example. Turkey was a stable country that, in its transition, was providing evidence that democracy and Islam could exist side by side.

Turkey was important for another reason: it was by geography and history an uneasy bridge between the Middle East and Europe. The great political scientist Samuel Huntington had written an article in 1993 called “The Clash of Civilizations?” and later a bestselling book. In them he argued that there was no such thing as universal values and that the Muslim world, among others, was an entity unto itself. That fact would eventually produce a clash, most likely violent, in which the Western principles of religious tolerance and secular politics would run headlong into political Islam. After 9/11 Sam Huntington sounded like a prophet.

I’d gotten to know Huntington while I was a visiting fellow at his research center at Harvard, the Center for International Affairs, in 1986. He’d been an important mentor to me, sharing my fascination with theories of civil-military relations. There were few minds as fertile as Sam Huntington’s. He thought in grand philosophical and historical terms. His book was like that, sweeping in its analysis and even more so in its implications.

After 9/11 I read Sam’s book again, this time with considerable alarm. But it seemed to me to understate the ability of institutions to shape events, not just to be shaped by events. History provided many examples. Under the NATO umbrella, Germany and France had become friends. At the end of the Cold War, many had feared ethnic violence in Eastern Europe, but with the exception of the former Yugoslavia it hadn’t materialized. Rather, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had overcome conflicts that, a century earlier, would have exploded onto the battlefield. The East and Central Europeans had made a peaceful transition to democracy. Their two lodestars had been NATO and the European Union; membership in one or the other or both had pointed the way.

Turkey was a member of NATO but wanted desperately to accede to the European Union. The strict requirements for membership, both economic and political, had in part driven Turkey’s democratization to that point. But the Europeans were ambivalent in the extreme about integrating more than 70 million Muslims. The Turks felt that Europe was going through the motions of negotiating their entry but unlikely ever to finish the process. Their fears were not unfounded. One didn’t have to probe too deeply to discover that many Europeans didn’t really see Turkey as belonging to Europe. That attitude, I believed, would make Sam Huntington’s prophecy true: a Europe that insisted on a new divide between Muslim Turkey and Christian Europe would make a huge strategic mistake.

So I went to Ankara with a deep desire to understand what was going on there and to strengthen our friendship with the Turks. My encounter with the Turkish leaders reinforced my belief that the country could be at the epicenter of a transformed broader Middle East, one that would embrace democratic values and ultimately defeat terrorism.

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, who would later become president, has a wrestler’s build and speaks fluent English, though with a heavy accent. Although one should always be on guard against reacting to a foreign colleague based on personality, we’re all human. Chemistry matters, and with Gül it was immediately good.

As we talked in the car about the future of Turkey, I was convinced that he was a democrat at heart. He acknowledged the discomfort of some Turks with the fact that the AKP was avowedly Islamic, saying that people would eventually see that it was evolving toward something like the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Germany. “They’re not very Christian anymore,” he quipped. He seemed almost hurt that people criticized his wife for wearing a head scarf, saying that it should be a matter of choice. “I have female relatives who cover and some who don’t,” he said. He then turned to the issue of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, expressing a desire to treat them better than previous governments had and thus awaken their Turkish identity. All in all, I saw nothing to dislike about my colleague—and that holds to this day.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was somewhat harder to read. Sitting in his rather dark office with heavy red curtains and surrounded by photographs of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, I had a momentary sense that Turkey is indeed not quite European. Though the prime minister said all the right things about democracy and Islam, his defense of the AKP felt more political than had Gül’s.

The conversation turned to Iraq and the tensions surrounding Turkey’s refusal to allow U.S. troops to transit its territory in 2003. I assured Erdoğan that the President had put the refusal behind him and was now focused on the extremely important relationship between Turkey and Iraq. Erdoğan expressed anger at the continuing attacks by Kurdish rebels using bases in northern Iraq. I promised to take the problem back to Washington, and, indeed, it would become one of the critical issues of the relationship. Erdoğan promised that Turkey was committed to rebuilding Iraq as a stable, unified, and democratic neighbor.

Finally, we established common ground very quickly on the desirability of Turkey’s joining the European Union, and I made assurances to intensify the United States’ already considerable efforts to make the case to our allies. “We’re not members of the EU,” I said, stating the obvious reason that our urgings could accomplish only so much. “When we get in, we will propose you for membership,” he said. At least he had a sense of humor.

While boarding the plane that was headed for Jerusalem, I felt very good about my visit to Turkey. I liked the Turks as people—tough, exotic, and engaging. They reminded me a bit of the Russians, struggling to fit between Europe and Asia. And I knew that I’d spend a lot of time with them, trying to avert a “clash of civilizations.”

THERE’S SOMETHING otherworldly about the light in Jerusalem, especially with sunrise or sunset as a backdrop to the “old city.” Whenever I arrived there, I found myself involuntarily praying “for the peace of Jerusalem,” a line that has been put to music in one of my favorite religious songs by the English composer Sir Hubert Parry. I’d last been in Jerusalem in 2003 while trying to breathe life into the Aqaba accords. Now, as secretary of state, I felt personal responsibility for the thicket of issues preventing Middle East peace. It’s been said that U.S. secretaries of state are drawn to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict like moths to a flame. The implication is that flying too close to this combustible problem is likely to result in being burned. But on that February trip there seemed to be as good a chance as there ever would be to midwife the birth of a Palestinian state.

Mahmoud Abbas had been elected president of the Palestinian Authority on January 9 and had immediately made clear that he believed only in a negotiated solution to the conflict. In his remarks, not just to outsiders but to his own people, the vocabulary of resistance and the intifada was nowhere in evidence. We welcomed Abbas’s election by offering to donate $200 million annually to the Palestinians. The President also encouraged the wealthy Persian Gulf states to dramatically increase their aid. That the appeal would fall largely on deaf ears was my first lesson in how stingy the Arabs could be toward the Palestinian cause that they so zealously championed.

Major changes were under way in Israel, too. Ariel Sharon was preparing to take the plan for withdrawal from Gaza to the Knesset in a few weeks. After all the failed negotiations, Israel was about to voluntarily and unilaterally remove settlements and settlers from Gaza and the West Bank. We’d helped Sharon immensely with President Bush’s letter of April 2004 in which he acknowledged the need to accommodate major Israeli population centers in the West Bank. Now the world would be able to see the benefits of the significant changes that we’d made to the old script for the peace process. There was a new, internationally respected leader in Palestine and a conservative Israeli prime minister who was ready to divide the land. The U.S. President now had the conditions that he’d insisted on in June 2002 despite the howls of traditionalists at the time.

THE APPROACH to the prime minister’s office reminds one that Israel still considers itself to be in a state of war. Every leader in the world lives and works in a protected compound. But the level of security at the Israeli complex is obviously higher than most. Once inside the building, you’re struck by its ramshackle appearance: it looks a little like a run-down high school building with bare tile floors and walls that could use a coat of paint. Inside the prime minister’s tiny office, half the size of mine at the State Department, Sharon and I reviewed his thinking on withdrawal from Gaza. I reiterated the importance of coordinating with the Palestinians and asked that he meet with Abbas to do so soon. The prime minister assured me that he would but reminded me that he had a lot of work to do in Israel first. “Have you seen those blue flags on the cars?” he asked.

“Yes.” I replied. “I thought they were for some kind of holiday.”

“No,” Sharon said, “they’re meant to be a sign of support for the settlers.” After my staff and I left the compound and turned back out onto the road, we noticed many blue flags.

That afternoon I was driven to the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, the Muqata. The long, straight highway through the barren desert always made me wonder why anyone wanted this land. Because of my religious beliefs, I always took a moment to imagine Jesus walking the dusty, and at some points quite steep, pathways of the Holy Land. Then I would return to my discussions with our consul general for Jerusalem, who was seated with me in the back of the armored SUV. We couldn’t have an ambassador because Palestine was not a state. Hopefully that was about to change.

The approach to the Muqata runs through Ramallah, a rather prosperous-looking town with shops, government buildings, and nice apartments. Ramallah, Jericho, and a few other towns were the exceptions for the Palestinian people; most lived in squalid conditions.

When we reached the Muqata, the SUV was turned sharply to avoid the gravesite of Yasir Arafat. It was a delicate moment. I didn’t want to seem disrespectful, but I felt it was important to be far enough away that I wouldn’t have to get out and acknowledge his grave. My security detail had obviously practiced the maneuver, and we drove just the right route, ending up in front of the assembled Palestinian delegation. Again the shock for me involved the press coverage. Palestinian journalists were roped off to the side, but they were yelling and I could still see the camera flashes. As I got out of the car and was greeted by Abbas’s trusted aid Saeb Erekat, they were screaming, “Secretary Rice!” “Over here!” “Please, just one shot!” I thought to myself that I’d have to get used to it.

My meeting with Abbas covered much of the ground I’d traversed with Sharon. Abbas doesn’t speak English well, but he understands it and can sometimes respond to questions. An elegant man with a shock of white hair, he seems confident and anxious all at once. He did seem genuinely glad to see me and expressed his hope that I would “stay really involved. We need you,” he said. At the conclusion of the meeting we held a press conference in a dingy room with a portrait of Arafat behind us. Well, I hadn’t avoided the “leader” after all. As I had in Israel, I declared that this was a period of “great optimism.” The news on the way to Paris that Abbas and Sharon had agreed to a summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt seemed to vindicate that judgment. The two would pledge to cease acts of violence against their counterparts in a mutual ceasefire. We’d come a long way since the darkest days of the intifada in the spring of 2002.

My initial voyage as secretary of state was going better than I could have dreamed. I felt energetic, and people reacted well to my message of vigorous U.S. diplomacy.

It was in that mood that I headed for Paris, knowing that the French love to chatter and gossip about U.S. diplomats. The morning began with a visit to the Hector Berlioz Conservatory, where the students performed Berlioz and Beethoven. Listening to the music was a nice way to connect with the French people and to soften the edges of America’s image, which most Europeans at that time associated with terrorism and war.

But the centerpiece of the visit was to be my speech at the Sciences Po, a leading French university. My words would be closely watched for their content, signals, and messages. And also, I had to concede, my suit would be closely watched for its style. I know it’s terrible to think that the U.S. secretary of state has to worry about such things. But that’s a fact of life if you’re female. So I chose carefully: a navy blue Valentino suit with pleats and a bow at the bottom of the skirt, pearls, and navy pumps. The French loved it.

With that hurdle out of the way, my message was well received. The speech called upon the Alliance to stop squabbling about today’s headlines and join together in the great work of helping to free people from tyranny. Some journalists reacted to the message about the Freedom Agenda with characteristic comments about American naiveté. There was a deep cynicism among the Europeans about the universality of freedom. It was as if they’d forgotten their own history and the lengths to which others (especially the United States) had gone to defend their liberty. Occasionally I’d remind them that Germany had come recently to democracy. “Oh, but we had a tradition of it,” a German would say. “What tradition would that be?” I would counter. “Bismarck, the Kaiser, or maybe the brief interlude that brought Adolf Hitler to power?” It was a rhetorical punch, but it backed our friends away from their patronizing view of the “readiness” of others to govern themselves.

When I met with President Chirac, I realized that I still harbored considerable animosity about Iraq. I told myself that I wouldn’t be baited into an argument with the prickly and proud French president. I needn’t have worried. When, to break the ice, I asked Chirac about his views on the Middle East, he surprised me with his cogent analysis, even if his dismissal of democracy in the Middle East was disquieting. Nonetheless, we engaged in a true back-and-forth at the strategic level, focusing particularly on what we could do to help Lebanon.

At the press conference with the foreign minister, Michel Barnier gently referred to me as “my dear Condi,” signaling his obvious desire to publicly put difficulties behind us. The same was true in Brussels at NATO headquarters and the European Commission, and later in Luxembourg, which was holding the six-month presidency of the European Union. It was crystal clear that the Europeans were desperate to repair the relationship with us. I felt that it was time to reciprocate fully.

Our allies can be frustrating and patronizing, treating the United States as a bigger and stronger but less refined and less cultured younger brother, who needs to be reined in from time to time. I found the European Union to be a strange institution, perhaps best summed up by Henry Kissinger’s question “If I want to call Europe, whom do I call?” The truth is, you had to call both Brussels and the European capitals.

But with all the challenges, we need Europe, with its considerable wealth and values, to achieve a freer, more prosperous world. The close ties of kinship have been diluted somewhat by the United States’ multiethnic character, but the great ideals of the Enlightenment and the principles on which we were founded remain and tie us to Europe as to no other place. And the alliance of Europe and the United States has been the most stable and successful free association of states in international history. Together we stood fast until the Soviet behemoth collapsed, and Europe is now whole, free, and at peace. That bodes well for what a united alliance can do in the future.

ONLY TWO WEEKS after my trip, the President was scheduled to go to Europe for a NATO summit. Sitting in the Oval the day after I returned, we talked at length about what I’d found: an alliance hungry to heal its fissures but deeply split with us about Iran. “They’re just sure that we want to take on Tehran next,” I told the President.

The President asked how dramatic a shift in policy we needed to reassure the Europeans, clearly indicating that he wasn’t ready for anything dramatic. There were two small decisions pending: whether to remove our objection to the Iranians’ beginning the process of negotiating membership in the World Trade Organization; and whether to agree to allow them to buy some spare parts for aging American-built civilian aircraft, conceding that the latter could even be considered humanitarian since we didn’t want Iranian passenger jets dropping out of the sky due to maintenance problems. By showing flexibility on those issues, we could possibly leverage agreement with our allies to unify our policies and toughen their stance toward Tehran. The timing was propitious because the Europeans had become frustrated with Iran’s intransigence in the negotiations that had been going on and off since 2003. The President could use his trip to Europe to confirm my view of the situation for himself and feel out the allies on a new direction.

In fact, that plan bore fruit. When, during his trip, the President signaled this potential change, the allies jumped at the possibility of aligning themselves with us. Two months later we would announce our decision to take modest measures to support the European diplomacy. They, in turn, would agree to refer Iran’s case to the UN Security Council if no progress was made. That was the first step in building an international coalition to deal with the Iranian problem.

EARLY IN 2005 it looked as if the forces of freedom would triumph in a matter of months, not years. Late in February, President Mubarak asked Egypt’s Parliament to allow for direct, multi-candidate presidential elections for the first time in the nation’s history. And even though women were excluded from the vote, Saudi Arabia conducted its first nationwide election to select half of the members of municipal councils. Taken together, those breakthroughs, combined with the parliamentary elections in Iraq, suggested that the Middle East was moving—or, perhaps more correctly, lurching—toward its first steps of political reform.

But nowhere were developments more stunning than in Lebanon. I’ve been asked many times through the years, about any number of events, “Were you surprised?” The truth is that you can often see the kindling collecting underneath a structure. The surprise comes from never knowing when a spark might ignite and engulf the structure in flames.

The spark in Lebanon was a car bomb that killed Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister, and twenty-two others. I was standing at my desk at State when images of the carnage started to play across the television screen. My mind flashed back to the only time that I’d met Hariri. He’d come to the White House to ask President Bush to back a donor conference to retire Lebanon’s debt. We liked the affable billionaire but joked that he could have simply paid off the debt personally. Indeed, he’d used a good deal of his personal wealth to improve the infrastructure of his country. The sudden and violent death of someone I’d met always shook me for a moment. This time was no different, and it crossed my mind that Hariri was more than a former prime minister; he was about to become a martyr for a cause.

Later that afternoon, I received a recommendation that we recall our ambassador to Syria. Syria’s military forces occupied Lebanon, supported Hezbollah, and had long intervened in Lebanese politics. Syria’s leaders hated Hariri, who had deep ties to the West, especially to the French. Everyone believed that Syria’s fingerprints were all over the assassination, so I talked with the President and we decided to withdraw our ambassador from Damascus to underscore Syria’s suspected complicity and put them on the defensive.

At the time the decision seemed wise, but once she was pulled, it was hard to send her back. On several occasions over the next three years it would have been helpful to have had a senior diplomatic presence in Damascus. I never asked the President to recall another ambassador, despite provocations in Venezuela and Belarus.

Events moved quickly in Lebanon. On February 28 the pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami resigned, ensuring a struggle over the future direction of the country. Remarkably, the pieces were falling into place to begin unwinding Syrian power and influence in Lebanon. The foundation of that outcome had already been laid in 2004 by a coalition led by the unlikely partners George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.

During a visit to France in 2003, Chirac had challenged President Bush, saying that he was always speaking of democracy in the Middle East. Why couldn’t something be done about democracy in Lebanon, which had once had relatively free political institutions? “We should save them from Syria,” Chirac said. President Bush was intrigued, and Chirac’s advisor Maurice Gourdault-Montagne and I were told to develop a strategy. We settled on a UN Security Council Resolution demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces and warning Damascus not to interfere in Lebanese affairs. The resolution passed the night that President Bush was nominated at the Republican National Convention in New York City. There were nine positive votes and six abstentions; no one voted against the resolution. In fact, I personally called the foreign minister of the Philippines at three in the morning to secure the final “yea.”

At the time, the resolution didn’t seem to mean very much. In fact, Damascus scoffed at it and basically told the United Nations to mind its own business. But now, less than a year later, in the aftermath of the Hariri assassination, international opinion shifted hard against the Syrians. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who hated Syrian President Bashar al-Assad the younger (he had hated his father too but respected him for his toughness), publicly warned Damascus to get its forces out of Lebanon.

The British had decided to hold a meeting in support of the Palestinian Authority in London on March 1 and 2. Though I’d been to Europe twice since becoming secretary, Tony Blair asked the President to send me to the meeting. The Europeans were always looking for leadership roles in expressing solidarity with the Palestinians. This was one such effort, and the President wanted to oblige his good friend.

That morning I was due to meet with French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, and with the gathering storm in Beirut we decided to call jointly for Syria to remove its forces. The press took note of the new era of cooperation between France and the United States. It didn’t take long to establish a “new era” in the age of instant communication.

Before dinner that night I returned to my suite in the Churchill Hotel and flipped on the television. Tens of thousands of Lebanese were in the streets, carrying posters bearing the likeness of the martyred Hariri. Car horns were honking as people yelled epithets at the Syrians, telling them to get out. For one moment I worried that Tony Blair’s Palestinian conference was being overshadowed; then I reminded myself that no one was more devoted to freedom’s forward march than the British prime minister. What a good way for his Middle East conference to end.

On March 5 Syria announced its intention to withdraw its military forces from Lebanon. Damascus would still have significant influence and covert intelligence personnel deployed in Lebanon through which to exercise it, and it would have its association with Hezbollah. But the balance of power in the Middle East was shifting: on March 14 hundreds of thousands of Lebanese rallied against the presence of Syrian forces in Beirut. A new, pro-Western movement, bearing the name of that historic date—March 14—was born under the leadership of Saad Hariri, the slain prime minister’s son.