No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

25 BAGHDAD AND CAIRO

EVENING TRIPS OUT TO Andrews Air Force Base always made me feel a little melancholy. I’d already worked an entire day, sprinted home to pick up my luggage, and jumped into the limousine headed to whatever country was next on my relentless travel log. “Otis, what are you going to do this weekend?” I’d ask my driver as we headed out along Suitland Parkway.

“My daughter’s got a basketball game, and I have to get out for a long run,” he would answer.

I would ask because it is important for the folks who help you to know that you care about their families and their lives. But the answer always made me sad. I’d lost all conception of weekends.

Otis had been a noncommissioned officer in the army from 1975 until 1995, when he’d become a civilian driver for the government. He’d been the personal driver of two former secretaries of defense and a former CIA director when he joined the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Bureau to serve as Colin Powell’s driver. Like Steve Estelle, my Secret Service driver at the White House, he was one of those dedicated African American government servants who just did their jobs without any fanfare despite long, crazy hours. Otis and Steve knew every route in Washington, D.C., and could magically turn a twenty-minute trip into a ten-minute one if need be, just by finding a shortcut. I gave Hillary Clinton only a few tidbits of advice about personnel; “Keep Otis” was at the top of the list.

On the morning of May 14, though, the journey out to Andrews was different. I was on my way to Qatar to board a military plane that would fly me to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and then on to Baghdad for the first time as secretary of state. I was so excited that I could barely contain myself. For security reasons, only a handful of staff knew where I was going, and I’d made the decision never to tell my family when I was traveling to Iraq or Afghanistan. They would just have worried.

After the brief stop in the northern Kurdish region, we took off in the military’s human transport plane, the C-17. The flight’s commander asked if I’d like to sit in the cockpit, which I readily agreed to do. With about thirty minutes left until landing, the flight crew brought me my armored vest and seat—yes, an armored plate that you sit on just in case a missile comes from below. On that occasion we landed without incident, though that was not always the case. Once, flying into Baghdad, we suddenly diverted upon approach. “What was that?” I asked the pilot.

“The airport is being mortared,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s random or if it’s meant for you.”

“I guess it doesn’t really matter,” I joked. We eventually landed about forty minutes later.

On another trip, I was to fly from Baghdad to Israel, which required us to fly over Jordanian territory. I spotted a plane off our right side and asked the pilot what it was.

“Oh, ma’am, that’s just a Syrian fighter making sure we don’t cross into his airspace,” he said calmly.

“Well, I hope we have good navigational gear,” I quipped.

“Ma’am, don’t worry about ours,” he replied. “Worry about his.”

Iraq was very much a war zone, but I loved going there despite the secrecy and extraordinary security. And I always felt preternaturally safe. On my first trip I wore the helmet that I was given, making me look like a re-creation of the much-maligned photograph of Michael Dukakis riding in a tank during the 1988 presidential campaign. After that I decided to forgo some of the armor, particularly the headwear, when getting off the plane.

The final step in the trip was boarding a Black Hawk helicopter with young gunners protecting its flanks. Swooping down into the fortified International Zone, more commonly known as the Green Zone, I felt tremendous anticipation and excitement. I was finally in Baghdad and ready to carry the message that the United States maintained its confidence in the ability of Iraqis to secure a democratic future. Arriving at the beautiful Presidential Palace, I was reminded that Baghdad had indeed been a cradle of civilization—the source of ancient wonders and antiquities of Mesopotamia and Babylon, including the Code of Hammurabi. This was not Afghanistan; Iraq’s cultural and political weight really could reshape the Middle East.

My certainty was shaken somewhat once I entered a room with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He enjoyed a reputation for honesty but had hardly been chosen to lead the transitional government because of his widespread popularity; the Sunnis had by and large not participated in the January legislative elections, and he had run unchallenged for the office largely because no other consensus candidate had emerged. Jaafari was an odd man with the bearing of a humanities professor. He spent the first thirty minutes of our meeting waxing lyrical about U.S. history, various founding fathers (usually confusing them somewhat), and the inspiration that he had drawn from my personal story about having grown up in the segregated South.

I thanked him but turned quickly to my agenda. The great challenge in the spring of 2005 was to include the Sunnis in the county’s political institutions and especially to gain their support for a new Iraqi constitution. There would be a referendum on a draft charter in October, and though the Shia and Kurds might be able to bring the constitution into force without the support of the Sunnis, it would be disastrous if a sizable minority did not endorse the new Iraq’s founding document. Under Saddam the Sunnis had represented roughly 30 percent of the population but nearly 100 percent of the political power. Now they were 30 percent of the population and terrified of being marginalized by a Shia-led government. It was that fear that had helped fuel the Sunni insurgency.

If a democratic state is to be stable, “one man, one vote” cannot mean the disenfranchisement of minorities. Respecting that reality is one of the hardest problems of democratic governance anywhere. But getting this right in Iraq would mean a new start for marginalized groups across the Middle East. Today in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia (where Sunnis rule over largely disenfranchised Shia populations), we can see the urgency of finding a political formula that works.

It was unsettling that Jaafari seemed to have only a marginal interest in that fundamental problem. He said the right things about wanting to reach out to the Sunnis but gave no indication that he knew how to do it. Perhaps, I told myself, he was just unfocused in our conversation. One thing was clear, though: he was not the man to lead Iraq.

IRONICALLY, MY CONVERSATIONS with the Iraqis were better than my interactions with General George Casey, the U.S. commander of coalition forces on the ground in Baghdad. I liked George. We’d both studied at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies, and he was a decent, honest four-star officer. But I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the Pentagon’s attitude toward Iraq, and the tensions between us were growing.

Toward the end of 2004, the briefings for the President had devolved from incomprehensible to inexplicable. The reports about the security situation usually focused on “metrics”: How many weapons caches had we destroyed? How many Iraqi security forces had been trained? How many incidents of live fire had there been? Few of those metrics bore much relationship to the deteriorating security situation and the strengthening insurgency. Attacks on reconstruction projects, particularly on the pipelines and electrical grid, were rising. Suicide bombings seemed to occur almost daily. And the highway between the airport and Baghdad had become virtually impassable because the bad guys owned the road.

When pressed on those facts, the Defense Department’s answer was largely the same as before: the security situation would improve when the political situation improved. That, of course, begged the question of how Iraqis could run for office while running for their lives.

Shortly after arriving at State, I asked my counselor, Phil Zelikow, to take a quiet fact-finding trip to Iraq. He was accompanied by then Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, my liaison from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had led the 4th Infantry Division during the initial invasion. The Pentagon assigns a senior officer to advise the secretary of state on the military aspects of her job and provide connectivity to the Defense Department. I had the remarkable good fortune to inherit Ray from Colin. He is a giant of a man—an imposing six feet, five inches but soft-spoken, decent, good-humored, and generous in spirit. Dealing with him every day, it would have been easy to overlook his toughness until one remembered that it was he who had commanded the unit that captured Saddam Hussein. We immediately hit it off, drawing on our common love of football to break the ice; he loves the New York Giants and was always too kind to ridicule my Cleveland Browns.

Ray was a “thinker” too. Military officers who had led the early campaigns in Operation Iraqi Freedom—David Petraeus, James Mattis, Peter Chiarelli, H. R. McMaster, Ray, and others—had returned from the battlefield between 2004 and 2006 determined to understand why we were not succeeding. The initial effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power had largely been accomplished, but stability had not been restored, and relations with the Iraqi population lay somewhere between indifference and outright hostility toward our presence. In part because we could not protect them from the growing insurgency, people were hedging their bets. In warfare of this kind, a population that is passive toward or intimidated by the terrorists enables their success. When you cannot separate friend from foe, it is hard to win, and increasingly the insurgency and the population were blending into one.

Moreover, in this dense, urban, complex fighting environment, our heavy military firepower in pursuit of insurgents and terrorists often ended up inadvertently alienating the population even further. U.S. soldiers raided towns and villages in search of enemies and often returned to the safety of their bases. The average Iraqi was left to deal with the consequences of those actions. The population had to believe that our forces had the capability and the will to protect them.

A new Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was emerging out of those concerns. Either militaries adapt on the battlefield, or they die. It was impressive to watch men like then-Colonel McMaster, an officer who had written a highly influential history of the Vietnam War for his PhD dissertation, and other young officers under the protection of the senior generals look for answers. Their thinking was not immediately welcome in the highest reaches of the Pentagon, but it would eventually lay the groundwork for the successful military surge of 2007.

I understood that it was not my role to change the military’s doctrinal approach to the Iraq war. But I, too, had studied counterinsurgencies in history, and I knew that they require civilian support to succeed. David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer who served as my special advisor on counterinsurgency, gave the State Department deep expertise in these issues. Winning the support of the local population required economic assistance, reconstruction, and good governance. Tensions were growing between the Foreign Service and a military whose most common assessment was “State is not in the fight.” It was true that too few diplomats, especially experienced ones, were deploying to Iraq. There were huge gaps in civilian expertise, often filled by military reservists or National Guardsmen. And there was a perception in the military, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House that the situation reflected the State Department’s ambivalence at best and resentment at worst toward the Iraq war.

My charge to Ray and Phil was to look over the situation in Iraq and come back to me with recommendations about how we could improve State’s support of the military effort and be responsive to the growing clamor for a change in the United States’ approach to the war. Their findings would lead to the deployment of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq, a kind of hybrid force first established in Afghanistan that included military officers, diplomats, and reconstruction workers from various civilian agencies, including the Departments of Agriculture and Justice and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The struggle to improve State’s contribution was just beginning at the time of that first trip; it was one that would take enormous effort and a redefinition of what diplomats are expected to do in war.

The most immediate conclusion of Phil and Ray’s trip was the need to clarify what we were trying to do in Iraq. During my October 2005 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I used a phrase that seemed to capture the essence of the effort. “In short, with the Iraqi government, our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold, and build,” I said in my opening remarks. “To clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable national … Iraqi institutions.” It was a rather catchy phrase but very descriptive of the tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine. In fact, it was an articulation of the strategy that Colonel McMaster had successfully used to retake the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar. Because it was one of the few statements of our objectives that was easy to understand, it captured enormous press attention. I heard through the grapevine that Don was annoyed and told some that I was out of my lane. I really didn’t care. Somebody has to be able to explain what we’re doing, I thought.

I had not intended, however, to blindside anyone, most especially George Casey. I had thought that Ray had briefed him on my testimony. So when I returned to Iraq in November to inaugurate the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in the country, I was surprised when George asked to see me alone. “Clear and hold” are military functions, he fumed. “I don’t like the State Department talking about military doctrine.”

I tried to stay calm, reminding myself that he was under enormous pressure. “George, I’m sorry that you were blindsided,” I said. “That’s wrong. But let’s get one thing straight. I’m the secretary of state, not the State Department. That means I am one of the President’s chief advisors on this war, and I will say what I please.” I then repeated that I thought he had been briefed and would make sure that we had better coordination.

This wouldn’t be the last time we would clash. More disagreements over the direction of the war effort would come later. But when I took off from Iraq after my first visit as secretary, I looked down on the terrain—two glorious rivers, fertile agricultural land to the north, oil to the north and south, and the majestic buildings of the nation’s beautiful capital. I called the President from the plane. “Baghdad will be a great city,” I told him as Iraq faded into the distance. “This will truly be a great country.” And I sat back thinking of all that had to be done before that prediction could come true.

IRAQ WAS ONLY one of the pieces of the puzzle in transforming the Middle East. The region seems always to mix hope and despair, and that was certainly the case in the spring and summer of 2005. On the one hand, Lebanon was free of Syrian forces; the Iraqis were debating a new constitution with the participation of Sunni Arabs; Egyptians were moving rapidly toward the most open presidential elections in their history; and the Kuwaiti Parliament had passed a law that gave women the right to vote and run for office. In Kuwait, I was presented with a T-shirt that I still wear—“Half a democracy is no democracy at all,” it said. On the other hand, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the lightly regarded but undeniably hard-line mayor of Tehran, had been elected in Iran to succeed the more moderate Mohammad Khatami.

Yet the outlines of a different Middle East—one that was more modern and democratic—were emerging and might, if given time, provide less fertile ground in which al Qaeda and Islamic extremists could spread their hatred. It was critical that the United States continue encouraging, cajoling, and persuading our friends to reform. We knew that each nation would move at a different speed. Iraq would need to stabilize its new democracy and reintegrate itself into an Arab world that had essentially expelled it at the time of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Lebanon was an unusual state, with its confessional groups locked into a formulaic sharing of power. Still, in the elections just three months after the withdrawal of Syrian troops during the Cedar Revolution (named for the cedar tree on the Lebanese flag), the moderate March 14 political alliance had won a major victory. With our help the Lebanese stood a chance of diminishing not just the role of Damascus but also the destructive influence of Hezbollah. Anti-U.S. forces seemed to be falling back across the region. We believed that we could use the momentum to unite our Arab friends to resist and counter Iranian aggression and penetration into the Middle East.

The role of Egypt in the overall equation was crucial. Iraq, bordered by six neighbors, including Iran, was one of the most important countries geographically. But Egypt was the cultural and political heart of the Middle East. A democratic Egypt would change the region like nothing else.

It was in that spirit that I went to the American University in Cairo in June 2005 to deliver a speech on democracy in the Middle East. Before leaving Washington, I sat with my speechwriter, Chris Brose, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch, and other key advisors. I told them that I needed to be bold. In his second inaugural address, the President had challenged the world to end tyranny by supporting democratic movements in every nation and culture. I saw the upcoming speech in Cairo as an opportunity to expand on that theme and lay out its implications for U.S. policy in the Middle East. I asked Mike Gerson, who had drafted the President’s address, if he wanted to join me on the trip. He did, and there in my cabin as we flew toward Egypt, Mike, Chris, David, Phil Zelikow, Sean McCormack, Brian Gunderson, and I went over every word, saying each one aloud, teasing out its meaning. I wanted to make clear that the United States meant it: the time had come for change—democratic change.

Before arriving in Cairo, I met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh, as I would many times over the next years. The aging president increasingly preferred to work at the seaside resort city. We reviewed a number of issues, including the upcoming Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Then I asked him if we could speak alone. I wanted to talk about democracy and reform, but I didn’t want to embarrass the president in front of others. After he shooed everyone from the room, I moved closer to him. Mubarak was very hard of hearing and too proud to wear a hearing aid. So I talked loudly and looked directly at him, hoping that the elderly leader could hear me or, if necessary, read my lips. “Mr. President,” I said, “you have a chance to do something great for your country. It’s time to give your people a voice. You don’t have forever to do it because soon they will demand it. Do it now.”

Mubarak sat up straight, leaned forward, and looked directly at me. With his broad nose and hooded eyes, he looked like a pharaoh. “I know my people,” he began. “The Egyptians need a strong hand, and they don’t like foreign interference. We are proud people.”

After listening to him for several minutes, I tried to appeal to that pride and his vanity. “You saved your country from ruin after Sadat’s assassination,” I told him, referring to his predecessor, who had been gunned down in 1981. “Now take your people forward.” I ended our encounter by telling him what I would say in Cairo. “I don’t want you to be surprised,” I said. He nodded and reminded me that Egyptians don’t like to be told what to do.

I felt immediately at home in the academic setting of the American University in Cairo’s auditorium. About six hundred students, faculty, and members of civil society were crowded into the relatively small room, made very warm by the glaring television lights. Mubarak’s warning was in my head, and I knew that there was great skepticism about the United States in this audience. Yet, as I made my way through the speech to the lines about our mistake in supporting authoritarian regimes, the mood in the room shifted. “For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East—and we achieved neither,” I said. “Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” At that moment and later with a group of democracy activists, I felt elated by the connection I’d made with Egypt’s impatient patriots. Only later would I wonder if I’d unintentionally promised more rapid change than anyone could deliver, most especially the United States.

As I watched the increasingly isolated Hosni Mubarak struggling to hang on to power in February 2011 while his people ridiculed him from the streets, I thought back on my conversation with him and my speech at the American University in Cairo. He would allow relatively free and very noisy presidential elections that fall of 2005. Steve Hadley and I had invited Mubarak’s confidant Omar Suleiman, the head of Egypt’s intelligence service, to dinner at the Watergate restaurant prior to the elections. There, in a dark corner of the room, we talked about how the United States could support a democratizing Egypt and what would be required if Egypt’s upcoming elections were to be truly democratic. I talked to Mubarak twice in August, urging him to keep the electoral environment free and fair. Then we watched as he campaigned from city to city for the first time in his life, seemingly rejuvenated by the democratic process. Egyptian coffeehouses were alive with political debate, and the Egyptian press commentary exulted that Egypt’s politics would never be the same.

But soon thereafter Mubarak reversed course. During the subsequent parliamentary elections in November and December, the regime was accused of deploying attackers wielding machetes and other weapons to intimidate voters. The next year Mubarak refused to carry through on his promise to repeal the hated “emergency law,” which limited free speech and assembly. In 2007 he held a public referendum on constitutional amendments that would, among other things, give him authority to dissolve the Egyptian Parliament without the public’s consent. The government announced that nearly 76 percent of voters approved the amendments, leading to allegations of election fraud. When we criticized his handling of the elections, Mubarak fumed that U.S. foreign assistance didn’t give Washington the right to interfere in Egypt’s internal affairs.

His problem, though, was not with us; it was with his people. I thought at the time that they’d never accept going back to the old ways where they were denied a voice in their political future. It was that frustration and anger that spilled out into the streets six years later and swept the confused and isolated Mubarak from power in 2011.

AFTER MY TRIP to Egypt I went on to meet with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the first time I’d meet him as secretary. Abdullah, then in his early eighties, would soon ascend to the throne with the death of King Fahd and, like his predecessor, become the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques in recognition of the Saudi monarch’s role in overseeing the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina.

I had met the crown prince during my time as national security advisor. He had initially been suspicious of me at the time, given the rumors that I’d told other Arabs that the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t a threat to the region. I never knew where that misquote had come from but chalked it up to the kind of gossip that ricochets around the Middle East regularly. I had a theory that the Egyptians might have started it. Fortunately, I’d had the opportunity to clear up the misconception when Abdullah visited Crawford in April 2002. I’d received him at the airport and escorted him back to the President’s ranch by bus. The Saudi leader had refused to ride in a helicopter.

During that roughly hourlong trip, the crown prince and I had talked about religion and values. I wasn’t sure how he’d react to the news that my father had been a Presbyterian minister and that I was unmarried. The latter he thought sad, but he reassured me that I’d probably still find a mate. The former, though, he found reassuring. It was good that I was a believer—even if in Jesus Christ, not Mohammed. By the time we arrived in Crawford, Abdullah had decided that I was a good person and conveyed those kind words to the President himself.

Arriving in Riyadh as secretary years later, I experienced that night what every former secretary of state had described to me. I went to the hotel about nine and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally at about eleven o’clock the crown prince was ready to see me. It seems that the Saudis prefer late-night meetings, having gotten out of bed in the afternoon, dined after nine, and then and only then readied themselves to receive guests.

The crown prince welcomed me warmly at his palace and then said that he wanted me to meet several other Saudi ministers. The princes were lined up in order of seniority, and each came forward, nodded, took my hand, and greeted me. The princes near my age all said hello with an accompanying “I’m a Trojan” (for USC) or “I’m an Aggie” (for Texas A&M). There was even one “I’m a Pioneer” (after my own alma mater, the University of Denver). Some of the most senior princes, such as my counterpart Saud al-Faisal, had attended elite American schools. Saud was a graduate of Princeton.

I’d read that the kingdom had educated the young royals in the United States until the 1980s, when there had been a turn toward conservatism in response to the Iranian Revolution. The younger princes had thus been sent to King Fahd University, where they had studied mostly religion at the expense of gaining technical and linguistic skills. This encounter vivified for me Abdullah’s preoccupation with sending more students to the United States, something that had become harder in the post-9/11 environment. By the end of the administration, thanks largely to a push by the President and our ambassadors to the kingdom, James C. Oberwetter and Ford M. Fraker, the number of Saudis studying in the United States exceeded pre-9/11 levels. Education in the West was not a guarantee of liberal thinking; three of the 9/11 suicide hijackers had studied in Germany. But going to school in the United States created more familiarity with—and hopefully more respect for—our system than if Saudis remained isolated from the West.

After the introductions were made, the crown prince and I went into his sitting room with only my trusted interpreter Gamal Helal joining us. The crown prince pulled out a gift-wrapped package. “I have a gift for you,” he said. I had become accustomed to Abdullah’s gifts, usually jewels that I couldn’t afford to keep, given federal ethics rules requiring me to purchase any offering over a certain minimal value. This time, though, I opened the package and realized that it was a full-length, beautifully embroidered abaya, the black robe and veil Saudi women traditionally wear. “I had it made especially for you,” he said tenderly. “Our women wear them.”

Yes, as a sign of oppression, I thought. But it was so dear, and he meant well. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” I said. “It’s so beautiful.”

We then sat together for two hours, reviewing the landscape of the Middle East, talking about Saudi Arabia and the “modernization” of the country and, of course, Iran. The crown prince exhorted me to deal with Tehran and to resolve the Palestinian conflict by pressuring Israel. Those were views with which I was familiar. But his discussion of his own country was more surprising. I’d come to know Abdullah as something of a reformer in this most conservative of countries. He spoke of the need to hear his people to know what they were thinking and stressed the importance of getting out of the palace and visiting remote parts of the country. He’d authorized the practice of elections for half of the seats of the country’s municipal councils, prompting lawyers, businessmen, professors, and tribal leaders to stand for election. Women weren’t permitted to vote or run for office, but Abdullah thought that might come in time. He did receive groups of women from time to time to hear their concerns.

The crown prince talked of his plans to change his country’s higher education system by building a technical university to give Saudi men—and women—the skills needed for the twenty-first century. One shouldn’t overstate the case, but Abdullah was different from his half brothers, who were known for their wealth, even corruption, and their death grip on power. He was a pious man who wanted to change his country—albeit slowly and within very conservative parameters. Later President Bush and I would talk about how we could help Abdullah guide Saudi Arabia toward reform. We felt that we would be pushing on an open door; we might not be able to expect national elections anytime soon, but we could encourage the kingdom to continue redefining the relationship between rulers and ruled. In Saudi Arabia that would be revolutionary in its own right. I could not help but wonder, though, At eighty-one years old, does he have enough time?

The Arab world had been isolated from the worldwide movement toward democracy during the second half of the twentieth century, but change was coming, even if it was frustratingly slow. Another key part of the equation would be to find an answer to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian question. It was not that reform in the Arab world was dependent on resolution of the conflict, though our friends often made that claim. In fact, it was a kind of talisman of legitimacy for otherwise illegitimate governments. When the authoritarian rulers needed to appease “the street,” as they referred to their people, the plight of the Palestinians was a convenient rallying cry.

That led me to challenge a group of Arabs on this point early in my tenure as national security advisor. “If you care so much about the Palestinians,” I asked, “why have each and every one of you expelled them from your country at some point in time?” It was a slightly exaggerated rhetorical point, but indeed there sometimes seemed to be more concern for trumpeting their cause rather than actually helping the Palestinians. I can’t count the number of phone calls I made to the rich Arabs, begging them to give just a little bit of their excess oil revenue to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. It was sad to watch the dignified Palestinian leader visit his Arab brethren, begging for money, and then have to call me, the U.S. secretary of state, and ask me to press his case with them.

Yes, reform in the Middle East needed to take place whether or not a Palestinian state came into being. That did not, however, diminish the urgency of finding a solution for those beleaguered people. The Palestinians and their leaders were admirable for their perseverance, their relative tolerance of religious difference (some Palestinians are Christian, others Muslim), and their industriousness. They needed their own state, and a democratic Middle East would be incomplete without a democratic Palestine.

In the spring and summer of 2005, the pending Israeli withdrawal from Gaza offered the potential to jump-start movement toward a two-state solution. President Bush had insisted that the Israelis cooperate and coordinate with the Palestinians so the withdrawal wouldn’t leave chaos in its wake. James Wolfensohn, who had recently retired as president of the World Bank, agreed to be an envoy on behalf of the Middle East Quartet (an association of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia) to facilitate that coordination.

Jim was indefatigable in pushing the process forward, though he was outwardly suspicious of the Israelis, causing some heartburn in Tel Aviv. But through his efforts funding was put into place for the Palestinians to take advantage of the Israeli withdrawal as a step toward statehood. There were, for example, massive greenhouses in Gaza growing world-class vegetables. Private sources, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Jewish Americans such as Mort Zuckerman and Leonard Stern, put up the money to buy them from the Israeli settlers. Also, USAID prepared several social projects, including much-needed water purification efforts, that could immediately be started in the newly Palestinian-controlled territory.

We all worried about settler violence, so I went to Israel in July, the third time since becoming secretary, to check in with the prime minister. This time Sharon asked if we could meet at his farm in the Negev in southern Israel to speak in a more relaxed atmosphere. I was somewhat surprised at the invitation; I guess I had never thought of Sharon relaxing. But he was different in that environment, calmer and more reflective. He’d lost his beloved wife several years before, and her photos were everywhere. He talked about how in the years after being viewed as responsible for the tragedies in the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, he’d effectively retired to the farm. The Sharons would get up in the morning and have breakfast, and he’d go out to work the fields. “Sometimes I got so carried away out on the land that I forgot to come home for lunch,” he said. Referring to his wife, he added, “She hated that.” It was such a tender moment with this very tough man.

Then he asked if I wanted to see his sheep. I told him that I was a city girl and hadn’t ever seen sheep up close and personal. He delighted in giving me my first experience, explaining that he knew them individually, not just as a flock. Walking among the smelly creatures, Sharon suddenly turned serious. “I want you to come back in the fall,” he said. “Come back here to the farm. We need to talk about the future.” I nodded in agreement.

As I was getting ready to leave, I asked a second time how he felt about the prospects for a peaceful withdrawal from Gaza. My first inquiry had elicited a perfunctory though reassuring answer. The IDF was disciplined and would succeed, he said. This time, though, he took another tack. He told me a story of going to visit settlers to explain why they had to withdraw from Gaza. “One man asked me to get up and come with him,” Sharon said. “He took me to the door, and above it was a mezuzah,” a Jewish symbol containing portions of the Torah that deal with keeping God in one’s everyday life. “‘You nailed it up there yourself,’ the man said to me,” Sharon continued. “‘You told me that it was good for the Israeli state that my family moved here to Gaza to claim Jewish lands. Now you tell me to leave.’” Sharon was suddenly very emotional. Now I understood that his speech a few years before about “painful sacrifices” had not been meant just in the political sense. Those sacrifices were deeply personal for him.

The Israelis would complete their withdrawal on September 12. As it turned out, it took only four weeks, and settler violence was minimal.

The Palestinians’ behavior in response did not, however, inspire confidence that they were ready for statehood. Hamas took to the streets to celebrate the “expulsion” of the Israelis from Gaza, inflaming opinion in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Palestinian thugs trashed the greenhouses that could have produced food for them. I called Bill Gates and Jim Wolfensohn to apologize for what had happened to their private investments. “I would do it again in the cause of peace,” Gates answered graciously.

Despite those small setbacks, the Israelis were out of Gaza and four small settlements in the West Bank. Soon after, Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s deputy, came to Washington with a message from his boss. The Israelis had further plans for disengagement from the West Bank, and Sharon would leave Likud and charter a new political party, Kadima, to support the establishment of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.