No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

33 A CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP IN IRAQ

THAT APPREHENSION was warranted as events turned increasingly sour, particularly in Iraq. The relative calm that had characterized the Iraqi reaction in the immediate aftermath of the Golden Mosque bombing in February didn’t last. Insurgent attacks were escalating, and in Al Anbar province there was open warfare. Al Qaeda in Iraq, under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had established a foothold in the province. We were losing more U.S. soldiers too, not just in Al Anbar province but in Baghdad and in the South, where the Iranians had stepped up support for the radical Shia militias. The Iraqis were descending into a sectarian conflict that stood at the precipice of all-out civil war.

And the country was staggering forward in a leadership vacuum as attempts to form a government stalled. After the elections, Ibrahim al-Jaafari had been nominated to be prime minister by his party as a kind of compromise candidate. But no one really wanted him to be prime minister, and he couldn’t garner enough votes. A stalemate ensued and lasted for four months. Every day the Iraqis made clear that Jaafari would never receive enough votes in Parliament to become the country’s leader. Yet he was stubborn and defiant, saying that he couldn’t disappoint his people by withdrawing.

Prime Minister Blair and President Bush conferred and decided that it would be a good idea if Jack Straw and I visited Baghdad together. That would show the solidarity of Britain and the United States and our resolve to get a handle on the worsening security situation. We knew, though, that we had really only one mission: to get Jaafari out!

I picked Jack up in London for the trip to Baghdad. We’d become close friends as well as close colleagues. In the fall of 2005 I’d taken Jack to my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, having vowed to take foreign ministers outside Washington so that they could get a feel for the country. The deeply personal journey to the place of my birth had done more than that—it had given Jack a feel for how far the United States had come. We visited my father’s church and my childhood home. Jack and his wife, Alice, didn’t say it, but I know they were stunned at how modest my beginnings had been.

Birmingham had rolled out the red carpet and our visit coincided with the dedication of a memorial to the four little girls killed at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. I participated in the dedication, a very personal event for me since my kindergarten classmate Denise McNair had been one of those killed. Jack and I walked the short distance from the church to Kelly Ingram Park, holding the hands of four little girls all dressed in pink and white for the occasion. The experience was powerful, particularly when we were told of how the bomb had blown out almost all of the windows—except one. That window, showing a likeness of Jesus Christ, had withstood the blast, but there was a hole—the face of our Lord was gone.

Still, I wanted the Brits to see the new Birmingham too, so we visited the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s first-class medical center. I explained how this steel town had become a technological powerhouse thanks to Governor George Wallace’s successful plan to turn the onetime commuter school into a first-class university.

Then there was one more thing to do. On Saturday we went to Tuscaloosa. Jack and I walked through the tunnel with more than eighty thousand Crimson Tide fans cheering wildly in anticipation of the big matchup with Tennessee. Jack is a politician and he glowed, basking in the adoration of the crowd. I wanted to tell him that the Alabama faithful would have cheered a squirrel coming out of the tunnel at that moment. This was the big leagues—SEC football! I flipped the coin, and Alabama won. “Nice flip,” drawled Brodie Croyle, the Alabama quarterback. I’m sure my British friends didn’t understand much about the game, but they were excited anyway. Alabama won, and all was well. We ended the evening with a messy deep-fried meal at Jim ’N Nick’s Bar-B-Q. My friends loved the South.

Jack returned the favor at the beginning of 2006, inviting me to his electoral district in Lancashire. There were the predictable protests, which every host always apologizes for unnecessarily. At the concert that night, one of the performers sang the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” substituting anti-war lyrics for a good portion of the song. She tried gamely to get the crowd to join in but it was the wrong crowd and most of the audience sat in stoic silence, giving the whole thing a comedic twist.

The next day we went to Jack’s neighborhood outside the city, a district with a large Muslim population, mostly from Pakistan. It was easy to see why the Europeans have had so much trouble integrating a disaffected minority population. Many of the people there clearly didn’t really see themselves as British, and it seemed as if the feeling was mutual.

Jack had arranged a one-hour discussion with Muslim leaders, all of whom viewed me skeptically, since I was the face of the Bush administration abroad. But the session couldn’t have gone better. I was honest with them about what we were trying to do and about the United States’ own troubled history with minorities. The ice broke when I said, “When America’s founding fathers said ‘We the People,’ they didn’t mean me.” After that the questions turned to how a black woman from Alabama had come to be secretary of state. Had I ever encountered prejudice? One woman asked how she could have her say when men wouldn’t stop talking. In my tenure this scene would be repeated many times—among Afro-Brazilians in Bahia, Chinese students at Tsinghua University, and journalists in Turkey. A black female secretary of state simply didn’t fit with the stereotypes that most people held about the United States. Tony Blair may have summed it up best when he said that he’d been struck by the sight at the first Camp David meeting of the President flanked by Colin Powell on one side and me on the other. Could this happen in Britain? he asked himself. Not yet, he said he answered silently. Not yet.

The trip was eye-opening for me and, despite the press focus on the protests, largely successful. But during a question and answer session after my remarks at the BBC–Chatham House Lectures in Blackburn, I said something that was interpreted in a way I did not intend. I was asked to give examples of lessons learned from some of the mistakes that had been made over the prior three years. After giving a lengthy discussion about how difficult it is to determine in the midst of an historical event whether a decision, tactical or otherwise, is ultimately good or bad, I concluded by quipping, “I know we’ve made tactical errors—thousands of them, I’m sure. But when you look back in history, what will be judged is, did you make the right strategic decisions? And if you spend all of your time trying to judge this tactical issue or that tactical issue, I think you miss the larger sweep.”

Because I thought my point—of missing the larger sweep—clarified my previous remarks, I didn’t think much of what I had said until I saw the news clips that evening. “Rice Admits to Thousands of Mistakes in Iraq,” they read. I’d used the word “tactical,” so the military assumed I was shifting blame to them. I tried to clean up the mess, telling journalists that I hadn’t been literal. “I say I’ve done that a thousand times. I don’t mean I’ve literally done it a thousand times,” I protested. But it didn’t help. The story lived on for days. I just didn’t anticipate how my words would be heard. It wouldn’t be the last time.

So, by the time Jack and I were sent off to Baghdad together on April 2, 2006, we were good friends indeed. When Jack got onto the plane, he was really sick with the flu. I watched him preparing to sleep on the floor for the overnight flight. “Jack, you take the bed in my cabin,” I said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.” He was grateful and felt better the next morning. I didn’t think anything of it, but it was a story the next day. “Is it true that you took Secretary Rice’s bed and she slept on the floor?” Jack was asked by the members of the press. I still can’t figure out why it seemed so odd that I’d make the offer or that Jack would accept. The press could make a story of just about anything.

Flying into Baghdad that morning we encountered very bad weather. It wouldn’t keep us from landing, but we were told that helicopters were grounded. Both Jack’s and my security details were adamant. We’d either wait until the weather cleared or go to another part of Iraq—perhaps up to Kurdistan. The issue was that the Baghdad Airport Road, or “Death Street,” as the Iraqis called it, known for lethal insurgent attacks, was the only road from the airport to the international zone. Deaths from roadside bombs were common, and there had been no time to even attempt to secure the highway.

Jack and I conferred and agreed that as the Iraqi leadership was waiting for us in Baghdad, we would take our chances. When we landed, we piled into a black suburban with our ambassadors and started the precarious, six-mile trip to the center of the city. Suddenly the motorcade screeched to a halt. The Iraqis had set up a roadblock, and traffic had slowed to a crawl. On both sides of the SUV there were buses and trucks, any one of which was a potential bomb carrier. There was nothing to do but wait. I wasn’t particularly frightened, though I was vaguely aware of the danger. But I was relieved when we finally broke through and passed the security guards standing watch at the gates of the protected Green Zone.

As it turned out, the trip in wasn’t half as bizarre as our meeting with Jaafari, which can only be described as surreal. Striking me—as he had before—as more suited to a professorship than political leadership, Jaafari welcomed us and described in detail his plans once he became prime minister. Is he living in some other world? I wondered.

Jack and I had agreed that we’d take turns making the argument that he had to end his pursuit of the prime minister position: I would go through the basic facts of the situation, and Jack would appeal to him politician to politician. Everything we tried met with stubbornness and obtuseness. “I can’t disappoint the people who nominated me,” he said. I was tempted to say, “No one wants you to be prime minister—even the people who nominated you.” I held my tongue and let Jack try again. After a while, though, I just said to Jaafari, “You aren’t going to be prime minister. You have to step down. This isn’t because the United States wants it this way. The Iraqis don’t want you, and that’s what matters.” Jack appeared a little taken aback, but I’d learned to be direct with Jaafari, who now looked hurt as the translation rolled forward. But he held his ground.

We went to see other Iraqi leaders who asked us point-blank if we’d convinced Jaafari to step down. Why are you depending on us to do your dirty work? I wondered. Not convinced that we’d gotten through, we went back to Jaafari, and this time, with only our interpreter in the room, delivered the message again. Even though he resisted, we knew we’d gotten through this time. He began publicly to suggest that he might have to withdraw and did so about three weeks later, on April 20. On the twenty-first, Nouri al-Maliki was nominated by the Shia coalition and elected by Parliament. Iraq had its democratically elected leader. A new era had begun.

Less than a month after my visit with Jack Straw to show British-American unity, President Bush decided that I should travel to Baghdad again—this time with Don Rumsfeld to show Pentagon-State unity. I was okay with the idea, though I doubted it would stem the tide of “Don hates Condi” and “Condi hates Don” stories that had become standard fare in Washington. Admittedly, my relationship with Don was testy. He’d resented my role as national security advisor because he didn’t like “White House” interference in his affairs. Now, as secretary of state, I think I seemed, to him, to be too indiscriminately flexing my figurative muscles, pushing into the Pentagon’s lane.

We’d crossed swords, for instance, on Uzbekistan where, after bloody riots in May 2005, State had issued a tough human rights report against the regime. The Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, had responded by threatening to expel us from the military base that he’d allowed us into at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan. Let us recall that we’d paid a small fortune for the privilege, but the dictator felt no obligation to honor that deal and said so.

Don called me to say that we needed to back off. “The military needs that base,” he said. “Our security is at stake.” I told him that I was sympathetic to the Pentagon’s plight but that, in my view, the United States could not soften its position on human rights as a quid pro quo for the military presence in Uzbekistan. “What’s more, now that he’s threatened us, we can’t afford to cave,” I told him. Don somehow heard this as “human rights trumps security” and told Steve Hadley to take the issue to the President. The President obviously wanted to keep the military base, but he didn’t tell me to tone it down, so I didn’t. Eventually Karimov would carry through on his threat, but I would negotiate basing rights in Kyrgyzstan and the Tajiks would make it clear that we could use their territory “as needed” too.

This was just one of my dustups with Don. The truth is, we’d never quite repaired our relationship after the Iraq Stabilization Group incident in the fall of 2003. And the gulf between us had widened after the President had endorsed “clear, hold, and build,” which, as previously mentioned, I’d introduced in October 2005 to explain publicly what we were trying to achieve in Iraq.

For all that, the tensions between Don and me weren’t personal; we still had a civil—even social—relationship. But on policy matters, we often clashed. I was skeptical of a joint trip to Baghdad. Don was downright hostile to the idea. Preparations for the trip were extremely difficult for my staff because every decision on the Pentagon’s side, no matter how small, seemed to need Don’s okay. Finally we were ready to go. We flew into Baghdad separately: I came in from a NATO foreign ministers meeting by way of Greece and Turkey, Don from Kuwait.

The meetings with Iraq’s leaders went well but were marked by tragedy. The sister of Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni Arab leader who served as one of Iraq’s two vice presidents, had been shot and killed by insurgents the day we arrived. Hashimi had already lost one brother just two weeks prior in a separate shooting, and his sister had been gunned down a day after Hashimi stood with his Shia and Kurdish counterparts to issue a unified call to crush the insurgency. It was increasingly clear that the terrorists would spare no effort in seeking to intimidate, threaten, and prevent Iraq’s leaders from forming a unified, stable democracy.

Don and I both found Nouri al-Maliki, the incoming prime minister, a reassuring figure, largely because he seemed to know what he wanted to do. He hadn’t yet been installed, so most of his ideas were conceptual, but at least he had ideas. That was a stunning contrast to Jaafari.

Every public appearance with Don was a disaster, though. It started when we held our first press availability. During a roundtable with members of both the Pentagon and State Department press corps, Janine Zacharia of Bloomberg asked whether our “secret” arrival said anything about the security situation. Well, of course it did, and what it said was not good about conditions on the ground. But one learns to just answer and not cause a scene. Don shot back, “I guess I don’t think it says anything about it…. I just don’t see anything to your question.” I tried to smooth things over by saying something about the improvements in Iraqi security forces and then took the next question. In fact, I took several of the next questions while Don doodled conspicuously on a piece of paper. I was mortified and signaled Sean to end it. He did. Don left. I would spend the night in Iraq for the first time. Our performance had just solidified the narrative of discord between us, and there wasn’t much to do about it.

Frankly, that was the least of our problems. Iraq was descending into chaos, and a lot was riding on the success of its new prime minister. That night I asked to see Maliki alone at Zal’s residence.

The soon-to-be prime minister was wearing a brown suit and sporting what looked to me like a five o’clock shadow. We sat together in Zal’s living room with just the translator, getting to know each other and talking about the future of his country. He told me that he understood the need to improve security but that it would take a long time. If he could deliver electricity quickly, people would feel an immediate improvement. Could I help him do that? I said that we’d do what we could, but I knew in my heart that the two were inextricably related, and in that moment I reflected on all the failed efforts to deliver power thus far.

My overwhelming impression was favorable, though. Maliki was down to earth and spoke very little English. He’d spent his exile in Syria, not Tehran, because he couldn’t stand the Iranians. He had a blunt, direct character that I really liked. “The Iraqi people have had enough,” he said. “And if we don’t demonstrate that we can govern, then we’re not going to be able to do this. All will be lost if we can’t demonstrate we can govern.” I was surprised. It was the first time an Iraqi leader had taken things upon himself rather than simply asking what we, the United States, could do. And when I said that most Sunnis didn’t feel safe when they saw the Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces, Maliki showed a sense of black humor. “I don’t feel safe when I see them either,” he said. I really felt good about Nouri al-Maliki. When I was wheels-up from Baghdad the next day, I was more hopeful than I’d been since the bombing of the Golden Mosque four months before.