No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

42 IMPROVING THE DAILY LIVES OF PALESTINIANS

I RETURNED TO THE Middle East as promised in late March for talks with Abbas and Olmert. The atmosphere was tense, particularly since the Palestinians had acted on the basis of the Mecca agreement and actually established their “unity government.” Since the Israelis weren’t prepared to sit down with Abbas, I engaged the two sides in “parallel talks,” shuttling between them.

The time wasn’t right to make progress on the core issues, but I did think that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit in the everyday interaction between the parties. When the press talks about “the peace process,” it focuses on borders, security, Jerusalem, refugees, water rights—matters that must be resolved to end the conflict. But there are other complex problems concerning the daily lives of the Palestinians and security for the Israeli people.

The goal of the first phase of the Road Map is to give the Palestinian people as normal a life as possible while respecting Israeli security concerns. Anyone who’d traveled in the Occupied Territories saw long lines of Palestinians at roadblocks set up by the Israel Defense Forces. Sometimes it could take as much as six hours for a Palestinian family to travel a few miles, since individual family members are regularly searched and questioned in an effort to prevent terrorists from moving freely. There had been terrible stories of women in labor who had lost their newborns while waiting for the ambulance to be searched. The movement of goods—agricultural products, for instance—was difficult too, sometimes taking so long that the produce spoiled along the side of the road. And there were a few direct routes that Palestinians simply were not permitted to take, which sometimes turned short trips into daylong slogs.

I spent endless hours working with the Israelis to remove as many of these roadblocks as possible. I became used to negotiating the lifting of important obstacles one by one. Since no Israeli defense minister wanted to wake up one day to find that a terrorist had crossed through a recently lifted border check, the process was arduous and frustrating.

The other major on-the-ground issue was facilitating the training of Palestinian security forces so that they could take responsibility for more of the territory where their people lived. When Palestinians were able to provide security, the population didn’t have to live in the shadow of the IDF—and there was thus far less friction between the two peoples. But the Israelis weren’t going to turn over territory to security forces that might ignore or, worse, facilitate terrorism, and I knew it would be a nonstarter to ask Congress to fund these forces under the unity government. The key was to train Palestinians who were competent and trusted to do the job (so that Israelis didn’t have to), but to show that Hamas had no role.

Fortunately, both the Israelis and the Palestinians trusted the Americans to help them achieve these goals. And the IDF trusted the U.S. military in particular. So after becoming secretary I asked Don to assign a three-star general to work on the problems of security, movement, and access. The first general chosen was William “Kip” Ward, an outstanding army officer who laid the foundation for the training of the Palestinians. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton succeeded Ward and labored at these tasks for five years. He masterfully built trust between the rapidly improving Palestinian security forces and the Israelis. He banged heads with the Israeli Defense Ministry practically every day to get roadblocks removed and towns turned over to the Palestinians. And he hammered on Abbas and his people to root out corruption and incompetence in their police forces.

When Keith could go no further, he called me. I would then call Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Salam Fayyad, or Mahmoud Abbas and fuss about the lack of progress. On some trips to the Middle East I would insist on seeing Barak and Fayyad together so that, with me present, they could accuse each other face to face of failure to carry out obligations. “Get this solved before I come back,” I’d say, feeling a little bit like a parent.

The painstaking work rarely made headlines, but it made a difference. One of Barak’s key aides paid me a great compliment when he said, after we left office, that he missed Sergeant Dayton and Corporal Rice. That was indeed the level of our work. But it would pay off as we looked to foster negotiations on the final-status issues. It was getting harder for the Israelis to claim that the Palestinians weren’t fighting terror—and harder for them to claim that they had no partner for peace.

Despite the tensions concerning the unity government, the March trip did result in an agreement that Olmert and Abbas would meet weekly. The next day on March 28, after four busy days in the region, the Arab League reaffirmed the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which was welcome news. Unfortunately, the good words were undone by the Saudi king’s sudden rant at the same Arab League meeting in which he called the U.S. presence in Iraq illegal, stating that in Iraq “the bloodshed is continuing under an illegal foreign occupation and detestable sectarianism.” The outburst left the Saudis scrambling to reassure us that the king’s frustration did not mean that he wanted us out of Iraq. “Really?” I said to the Saudi ambassador. “You could have fooled me.” Sometimes the hypocrisy of the Arabs was more than I could take.

We didn’t comment publicly, but it was one of the many examples of Arab leaders saying one thing in private and the near-opposite in public. I believed that on some level their hypocrisy grew from an absence of accountability. It was not a product of being Arab, of course, but rather of being autocrats. Lacking in popular legitimacy, many of the Arabs felt the need to grandstand and play off populist passions. That they often had to throw the United States under the bus to do so rarely stopped them.

In this case King Abdullah’s comments could not have been more ill timed. Domestic pressures were rising with both houses of Congress expressing discontent with the Iraq mission. Back in February, the House of Representatives had passed a resolution repudiating the surge—seventeen Republicans breaking ranks and joining the 246–182 majority. On March 23 the House adopted a spending bill with a timetable for withdrawal, and four days later the Senate put forward a bill with a nonbinding withdrawal timetable, setting a goal of withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by March 31, 2008.

We desperately needed something to go right, but things just got worse. On April 12 a suicide bomber killed eight in an attack on the Iraqi Parliament, which was located in the supposedly safe Green Zone. Four days later, six members of the Iraqi Cabinet resigned on Muqtada al-Sadr’s orders. I had the sickening feeling that the surge had come too late.

In the middle of these difficult days, George Tenet, who’d headed the CIA during the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and during the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, released his memoirs. Suddenly George, who’d told the 9/11 Commission that I’d “gotten it” when he had “warned” of an impending attack, was saying that I’d ignored his clear signals. What clear signals? I thought. Back when CBS discovered the August 6 memo that supposedly warned of an attack, you didn’t even remember it. You’d told me you’d been somewhere on a beach in New Jersey that day. To counter George’s revisionist narrative, I went on the Sunday-morning shows and dutifully recounted what we’d done in the run-up to 9/11, reminding people of what George had said at the time. It was hard to get very worked up about it, though. I was confronting too many real problems around the world to worry about a retrospective blame game. Iraq would have been enough. But there was also the task of rescuing the Middle East peace process; we needed an answer to a growing humanitarian crisis in Sudan; and out of the blue we were in a war of words with Moscow about missile defense and conventional forces limitations in Europe. Was the Kremlin trying to resurrect the Cold War?

OUR RELATIONS with Moscow had been somewhat testy for a number of months. The Kremlin had complained about our decision to place missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, making clear that the offense was linked to the status of the two as former members of the Soviet bloc. “Put your interceptors in Turkey,” Sergei Lavrov had said at the time.

Now we were moving toward implementing agreements with our allies. The Czech and Polish foreign ministers came to Washington, and it was no secret that we were moving ahead.

We tried not to make it a zero-sum game, continually insisting that the systems that we were contemplating were no threat to Moscow’s deterrent and reiterating an offer to Moscow for partnership in the area of missile defense. Bob Gates and I made the case in an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, suggesting that the NATO-Russia Council would be an excellent forum for cooperation in this area.

Still, the Russians bristled, and I was prepared for fireworks when Sergei Lavrov paid a visit to NATO headquarters. I had no idea, however, just how incredible the encounter would be.

It was always satisfying to see the Russians come to NATO and sit there among members that included a unified Germany, the three Baltic states, and seven former members of the Warsaw Pact. We’d advocated strongly for the incorporation of the East Europeans into the Alliance, and they’d been the staunchest defenders of the Freedom Agenda throughout the world, including in the Middle East. But the East Europeans never let the Russians forget that they’d lost the Cold War, and they sometimes treated the Russians in a manner that bordered on ridicule, which made me uncomfortable.

At that particular session, however, the Russians deserved what they got. Just before the NATO ministerial meeting, I learned that Putin had declared a suspension of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. In a speech to the Russian Parliament, he derided what he perceived to be an unequal treaty that disadvantaged the Russian Federation. Indeed, the Russians hated the agreement, which called for limiting the number and location of troops in Europe. It had been negotiated at the end of the Cold War, at a moment of supreme weakness for the dying Soviet Union. They had a good point about the need to further revise a treaty that, despite having undergone some changes in the 1990s, was originally written to balance the forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The latter had, of course, ceased to exist, and some of its members had been incorporated into the former.

Sergei Lavrov had come to Oslo, Norway, to rally support against our plans for missile defense. It was an old game that the Russians were playing, splitting the allies from the United States by playing on the fears of the Europeans, particularly the Germans, of conflict with the Kremlin. But Putin’s announcement had soured sentiment toward Russia. When Lavrov launched into his remarks—which were vaguely threatening about missile defense and dismissive of Russian obligations under CFE—he lost any hope of winning support. Minister after minister excoriated Russia for Putin’s announcement and supported the idea of missile defense. Those who had reservations about our plans to put components in Eastern Europe kept their opinions to themselves. The Czech minister of foreign affairs, Karel Schwarzenberg, said only one thing: “Pshaw—fine thing to come here after threatening to abrogate a treaty commitment.” It was a wonderful moment of confrontation between a Czech who was plenty old enough to remember 1968 and a Russian who did too.

Lavrov had also come to lobby for cooperation between NATO and something called the Collective Security Treaty Organization. He brought slides explaining the CSTO—a pitiful attempt to re-create a Warsaw Pact–like structure. Its members were Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and later Uzbekistan—all states comprising the stub of the old Soviet Union. I felt bad for him at that moment.

Finally, Sergei (who just wanted to get out of the room) concluded his comments. He couldn’t resist one final shot: “I’ve heard the arguments about missile defense—the same argument, just in different languages.” He promised to seek areas of cooperation, but it was pretty clear that he didn’t really mean it.

It would have been totally satisfying were it not for the fact that we really did need to work with Moscow on a problem of growing urgency. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia had resulted in the establishment of six independent countries: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia (or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—more about that later). But there was one piece that remained unresolved: Kosovo. Kosovo was an impoverished and ethnically charged enclave of Serbia that had been brutally cleansed by Slobodan Milošević’s armies. Kosovar Albanians, who make up more than 90 percent of the population, clamored to secede from Serbia, but Serbia would not countenance independence. Indeed, one of the most famous and most remembered battles in Serbia’s history was the loss of Kosovo to the Ottoman Turks in 1389.

Much of the world had accepted that Kosovo would secede and become independent. But Russia, long an ally of Serbia, was not prepared to do so. The Kosovars wanted their independence and were ready to take it by force if it was not granted to them. We had to find a diplomatic solution and Moscow stood in the way. The charged atmosphere of the Oslo ministerial meeting did nothing to improve the chances for cooperation on this dangerous problem. In May I went to Moscow on a mission to improve at least the tone of the relationship. Putin and I had a direct conversation in which we both acknowledged responsibility for the pall over U.S.-Russian relations.

A couple of weeks after that I met Sergei Lavrov at the G8 ministerial in Potsdam, Germany. Frank-Walter Steinmeier was so proud of the beautiful restoration of Cecilienhof Palace, where the Potsdam Conference had been held in 1945 as World War II was drawing to a close. The flags of the victors were displayed in the corners of the conference room—the Stars and Stripes of the United States; the Union Jack of Great Britain; and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union—here in the unified Germany. Amazing, I thought. What would Truman think? What would Stalin think? The sentiment of the moment was suddenly disrupted by the comment of my unpredictable friend, the Japanese foreign minister, Taro Aso. “But for a few turns in the war, it could have been the flags of Germany, Italy, and Japan,” he blurted out. Okay, I thought. Time to move on.

Sergei and I used the occasion to spar over Kosovo and missile defense despite the promises of Moscow weeks before to find areas of agreement even when our policies did not coincide. The Europeans tried as usual to mediate—unsuccessfully. The scene that day was a harbinger of what was to come: an increasingly difficult relationship with the Kremlin for the next eighteen months, until the end of the Bush years.

Relations thawed briefly when the President invited Putin to the Bush family home at Walker’s Point in early July, hoping to appropriate some of the warmth that the Russians felt for George H. W. Bush, whose respectful diplomacy at the end of the Cold War was greatly appreciated in Moscow.

After the Presidents Bush took Putin fishing—Putin caught the only fish—President George W. Bush and Putin settled back at the house for the meeting, and President George H. W. Bush went off to prepare dinner. Sitting in the same pastel chintz living room where I’d first talked with the then governor about foreign policy, the Russian and U.S. presidents relaxed and talked openly and candidly about the problems in the U.S.-Russia relationship. Looking past them, one could see through the window an extraordinary view of the Atlantic Ocean.

Putin was as tough on Iran as I’d ever heard him, making very clear that he had no love for Ayatollah Khamenei or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But he said that Russia had to deliver on the fuel shipments to the Bushehr reactor that had been held up for months. “Our companies will start to lose money because of the contract,” he explained calmly. The President asked only that the Russians make no announcement without full coordination with us. Putin agreed and kept his word. It was one incident but emblematic of the relatively good cooperation on Iran—far better than the public perception.

The two men then turned to missile defense, agreeing to find a way to cooperate. I believe now that there was some miscommunication between them but I didn’t catch it at the time. The President was trying to make clear that he wouldn’t reverse the decision to place sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin was offering alternate sites. Yet we were encouraged by Putin’s reference during the press conference that afternoon to missile defense as an area of “strategic partnership” and his proposal that we continue the conversation in the forum of the NATO-Russia Council. The President and Putin agreed to have Bob Gates and me follow up with a visit to Moscow. The next day, Lavrov and I issued a joint statement reaffirming our desire for a post-START treaty. George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin did have good chemistry, and on this occasion it helped to calm the waters—temporarily—of our increasingly choppy relationship. After a dinner of lobster and swordfish (not the fish that Putin had caught) the Russians left and everyone felt better.

IN SOME MATTERS we worked very effectively with Moscow. This was certainly the case in the Middle East, where Sergei’s support in the Quartet of our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue was unwavering. In fact, the Middle East Quartet was a very effective mechanism for coordinating policy toward all aspects of the peace process.

The prospects for forward movement were once again on the rise. Predictably, Hamas and Fatah were not able to live in harmony under the Mecca agreement. The isolation of Gaza had exposed the weakness of the Hamas-led government. As a Palestinian friend told me, “It just showed that they aren’t the great resistance movement—they’re just a bunch of politicians who can’t make the sewer system work either.”

Indeed, the “unmasking” of Hamas was one of the unexpected but welcome benefits of their victory in the elections. I’d often argued that it was preferable to force extremists to prove that they could govern, not just blow up innocent people. Hamas couldn’t do the former, so it decided to launch a preemptive strike against the rapidly improving security forces of Mahmoud Abbas. Everyone knew that Hamas had the upper hand in Gaza but believed that the Fatah forces were at least capable of putting up a fight. They weren’t. While Fatah’s national security advisor (and one of the former security chiefs), Mohammed Dahlan, was in Egypt for surgery on his knee, Fatah forces were routed, the final indignity being Hamas’s takeover of Abu Mazen’s Gaza compound.

The Palestinian Authority had been pushed back into the West Bank. But there was both good news and bad news in that. Obviously Gaza would be an even bigger terrorist safe haven than before. Yet the PA could now concentrate on building reasonable institutions and economic growth in the West Bank. It would have the support of the international community in doing so—including the Israelis, who would restart the flow of tax revenue to the government of Salam Fayyad. It would also allow Olmert to begin, in earnest, to pursue political talks with Abbas, who’d rid himself of the albatross of Hamas.

The timing coincided with Tony Blair’s decision to step down as prime minister and cede the office to his intra-party rival Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Blair sent a private note to the President and asked him to share it with me. It asked whether the United States would support the creation of a position for him as the Quartet’s special representative for Middle East affairs.

“Tony wants to do this, but he doesn’t want to step on your toes,” the President told me, standing at his desk in the Oval. I read Blair’s letter, which laid out an agenda of strengthening Palestinian institutions. He explained to the President that the United States would have to deliver the negotiated solution.

“It’s fine,” I told the President. “I think we can work together and he can go places and do things that I can’t.”

“Like what?” the President asked.

“Go to Gaza,” I answered. The other Quartet members quickly came on board with the idea, and Blair was named to the post.

Tony Blair would bring new energy to the effort to build the Palestinian institutions and foster economic development in the West Bank. Olmert and Abbas were finally ready to negotiate seriously toward a final-status agreement, meeting at Sharm el-Sheik on June 25 and announcing their intention to do so. If they succeeded, Hamas would have to make a choice. If Hamas opted for continued resistance, it would lose the Palestinian people, who wanted decent lives. And if it accepted the agreement, it was finished as a terrorist organization. The pieces were falling into place for a big push toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was during those summer weeks that I began, very discreetly, to lay the ground for what would be the historic Annapolis Conference. There could be no better accelerant for the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East than, at long last, the establishment of a democratic Palestine.

I FELT VERY GOOD about the cooperation that we were achieving in the Middle East. But there were some issues that made me want to pull my hair out in pursuing common ground with the “international community.” Sudan was exhibit one.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, so painstakingly brokered by Bob Zoellick in 2005, was in serious danger of unraveling under the worsening circumstances in Darfur, and the May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement was failing for a variety of reasons including a lack of signatures and limited scope. I’d seen firsthand the suffering in the refugee camps, and the continued reports of violence against civilians were fueling—properly—cries of outrage from human rights groups and NGOs. The crisis was one of those front-page stories with enormous celebrity attention and daily calls for the administration to do more.

In fact, no one wanted to do more than the President. He was fed up with the fecklessness of the United Nations and the international community—and sometimes, I thought, fed up with my explanations for why nothing was moving forward. Why couldn’t the world do a simple thing such as mobilize peacekeeping forces to protect innocent people and deploy them to Darfur, even if it meant ramming them down the throats of the war criminals in Khartoum?

The answer was simple. There was little will or stomach for a confrontation with the Sudanese government, particularly since the Security Council was stalemated due to China’s reluctance to impose penalties on the oil-rich regime. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, did just enough to keep pressures from mounting to the point of action, usually by feigning agreement with entreaties to admit UN forces only to find numerous excuses to keep them from deploying.

He could count on the inefficiency of the United Nations as well. It was like pulling teeth to get the peacekeeping bureaucracy to recruit forces and pay them. When I learned from the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, that he was ready to send forces—capable troops—to Darfur, I was delighted. He called later to say that it would take six months—not because his military was slow but because the United Nations insisted on building barracks for them and that would take time. “I told them the army can travel on its stomachs,” he said, referring to their ability to build their own encampments along the way. I called UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and lost my temper when he defended the peacekeeping office. “This is why people hate the U.N.,” I said, feeling an immediate sense of regret for my rudeness. Ban Ki-moon was not the problem. He was a good man with the right values, but he headed the worst bureaucracy in the world. The secretary-general couldn’t even fire people without a vote of a committee of the General Assembly. “I’ll try again,” he said meekly. “I know, I know,” I answered.

My most uncomfortable meetings with the President were always about Sudan—because I couldn’t give him good options. The Principals Committee meetings that we held in advance of the NSC sessions rarely achieved much as attendees reviewed over and over again the impediments to international action. The President’s frustration finally boiled over, and he told his assembled War Cabinet that he was considering unilateral military action and wanted options. Jendayi Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who’d advocated for a tougher response, was very excited but soon reported that the working-level sessions had become bogged down. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon had made it clear that it opposed any military involvement in Sudan. Its argument was compelling: we can’t take military action in another Muslim country, especially one in which a vital national interest isn’t at stake. As frustrated as he was, the President acceded to the reality of that circumstance.

That left us with no course but to return to the slog of international cooperation. The President did levy new U.S. sanctions in May, and I was directed to consult with the United Kingdom and other allies on multilateral sanctions and an expanded embargo on arms sales to Sudan.

The problem, of course, wasn’t the United Kingdom or any of the Europeans. In fact, the May election of Nicolas Sarkozy in France strengthened the coalition against Sudan. The French president called seventeen countries, including China and Russia, as well as diplomats from regional and international organizations, to Paris for an international meeting on Darfur. He was wonderfully blunt, saying that the international community was not meeting its responsibilities.

That June I went to visit Sarkozy in Paris. The energetic president of France and his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, made quite a pair. Sarkozy had cleverly reached across the political aisle to select Kouchner from the opposition Socialist Party. Kouchner is a Nobel Prize winner for his extraordinary work in founding Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, which delivers medical assistance around the globe. Sarkozy is a pro-American son of a Hungarian immigrant who values freedom and human rights. The two of them were quite a contrast to the cynical Chirac, who thought in terms of French grandeur and great-power politics and had a colonialist disdain for the democratic aspirations of people in the Middle East and Africa.

Whenever I met Sarkozy, he greeted me by saying, “I love this woman.” He didn’t mean it literally, of course. But we saw eye to eye on almost everything. I couldn’t help but think how different it might have been to confront the problem of Saddam Hussein with Sarkozy instead of Chirac in the Élysée Palace and Angela Merkel instead of Gerhard Schroeder in Berlin. France could do little, though, to move the needle on Darfur. Beijing was the obstacle. Sudan was perhaps the best example of China’s mercantilist-style foreign policy—concerned first and foremost with its economic interests. Sudan was a major supplier of oil to China, and Hu Jintao, who was chasing an average 10 percent growth at home, was in no mood to challenge Bashir over the cost of human lives in Darfur.

In July we would succeed in securing a UN Security Council resolution, 1769, calling for a joint peacekeeping operation with the African Union. That year, the African Union/United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) deployed 26,000 troops to allay the violence. There was never a doubt that violence against civilians ebbed wherever the international peacekeepers deployed. But until the day that I left the State Department there was no greater source of frustration than Sudan. Sudan represented the international community at its worst—smug and self-righteous about its principles, including the “responsibility to protect,” and almost completely ineffective in actually acting on them in hard cases.

The horrific situation in Burma was another egregious example of the international system’s inability to act. The Burmese junta was so repressive and isolated that it had actually refused international help for its people after a monstrous cyclone devastated the country in 2008. Thousands of people died needlessly while the generals deliberated and stalled. We finally managed to get some assistance through, using the good offices of Admiral Timothy Keating, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, who was able to appeal to his counterparts in the Burmese leadership. Nearly ten days passed before the Burmese military junta permitted the first U.S. aid shipment into the country, and by that time the cyclone had killed up to 32,000 people and impacted millions of others. Even after those initial deliveries, Admiral Keating was forced to withdraw four U.S. Navy ships from the region after fifteen failed attempts to convince the government to allow them to deliver more aid.

This behavior was not surprising given the nature of the regime. Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition, had long been under house arrest and had become a symbol of the junta’s repressions. Laura Bush had taken up her plight as a personal cause, giving voice to the United States’ support for the Burmese people. But India and China always blocked real action in the Security Council, citing their long borders with Burma and fears of instability.

Then, on the second day of the UN General Assembly in 2007, the sheer brutality of the regime burst onto television screens. The activist religious community in Burma, monks who engaged in peaceful resistance, had always been a center of opposition. But on September 26 they took their protest into the streets for the ninth straight day, chanting the name of Aung San Suu Kyi. The junta cracked down hard, and violence soared.

Coming as it did during the UNGA, the events were deeply embarrassing for Burma’s supporters, especially the Southeast Asian states that had maintained a posture of noninterference in their neighbor’s affairs. I happened to have a meeting with the ASEAN leaders the next afternoon. When the press entered the room, I delivered a strong condemnation of the events, turning to face the Burmese foreign minister. I knew that it would make my Southeast Asian colleagues uncomfortable, since they tended to avoid conflict—a cultural trait, I was always told. I continued to attack the Burmese minister when the cameras left. He tried to talk about trade. “You can’t ignore what your government is doing in the streets. You and your leaders are despicable,” I said. Finally, a few ministers spoke up, particularly my friend Alberto Romulo, the foreign secretary of the Philippines, who was more direct than others at the table. But still no UN action followed. There was just a weak UN Security Council Presidential Statement (the mildest form of condemnation). Within a few weeks, we imposed tougher unilateral sanctions on Burma. Multilateral penalties would have been more effective, but we didn’t have that option.

There would be one other example of the international community’s inability to act. The plight of the people of Zimbabwe under the aging dictator Robert Mugabe would capture headlines worldwide, particularly when a cholera outbreak underscored the consequences of his authoritarian rule: a contaminated water supply with no purification chemicals and a collapsed health-care system. Zimbabwe had once been the breadbasket of southern Africa, but it was now experiencing widespread famine. Mugabe’s failure to address these crises was just one example of his callous neglect for his own people. Yet some African leaders, particularly those in South Africa, were reluctant to break publicly with Mugabe because of his fervent opposition to apartheid decades ago. The Russians and the Chinese, too, were reluctant to interfere in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs. This left those who wished to do something about the regime—the United States, Europe, and a few African countries—without the Security Council’s backing for multilateral sanctions.

The United Nations had much to commend, particularly some well-run agencies such as the World Food Programme and UNICEF, ably led by Josette Sheeran and Ann Veneman respectively. It also conducted some very successful peacekeeping missions overseen by talented public servants such as American Jane Hall Lute. In addition, the UN was a place to convene the world to discuss important problems, and the Security Council was a way to express the collective will of the international community on matters of peace and security. But the UN is in the final analysis a collection of independent states. The diplomacy was hard, and I had great help in dealing with the organization. Kristen Silverberg, my assistant secretary for international organizations, was tenacious and fortunately more patient than I. When the time came to do hard things, it was exceedingly difficult to align the interests of its members. I therefore came to value more the ad hoc arrangements, sometimes called “coalitions of the willing,” that could actually get things done.

Thus, I always bristled when the press or experts accused us of unilateralism. Yes, sometimes it would have been better to bring the international community along. But experiences such as Burma and Zimbabwe exposed just how hard it was to get others to do difficult things. The United States was sometimes accused of “moralism,” but at least there was real concern for the plight of those living under tyranny, a quality that seemed in short supply among the broader community of states.

While unilateral sanctions were not always effective, “name-and-shame” efforts were surprisingly powerful. The State Department issued several reports each year that assessed various countries’ progress on human rights and religious freedom. Two of the most watched were the annual human rights report—which was sure to draw a rebuke from countries that were cited for abuses—and the human-trafficking report. President Bush put modern-day slavery on the international agenda with a speech to the UNGA in 2003, followed by the issuing of a National Security Presidential Directive aimed at eradicating human trafficking.

Some of the saddest stories in the world emerged as people began to pay closer attention to the tragedy of human trafficking and slavery: young children sold as sex slaves globally—particularly in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe; children forced into slave labor making cigarettes, bricks, and other items or brutalized and enslaved as household servants, porters, or camel jockeys; children smuggled across borders and sold into “adoptions.” These crimes had been perpetrated for years, but our efforts helped bring them into the light. Each year we ranked countries on their commitment to fighting these awful practices. The ambassador at large for combating and monitoring human trafficking, a position held first by former congressman John Miller and then by Mark Lagon, gave visibility to the cause. And countries hated to be listed in Tier III, the worst offenders. Because virtually no government wanted to be associated with modern slavery, we were able to make real progress in getting countries to change laws and prosecute offenders. Our efforts were also greatly enhanced by the work of Assistant Secretaries of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Barry Lowenkron and David J. Kramer. Still, as I write this, the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons estimates that 12.3 million adults and children are trafficked for forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution around the world. The struggle against these crimes continues.