The Secretary
Authors: Kim Ghattas
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For Lebanon and for my family,
they made me who I am.
CONTENTS
2.
Hillary Reconquers the World
8.
Whirling Dervishes and Brazilian Samba
14.
Sarko’s War
15.
Summer of Disparate Discontents
INTRODUCTION
War is a force that gives us meaning.
—Chris Hedges, 2002
I grew up in Beirut, on the front lines of a civil war. My father always said, “If
America wanted the fighting to end, the war would be over tomorrow.” He waited fifteen
years for the guns to fall silent. From 1975 to 1990, everybody waited while 150,000
people died. Did America not care that people were being killed? Did it not have the
power to stop the bloodshed? Were we just a pawn in the hands of the neocolonial imperial
power? And why were we all blaming this distant land for our war, anyway?
As a child, I never imagined I would one day live in that distant land and would be
able to put some of those questions to the American secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
As a reporter, in the State Department press corps, I would even fly from Washington
to Beirut with her, on an aging American government plane, which contrasted somewhat
with my image of an omnipotent superpower.
During the war in Lebanon, America received the most calls for help and the biggest
share of blame in a conflict so complicated that even the Lebanese sometimes lost
the plot. The United States was one of many countries playing a role, though there
were those who believed only the United States could save Lebanon from its descent
into a seemingly bottomless hell. Others were convinced America was the reason for
our suffering. People who disagreed about everything, who either loved or resented
the United States, shared one conviction: America was omnipotent; its power knew no
bounds.
My own family was liberal and secular, and with a Dutch mother, we felt attached to
Lebanon yet also connected to the West. Although we often felt ambivalent about U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East, Europe and America symbolized hope, a chance for
a better life if we decided to leave Lebanon. We did not identify with the Soviet
Union, Iran, or Syria, though many of our compatriots did. Ours is a country with
multiple political identities and a multitude of religious communities.
War is a maturing experience; at the age of thirteen, I decided I would be a journalist.
I was tired of explaining to friends and relatives abroad that Lebanon was not flattened
by bombs, that I still went to school—though there were long periods where the shelling
was too intense—that we still went out for family lunch on Sundays when the snipers
took some time off. I was tired of the raised eyebrows when we presented our passports
at airports during the days when Lebanon and Beirut were associated with plane hijackings
and bloodthirsty gunmen. I just wanted the world to understand what was really going
on in my country.
One day, we woke up and peace had arrived. Or at least a semblance of peace—postwar
societies are rarely stable. We were in fact under the military occupation of Syria,
our neighbor to the east. I was just a teenager, but war was all I had known and I
had trouble adjusting to life without adrenaline. Bombardments had been replaced with
a deafening silence, and fireworks made me jump. I still hoped for an outburst of
fighting that would shut down the road to school as an excuse not to do my homework.
The army was still on the move often, its tanks rumbling on city streets, checkpoints
manned by trigger-happy Syrian soldiers terrified us at all hours of the day, and
scores were still being settled with gruesome political assassinations. After high
school, many of my friends left Lebanon and enrolled in universities in Europe and
the United States, hoping to build a better, more sane future. I followed my childhood
dream and stayed in Beirut.
I reported on my country for American and European newspapers and then became a radio
and television journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation. After covering
political unrest, assassinations, uprisings, and more wars in Lebanon, as well as
the invasion of Iraq and repression across the Middle East, I finally left the city
that had made me a journalist and moved from Beirut to Washington in 2008, at the
age of thirty-two, to be the BBC’s State Department correspondent. I had overdosed
on instability and uncertainty and felt only relief as I arrived in the United States.
I did sometimes wake up in Washington wondering about the meaning of life now that
it didn’t involve a daily struggle. Could it really be just a steady stream of days
in the office, dinner with friends, and weekends puttering at home? I got my adrenaline
fix from a new, much healthier source. I had become part of the small group of journalists,
known as the traveling press corps, covering the secretary of state in Washington
and on international diplomatic missions—last-minute plans for frenzied jaunts around
the globe on a U.S. government plane, motorcades racing through world capitals at
breakneck speed, and high-wire diplomatic talks about war and peace.
My BBC predecessors had all been British; I was also the only non-Western journalist
in the group. My background informed and enriched my reporting—I had lived on the
receiving end of American foreign policy my whole life; I knew the very real-life
consequences of decisions made at the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon.
Now I had a front-row seat to watch that policy unfold, succeed, and often fail.
On my travels, from London to Kabul and Beijing, I heard countless echoes of my own
frustrations and hopes about the United States. Even today, while America is deeply
in debt again, exhausted by two wars, its influence challenged by rivals big and small,
millions of people around the world still believe that the United States can snap
its fingers to make things happen, for good or bad, just as I had believed as a child.
But in Washington, I found American officials frustrated and exhausted by the heavy
lifting required to advance their country’s interests or to get anything done around
the globe. America really did seem to be in decline. Or was this just the reality
of a complex and fast-changing world?
As I prodded for answers and dug deeper, I began to feel that news reports for television
and radio were no longer enough to share everything I was learning—it was time to
write a book. I didn’t want to simply record observations from my travels and reflect
on my feelings along the way; I wanted to enrich my perspective on the events I saw
unfolding in public with the points of view of those at the heart of action, working
behind closed doors. Those untold moments rarely make it into short news stories or
big headlines but they provide valuable context that tells a fuller story. Over the
course of a year, I interviewed several dozen senior American officials, junior officials,
foreign ministers of other countries and their advisors, in Washington and abroad,
sometimes immediately after a diplomatic crisis, other times with hindsight. Many
of them spoke to me more than once, often for several hours, in person or by phone.
I conducted the interviews on a “deep background” basis, a journalistic term that
means I would use the anecdotes, observations, or analyses shared with me during the
interviews, but I would not identify the source. The promise of anonymity often allows
people to be more open in their descriptions, in their retelling of events, and in
sharing their emotions and thoughts. Dialogue in quotation marks has been retold to
me by the speaker or someone in the room; I have paraphrased occasionally to condense
long conversations or because my sources were uncertain about the precise wording
used, but the context or content was never in doubt.
The result is a rich canvas of different points of view, American and foreign: a multidimensional
look at some of the issues and crises that have marked the Obama administration over
the last four years, from the Arab Spring to the Asian pivot. It’s a journey across
hundreds of thousands of miles, from the Elysée Palace in Paris to the Saudi king’s
desert retreat. It’s a journey in the company of the real people behind American power,
the fallible human beings who devise American foreign policy in an increasingly complicated
world and the foreign officials with whom they cooperate, jostle, and clash on a daily
basis.
It’s also my own journey from Beirut to Washington, as I try to come to terms with
my personal misgivings about American power and look for answers to the questions
that haunted my childhood: Did America not care that the Lebanese were dying? Does
America still matter in today’s world where China, Turkey, Brazil, India, and others
are all competing for a bigger say in how the world is run?
I look at the bigger picture of American power on the world stage through the eyes
of the woman who came to symbolize America, almost as much if not more than President
Barack Obama. For four years I traveled on a plane with Hillary Clinton, scrutinizing
her every word and move to determine what the essence of American power and influence
may be. And I watched her make her own journey during that time, from defeated presidential
candidate and polarizing politician to a rock star diplomat, admired and respected
around the world, at an all-time high in the polls in her own country. I’ve observed
Clinton, the secretary of state, grow into her role and establish her own brand of
diplomacy. But I also saw Hillary, the woman, in action, close-up, with and without
makeup. In the spotlight for decades, Hillary Rodham Clinton is often referred to
simply as Hillary and I have chosen to refer to her as Hillary occasionally in the
book, not out of any familiarity but to highlight more private moments as the public
rediscovers a woman it has known for years.
When she took on the challenge of restoring America’s reputation, the United States
was at a crossroads, its influence shunned by others after eight years of the Bush
administration. As President Barack Obama’s envoy to the world, Clinton set out to
make her country a wanted partner once more, finding new spheres of influence and
exploring the new frontiers of twenty-first-century diplomacy from her very first
day at the State Department.
PART I
You are the agents of innocence. That is why you make so much mischief. You come into
a place like Lebanon as if you were missionaries. You convince people to put aside
their old customs and allegiances and to break the bonds that hold the country together.
With your money and your schools and your cigarettes and music, you convince us that
we can be like you. But we can’t. And when the real trouble begins, you are gone.
And you leave your friends, the ones who trusted you the most, to die. I will tell
you what it is. You urge us to open up the windows of heaven. But you do not realize
that the downpour will come rushing and drown us all.