The Secretary (36 page)

The politicians who were assassinated did not have pristine records; they had not
been perfect democrats or incorruptible, but it didn’t matter who owned the truth,
who was right or wrong, good or bad—one party was willing to kill to advance its agenda.

*   *   *

At two in the morning on the secure floor of our Doha hotel, it was time for Hillary
and her team to forget about the day’s crisis in Beirut and take a step back. In makeshift
offices in hotels around the world, on the seventh floor of the Building, in the West
Wing, at the Pentagon, or aboard SAM, officials went from one crisis to the next,
from one urgent matter to the following. The adrenaline never receded. The news cycle
was relentless, and long gone were the days when top officials in Washington stopped
working at six thirty to watch the evening news and then awaited their morning paper
to find out if there were any agenda setters. Every tweet, every blog, every morning,
midday, and evening show was a news maker and a crisis alert, and every pundit declared
the administration a failure if it hadn’t found a solution within five minutes of
a problem erupting. There was hardly any time to think about the long term, but like
others in the administration, Hillary, Jake, and the rest of the team tried as best
they could.

Clinton was often criticized for not having adopted a signature issue to which she
had devoted her heart and soul. By the end of her tenure, Condoleezza Rice was in
the weeds of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, negotiating the removal of a checkpoint
here and restriction on movement there. She was criticized for losing sight of the
bigger picture, shuttling to the region every month and ending up empty-handed. Clinton
had steered clear of that approach, partly because none of the problems in her in-box
had an easy solution: there was no point tying your reputation to a sure failure.
She also believed it was more important to establish long-lasting trends that could
deliver more for more people—like empowering civil society and women. This empowerment
could, in turn, bring about lasting solutions to conflicts. But she also wanted to
manage the bigger picture: America’s position in the world. American power was bigger
than just the sum of its successes and failures.

Sitting in a staff office with Dan Schwerin, one of Clinton’s speechwriters, Jake
was reviewing the speech that his boss would be giving at the conference she was here
to attend. The Forum for the Future was a yearly gathering of government officials,
business leaders, and civil society organizations from G8 countries and the Middle
East, and Clinton wanted to deliver a warning about the negative trends in the region.
On January 3, Jake and Dan had gathered with Huma and Jeff, the Middle East man, in
the secretary’s office to prepare for this trip. Clinton wanted civil society to be
the focus at every stop, every speech.

In the summer, President Obama gave a directive to review American policy toward the
Middle East, a region not only plagued by conflicts but also ruled by dictators, many
of them reliable friends of Washington. They provided stability, and America gave
them military aid and economic assistance. Those who were not friends with America
were somehow part of the system too.

But Washington knew that any perceived stability of the region was false. Condoleezza
Rice had spoken in the past about the need to push for reform and not choose stability
over democracy, but neither Arab leaders nor Arab civilians were in the mood to listen
to America’s talk about democracy after the debacle of the Iraq War. Yet there was
a growing realization that the price of being friends with rulers like Mubarak of
Egypt or Saleh of Yemen was about to rise exponentially. The presidential study ordered
by Obama had come to tentative conclusions: be more assertive on pushing reform, find
points of leverage, work more with civil society, and ally with people inside the
government who understand the urgency for reform. No formal decisions were made, no
plans drafted; after all, there was no rush—the Arab world moved at a glacial pace.

Hillary was personally frustrated. She had been traveling to the Arab world for two
years as secretary of state by now, and she had seen the region amble aimlessly forward
for years. She had read all the UN reports about the lack of development, the booming
demographics. She had pleaded with leaders to embrace reforms and had tried to explain
how a more open system would benefit everyone. She was fed up with Arab officials
not listening to her. Her admonitions were becoming background noise. During that
meeting to prepare the trip, Hillary had got more and more agitated as they delved
deeper into the challenges of the region.

“I want to break through,” she said. “We have to come up with a way to wake these
people up. They are sitting on a time bomb.”

Not even Hillary knew how prescient her words were. Now in Doha, Jake and Dan were
trying to find the one sentence that would help her break through. Was it too harsh?
Was the metaphor clichéd or too scathing? Bernadette walked in to pick up a stack
of files. They read it to her.

“So what do you think?” asked Jake.

Bernadette paused for a few seconds. She had barely slept since leaving Washington.
All she could think of was whether she had prepared enough mini-schedules for the
morning. But in the tedium of the grind, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff was asking
her what she thought about a key policy speech. Suddenly she was reminded of why she
was doing this job and what it was all about.

“I like it. It is tough, but it’s a good line,” she said.

*   *   *

On the morning of January 13, with colleagues from the traveling press, we met Amr
Moussa for a quick cup of coffee in the hotel café. The secretary-general of the Arab
League didn’t have his cigar this time, but he offered more pricelessly useless assessments.

“Ben Ali has called for parliamentary elections. He is serious about finding a solution,”
he said. He hadn’t spoken to any Tunisian officials yet, but as we all walked out
of the restaurant, he said he planned to call the foreign minister in the coming days.

Clinton’s intervention at the Forum for the Future conference was about to start.
In going over the speech in the morning with her team, she had decided she liked the
line that had given Jake and the others some anguish. She kept it. She didn’t think
chaos was around the corner, but the region’s young population was only growing and
unemployment only rising, with militants keen to fill the void—a combustible combination.
It was time to grab the region’s leaders by their lapels, others by the golden trimming
on their
bishts
, the loose dark coat that men in the Gulf wore over their
thobes
.

“In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the
sand,” she said to the conference attendees. Silence.

“Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their
countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever.” More silence.

Clinton was just getting started. The region’s leaders needed to listen to their people,
she continued. They had to view civil society as a partner, not a threat; they had
to create opportunities for their people and rein in corruption.

“Trying to get a permit, you have to pass money through so many different hands. Trying
to open up, you have to pay people off. Trying to stay open, you have to pay people
off. Trying to export your goods, you have to pay people off. So by the time you finish
paying everybody off, it’s not a very profitable venture.”

When she was asked why the United States couldn’t stop Israel from expanding settlements
in the West Bank, she gazed pointedly across the room full of officials from countries
that were U.S. allies—Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia.

“We can’t stop a lot of countries from doing things we disagree with and that we speak
out against. We see it all over the world,” she said.

“The United States bears a disproportionate amount of the burden for trying to maintain
peace and security and prosperity across the globe. I wish there were a way we could
tell a lot of countries what they should do,” she said.

Clinton was frustrated because the United States, along with Europe, was one of the
biggest donors to the Palestinians and constantly had to beg countries like Saudi
Arabia to pay up too. The Saudis had pledged close to $2 billion in the preceding
few years but so far had transferred only a third of it to the Palestinian government.
Arab money was often pledged yet rarely made it to the recipients. The United States
often tried to shame Arab countries into disbursing the money they had promised, making
very public, elaborate announcements whenever the United States released a portion
of money to the Palestinian Authority.

Clinton’s role in the forum had come to an end. Our vans were waiting outside the
hotel, ready for the race to the airport with the usual detour to the U.S. embassy
to rally the troops. No matter how far behind we might have been, embassy stops remained
an essential part of our schedule on every trip, in every country. Hillary gave those
stops her full attention and her customary warm, energetic thank-you. She felt strongly
that embassy employees were the implementers of U.S. foreign policy on the ground.
They needed to believe in what they did and feed off her energy to carry forward at
a time when doubts about America’s role plagued people’s vision.

After we left, Egypt’s foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit offered his own vision of
the urgency for reform.

“History and contemporary practice have both proven that any reform process is by
its nature evolutionary, cumulative, and gradual, which are all essential prerequisites
in order to guarantee its success and continuity along with the preservation of stability
and social cohesion.”

The opaque statement reflected the inability of Egyptian leaders to understand the
needs of their people, the urgency of reforms. Their obfuscation blinded them to what
was awaiting them and their country.

*   *   *

We had a twelve-hour journey back home, stopping through Shannon, and would be landing
midevening on U.S. soil. In the front section of the plane, staffers were working
on Hillary’s speech for the next morning on American-Chinese relations. Jake took
a break and came to the back of the plane to chat about the content of her address
and all the other preparations that were under way for the visit to Washington the
following week by China’s president Hu Jintao. We talked about Richard Holbrooke,
who had died suddenly a few weeks earlier. Without the special representative for
Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. policy toward the two countries would soon be adrift.
Not everybody had agreed with Holbrooke, and there was much infighting within the
administration about him, but he kept people’s minds focused on the issue. Soon, Vali
and other people on the team would move on to other jobs inside or outside the State
Department. The focus would change, decrease. The Pakistanis would feel abandoned
again because Holbrooke’s replacement wasn’t as high caliber.

After her China speech on Friday morning, Clinton had a ten thirty meeting with the
Malaysian deputy prime minister, an eleven o’clock meeting at the White House with
President Obama and President Zardari of Pakistan, and a one o’clock meeting with
all the special representatives for Afghanistan and Pakistan—Holbrooke’s counterparts
from all the other countries in the coalition fighting in Afghanistan. They were all
in town to attend Holbrooke’s memorial service later that afternoon at the Kennedy
Center. Hillary and her husband would each give a speech, alongside all the others
paying their respects. It was rare for the two Clintons to share time in the same
location. Hillary and Bill spoke almost every day on the phone, but coordinating their
schedules was an exercise in improbability.

*   *   *

There was also an unscheduled event for that Friday, January 14, all the way in Tunisia.
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali got on a plane and flew into the night, looking for a country
that would take him. As with every significant world event, the American president
and the secretary of state sent out statements, e-mailed to journalists around town
and farther afield.

“The United States continues to closely monitor the rapidly evolving events in Tunisia,
where earlier today President Ben Ali left his country following several weeks of
demonstrations and popular unrest. We condemn the violence and urge restraint on all
sides.”

No one said anything about history in the making; no one knew for sure what it meant.
But at the White House and the State Department, they rushed to the phones and dialed
country code (
+
20): Cairo? We have a problem.

13

THIS IS NOT ABOUT US

The Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Nazif and Omar Suleiman, the country’s spy chief,
had no patience for any more lectures by America. A few months earlier, U.S. officials
had called them and even spoken to President Hosni Mubarak himself to press on them
the need for urgent reform after the country held fraudulent parliamentary elections
in October. A bomb explosion on New Year’s Day in Alexandria had also killed twenty
Coptic Christians, and in the daily briefing, Egyptian journalists were imploring
P. J. and the United States to do something, anything to help protect Egypt’s minority.
As usual, Mubarak was not receptive to outside advice. But now, the Americans seized
on the popular rebellion in Tunisia to make their case again. This could happen in
Egypt, the officials warned. Don’t you think you’re going to have to open things up?
No, came the answer. The Egyptians insisted their country was different. It can’t
happen here, they said. Well, why not? asked Washington. Egypt was just different,
replied Cairo.

Ten days after Ben Ali left Tunisia, Clinton traveled to Mexico for a one-day trip
full of meetings and public events. SAM flew her back and dropped her off at Andrews
Air Force Base at two in the morning on January 25. Later that day, she would be attending
President Obama’s State of the Union Address in Congress, and she was sending her
input to the White House. Obama’s advisors were debating whether to mention the events
in Tunisia and decided to make an oblique reference to the rest of the region as well.
“The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic
aspirations of all people,” Obama would say that evening. But first Clinton had a
meeting at ten thirty with the Spanish foreign minister Trinidad Jimenez after which
they took questions in the Treaty Room. Those little press conferences, called press
avails, were an occasion for journalists to ask Clinton about any world event, not
just the content of her meeting.