Chapter 7
THE MIDDLE EAST: CAN DEMOCRACY EXIST IN A CAULDRON?
Tsipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, was on the phone. “Hezbollah crossed the Blue Line,” she said, referring to the border between Lebanon and Israel that had been established after Israel’s withdrawal from its northern neighbor in 2000. “They killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped others.” My heart sank. Another war in the Middle East was about to begin.
The Lebanon War of 2006 began on July 12 and would go on for six devastating weeks, shaking the Levant yet again. Within days, Israelis and Arabs and diplomats across the world were calling for the American secretary of state to find a solution. One night I watched as a snap poll on CNN asked whether people thought I would find a solution. (I believe 58 percent thought I would.) This was getting personal.
Facing pressure to do something, I tried to put the situation into context. “We are experiencing the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” I told a reporter, hoping to signal that something good could still emerge from the chaos engulfing the region. It was a well-meaning comment, but it came across as insensitive. The cartoon of me pregnant with the new Middle East, blood dripping from my teeth, drove home the point. I quickly backed off the characterization. Yet the tumultuous events of the last decade have indeed torn apart the map of the area and cast aside the pillars of the old order. A new Middle East is emerging through war, unrest, revolution—and, in a few cases, reform.
Many tend to think of the Arab Middle East as uniform. The composite picture is one of corrupt, authoritarian governments, some of whom are kings. They oppress their women and behead their enemies. The region is the source of terrorism and wars and is wealthy only because of oil. It is a place that spells trouble, pure and simple.
But there is also another parallel reality. The historical, political, and social circumstances of the countries in the region vary greatly. Bahrain’s ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2013 was a Jewish woman. Jordan has five female ministers. The skyline of Dubai rivals that of Chicago. Lebanon’s restaurants and nightclubs feel almost European.
And the political circumstances of the area—the institutional landscape—varies too. If we return to our earlier introductory framework, the Middle East has countries that fit into every category. Libya is a story of chaos after the overthrow of a totalitarian cult of personality. There were few institutions to speak of, and new ones are having trouble gaining traction. Egypt and Tunisia are examples of quite different outcomes after authoritarian presidents were deposed. The former is now ruled by the military, while the latter is now quasi-democratic, with a nascent institutional infrastructure struggling to survive. Iraq is trying to make young institutions work but under much more challenging security conditions and political divisions. The monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE have different levels of tolerance for dissent and political activity—and the institutional landscapes reflect that. The challenge is to understand not just where these states stand today but what the building blocks might be for a better tomorrow.
This may seem a less than propitious time to think about a democratic future for the Middle East. The region is experiencing two upheavals simultaneously. The first is similar to uprisings around the world—people are fed up with authoritarian, corrupt regimes that don’t deliver for them. This was the source of discontent that fueled the “Arab Spring,” bringing down governments in Egypt and Tunisia and launching the civil war in Syria. Today, what happens in the village does not stay in the village, thanks to social media. Discontent is spreading across borders like wildfire. The second element, though, is unique to the Middle East—a backdrop of regional war and the splintering of an entire system of state borders.
The Middle East is cursed with a complex political geography. Egypt has existed for centuries. Modern-day Iran was once the core of the Persian Empire, and Turkey was the center of the Ottoman Empire. These states have strong and established national identities. Others in the region, however, emerged by diplomatic design in the early twentieth century. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, its four-hundred-year-old system of governing the Middle East collapsed with it. Britain and France, victors in the war, poured into the vacuum and redrew the borders, often without regard for the complexities on the ground. From this process emerged the modern boundaries of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and what was then called Palestine. Monarchs and dictators held these constructed states together. Arbitrary lines crossed sectarian and ethnic divides, leaving a hodgepodge of Kurds, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and a smattering of Christian groups and other minorities within and across borders.
And often the leadership did not match the ethnic and religious mix. Iraq was ruled first by a Sunni king and later by a Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein, though the Shia were 60 percent of the population. Bahrain’s ruling family is Sunni, while the population is roughly 70 percent Shia. Eastern Saudi Arabia—10 percent of the country and an oil-rich region—is largely Shia. The Sunni monarchs have historically neglected the needs of their populations, leading to widespread distrust. Bashar al-Assad is Alawite—a minority Shia sect. The broader Syrian population is roughly 75 percent Sunni, about 13 percent of whom are Kurds. Lebanon’s population is about 27 percent Sunni, 27 percent Shia, and 40 percent Christian.1 The country is governed by a fixed formula. The president must be Christian, the prime minister Sunni, and the speaker of the parliament Shia. Lebanese Hezbollah, meaning “Party of God,” is also Shia and dominates the country’s southern region and a big chunk of Beirut. It is almost purely an extension of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps—taking orders, money, and inspiration from Tehran.
The picture is further complicated by the relationship between Shia Iran and Saudi Arabia, the most important Sunni power. Sunni rulers—with some justification—accuse Iran of encouraging the disintegration of their states, of trying to build a “Shia crescent” from the Mediterranean to the Gulf and beyond. They resent the infiltration, as they see it, of Persian Iran into Arab affairs, a battle each side can trace back to the early days of Islam. Though there is no love lost between the Shia Arabs and the Iranians, Sunni leaders tend to lump them together—and to see Iran’s influence everywhere. As a result, there has been a proxy war in Yemen, pitting Iran’s allies against those of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, the regional powers vie for influence, complicating the already explosive domestic political circumstances.
So with the Middle East in flames, why even raise the question of democracy? Why not wait until the regional wars and conflicts subside? The answer is that the people of the region may not be so patient. The pent-up frustration that erupted in the “Arab Spring” has not gone away. The economic landscape, with slow growth and low oil prices, is forcing change. The populations of the Middle East are young, and recent surveys show that they remain unsatisfied with the status quo: More than two-thirds of Arab youth think their leaders should do more to improve their rights and freedoms.2 And the landscape for the future is developing now in Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, and the Gulf states. Eventually, peace will come in Syria too and will shape the institutional framework for that country.
Most important, the argument for the necessity of a democratic Middle East is as strong—if not stronger—than any place in the world. The case was made most effectively in a landmark manifesto by Arab intellectuals.3
The 2002 Arab Human Development Report painted a dire picture for the future of the Middle East. Written by Arab social scientists and academics, the report warned of an impending crisis if the region’s leaders did not address three gaps—the freedom gap, the women’s empowerment gap, and the knowledge gap. The study compared progress in the Arab world to that of the Asian Tigers and, somewhat surprisingly, to that of Israel. As the Middle East Quarterly stated in its summary, “The core assumption of the report is that poverty is not merely a matter of income.”4 It quoted Nader Fergany, the lead author of the report, as saying, “A person who is not free is poor. A woman who is not empowered is poor. And a person who has no access to knowledge is poor.” And it concluded that “by all these criteria, the Arab region—even some of its wealthiest corners—could only be described as impoverished.”
The report thus defined development not just by economic measures but by social and political freedom as indicators of progress as well. The message to Arab leaders could not have been clearer: Change or continue to fall behind the rest of the world.
I first read the Arab Human Development Report when a member of the NSC staff brought it to my attention. I was stunned at its candor and by the multiple taboos that it broke. I took a copy with me to the Oval Office one morning. “Mr. President, you have to read this,” I said to him. And then I gave copies to others, including Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, then the secretaries of defense and state. It was not the only factor, but it was a big one in shaping the Freedom Agenda—our belief that the United States had overlooked the absence of freedom in the Middle East for too long. In June 2005, I delivered a speech in Cairo that made that admission. “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. Now we are taking a different course,” I said. “We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” I went on to say that change was overdue. It was time for individual freedoms, fair elections, the end of violence and intimidation against citizens, and constitutional protections for all.
Despite regional circumstances less favorable today than in 2005, I stand by that statement. A stable Middle East will one day have to be a democratic Middle East. Only through institutions can people of all religious and ethnic groups find a way to peacefully protect their interests and rights. If dictators and authoritarian monarchs can no longer hold their countries together and make them prosper, democratic institutions have to take their place.
Iraq: When Tyrants Fall
I was sitting in my office, trying to put everything that had occurred over the last few days into perspective. The American military had met little resistance from Iraqi armed forces. The war that had begun on March 19, 2003, was, it seemed, just about to be over on April 9.
The television was on, but it was background noise. I was lost in thought, reviewing my to-do list. Be sure to call Colin about getting the ambassadorial selection process going. He’s also going to have to go back to the UN. Now that the war is over we’ll have to try to bring the Russians and the French on board. [Treasury Secretary] Paul O’Neill ought to call his counterparts to talk about currency stabilization and debt relief. That can be a good icebreaker. Maybe the president should call Chirac and Putin. No—it’s too soon.
Suddenly, the commotion on the screen got my attention. The huge statue of Saddam Hussein was crashing to the ground, pulled down by angry young Iraqi men. What a moment! I thought to myself. This feels like 1991 when statues of Josef Stalin were tumbling across Eastern Europe. The Iraqis have been liberated from a monster.
In Iraq, though, that moment would turn out to be a bit of a mirage. Apparently the first attempt to bring down the likeness of the dictator had failed, leading someone—possibly an American soldier—to suggest that a rope might do the trick. And there was the awful moment when U.S. troops climbed up on the toppled statue to plant an American flag. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and the Iraqi banner suddenly appeared.
Maybe it was a kind of metaphor for the paradox of supporting a transition to democracy under occupation. American military power provided the opening. But the work of building a new state needed to be done by the Iraqis themselves.
Over the next decade and beyond, Iraqi leaders have struggled to make their people secure and to provide essential services. To their credit, they have tried to do the work through their new democratic institutions—contesting budget allocations and ministerial positions in the parliament and in the very free press. Several leaders have stepped down peacefully and the Iraqis have gone to the polls three times to replace them. Citizens have protested openly and sought to hold their government accountable. The country has been dogged by an existential question: What does it mean to be a federal Iraq? The Kurds have had one answer, the Shia another, and the Sunnis still another. And through it all, Iraqi leaders have had to learn to work together and trust each other. That has been hard.
In the pages that follow, we trace the Iraqi struggle to build and sustain democratic institutions under the hardest of circumstances. I do not intend to revisit the decision to invade Iraq, having done that thoroughly and as honestly as I know how in an earlier work.5 It is important, though, to reiterate one point: We did not overthrow Saddam to try to bring democracy to Iraq at gunpoint. To do so would have been a misuse of American military power and I would never have advised the president to do pursue that idea.
In brief, the president and his national security principals believed that Saddam was a security threat. It was our belief—supported by the intelligence of multiple countries—that he had reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons programs and was well on the way to doing so on the nuclear side.6
That it was Saddam mattered. He had a history of aggression against his neighbors and a long record of seeking, building, and using weapons of mass destruction. He supported terrorists—not al-Qaeda, but numerous other groups. And, yes, we feared that he might transfer weapons of mass destruction or the technology to make them to some of them. Commercial airliners were used as missiles in the attack of 9/11—we ruled out no scenario in trying to protect the country. We had failed to connect the dots before that catastrophe, and we were not going to do it again.
After signing an armistice to end the first Gulf War in 1991, Saddam repeatedly ignored it. He tried to assassinate President George H. W. Bush. He claimed to destroy his prohibited weapons but refused to show proof—and was repeatedly caught lying. UN inspectors were kicked out of the country in 1998, unable to do their jobs as he played cat-and-mouse with them. His violations included shooting at our combat aircraft as they enforced a no-fly zone meant to protect his people from him. At one point in 2001, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was told to develop plans should Iraqi air defenses succeed in bringing down an American plane. We were in a perpetual state of limited war with the Iraqi dictator.
The United States and thirty-two coalition countries decided that it was time for the international community to act. UNSCR 1441, passed in November 2002, had threatened “serious consequences” if Iraq did not comply with its terms. Those facts—or rather facts as we knew them at the time—were the sole reason for the invasion of Iraq.
The decision to give the Iraqis a chance at a democratic future was a separate one—and driven by a different logic. Some within the administration, including Don Rumsfeld, argued that we might be better off to install another strongman once Saddam was gone. Just find a general who wasn’t implicated in his war crimes and let the Iraqis sort it out. It was a reasonable idea, but the president believed that America had done enough of that in the Middle East, with unacceptable outcomes. The freedom gap was in part to blame for terrorism and instability in the region. We knew the complexity of Iraq’s ethnic and religious mix. It was precisely the complexity that demanded democratic institutions so that people could coexist while contending with their differences peacefully. The other option—someone oppresses someone else—was no longer a formula for stability.
The closest historical parallel to this view is American policy toward Germany and Japan after World War II. The United States did not enter those wars to bring democracy—it overthrew Imperial Japan and Adolf Hitler because they were security threats. But when the regimes were defeated, the Americans avowedly focused on building democratic successor states. There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that as the war neared conclusion, Churchill was asked what he wanted to do about the vanquished Germany. “I like Germany so much that I want as many of them as possible,” he is said to have remarked. In other words, break it up and keep it weak. It was classic balance-of-power thinking.
The United States, on the other hand, empowered men like Konrad Adenauer to rebuild the western part of Germany on the basis of democratic principles. Together they championed the inclusion of the Federal Republic of Germany in a political organization of democracies—the European Union and, in a collective defense treaty, NATO, with an American guarantee. Similarly, the basic tenets of the “Peace Constitution of Japan” bear a striking resemblance to those of the American one. And, once again, the United States provided for the defense of the country so that it would not need to fully rearm. In an early version of what political scientists call the “democratic peace,” these leaders believed that democracies would not fight each other. France and Germany would never go to war again, and they believed that a democratic Japan would live in harmony with its neighbors. Let me be clear—we did not think that Iraq was Germany or Japan in terms of its readiness for democracy. But we did believe that a peaceful and democratic Iraq was better than an authoritarian alternative. That was the spirit that motivated the drive to give the Iraqis a chance at a democratic future.
An Institutional Landscape Like the Dark Side of the Moon
A few days after the statue fell, we turned to getting the country back on its feet and functioning again. We had engaged in multiple planning efforts for postwar Iraq, involving scores of U.S. government agencies. There was even a full-scale, all-agency dress rehearsal before the invasion. But the assumptions about the institutional infrastructure in Iraq were in large part wrong. The very opacity of Saddam’s dictatorship meant that we could not know the likely unknowable: How precisely did he rule the country? And what would be left of those levers when he was gone? When a totalitarian regime is decapitated, the institutional landscape is barren. Iraq’s resembled a moonscape.
We counted on institutions—like the civil service—that didn’t have firm footing. And we trusted the returning diaspora—those who had lived in exile—too much. We undervalued some groups that did have standing—the Sunni tribes; Shia religious authorities led by the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani; and the Kurds, who were competent and organized but ambivalent about a unified Iraqi state. All of these actors would play an increasing role as events unfolded. But misreading the institutional landscape early certainly cost valuable time at the beginning.
Under America’s Flag
The chaos of the first weeks led the administration to tighten the reins on the occupation of Iraq rather quickly. As Americans with a more limited history of colonization than our European allies, we found the very idea of occupation distasteful. When commanding general Tommy Franks sent a draft of the decree he would issue once Saddam was defeated, I was horrified. “It sounds like Caesar,” I told my communications director, Anna Perez. We revised it to sound more collaborative. We even asked our lawyers whether we had to call ourselves the “occupying power.” The British were not so squeamish. They insisted that legally we had no choice. And I remember my British counterpart David Manning’s warning: “You will be viewed as an occupying power anyway. The only question is will you be seen as competent.”
In fact, we had envisioned a kinder, gentler approach through the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired general Jay Garner, who had led Operation Provide Comfort to protect the Kurds in 1991. Jay was to go in with a small team, find the civil servants who could run the country once high-ranking Ba’athists were fired, and coordinate the Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA)—composed of the Kurds and returning exiled Sunni and Shia leaders—in taking control of the country. There were a few potential leaders—very few—who had survived living inside Iraq. President Bush wanted to be sure that they too were included in the IIA.
The plan never got off the ground. The security situation began to deteriorate almost immediately. Criminal gangs looted the museum and the library, destroying antiquities; the oil fields were not functioning to provide revenue; basic services like electricity were dilapidated and breaking down. An insurgent group called Fedayeen Saddam suddenly appeared, engaging in hit-and-run skirmishes throughout the country. I cornered George Tenet, the CIA director, at the president’s morning briefing. “What in blazes is Fedayeen Saddam and where did they come from?” I asked in a voice clearly signaling my alarm and displeasure. The intelligence agencies had significantly underestimated the strength of groups like this. George admitted that little was known about Fedayeen Saddam. They were clearly the dictator’s supporters, but to this day, we don’t really know much about them. In any case, despite the presence of two hundred thousand coalition troops, the Pentagon said that the security situation was too dangerous for ORHA to enter Iraq. Garner sat in Kuwait.
The military had defeated Saddam’s forces decisively, but we needed a civilian presence on the ground to get the country functioning. Almost two weeks after Saddam fell, Garner finally arrived in Baghdad and was instantly overwhelmed. His organization was too small to sort out the tasks of bringing order to the country, let alone actually govern.
I called Margaret Tutwiler, our ambassador in Morocco. We had been friends since the George H. W. Bush administration when she worked for James Baker at the State Department. She was simply capable, and that’s what we needed—someone who was capable. “Margaret,” I said, “I know it is asking a lot, but can you go and help Garner? He’s hopeless.” She confirmed what we all knew: The Garner mission was not going to work. The Pentagon, which had created ORHA, abandoned it. Rumsfeld recommended a new approach to the president: a fully empowered presidential envoy, reporting through the secretary of defense, to run the country. L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer took over as head of the new Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) on May 13. The president’s orders gave him all executive, legislative, and judicial functions in Iraq. Iraq was now controlled by a two-headed hydra: the military commander for matters of security and the CPA for civilian reconstruction.
The CPA was twice as large as ORHA, and its mandate far more sweeping. On one hand, this gave Jerry Bremer the authority to do what Garner had been unable to—bring a semblance of order. On the other hand, it meant that the Iraqi institutions, both new and old, sometimes felt stymied in finding a role in the affairs of the country. This was especially true as the CPA set up the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), comprising Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni parties. Each group brought its own strengths and considerable weaknesses to the endeavor.
The Kurds were by far the most competent and coherent group in post-Saddam Iraq. They were an ethnically distinct minority population that lived dispersed within the boundaries of the constructed states of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Turkey was about 18 percent Kurdish, Syria about 10 percent, and Iraq about 15–20 percent. The worldwide Kurdish population is about thirty-two million. As a people they had long suffered discrimination and persecution at the hands of Arabs and Turks and dreamed of creating an independent Kurdish state. They were closest to realizing that desire in Iraq, where they had existed as a state within the state since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, protected by the United States and Britain under UN mandate.
From 1991 to 2003, the Kurds used their status effectively. They built a relatively well-functioning system in the rough mountainous territory of northern Iraq. The region is oil-rich and the economy was relatively strong compared to that of the rest of the country. There was considerable corruption, but the Kurdish lands functioned efficiently. The infrastructure was far superior to much of Iraq’s, with good roads and even a fairly modern airport.
Kurdistan, as it was called, had another problem, however—the animosity between its two dominant political forces. Masoud Barzani led the KDP and Jalal Talabani the PUK. The conflict was sometimes violent since both maintained militias. And neither controlled the PKK (the Kurdish Workers’ Party), a third group that carried out terrorist attacks across the Turkish border. The tensions between the two clans grew so great that the United States finally stepped in and brokered a governing agreement in 1998. They kept their rivalry under control and even jointly commanded a security force, the peshmerga. The “pesh” were fierce fighters—male and female—who took their orders from the two in a relatively harmonious fashion, though divided loyalty was certainly evident from time to time.
When Iraq was liberated from Saddam, Barzani and Talabani were asked to join the IGC. The two men could not have been more different, and their responses to the call showed it. Jalal came down from Kurdistan to take up residence in Baghdad. You had to like this man who was as wide as he was tall. He was jovial and always joked in heavily accented but very good English. When one was invited to dinner at Jalal’s house, as I often was as secretary of state, you had to eat—and eat—and eat. Jalal for his part would dine with both hands, shoving food into his mouth with one hand and onto your plate with the other. From the very start he warmed to the role of “founding father of a new Iraq.” He was smart and effective and largely trusted by the other members of the IGC. Jalal Talabani was by far the shrewdest politician in the country and, ironically, this Kurd would become a unifying figure in Iraq.
Barzani, on the other hand, refused to live in Baghdad. On my first trip to Iraq, I therefore went to see him. When I arrived, Barzani’s aides greeted me at the helicopter. They were tough-looking men who I assume doubled as bodyguards. The Kurd was waiting for me on a red carpet with the Kurdish national flag behind him. We stood at attention while the Kurdish anthem was played. There was no sign of the flag of the united Iraq.
Barzani’s remote mountain home was at once palatial and rough-hewn. We ate a lot too, but Masoud was an active man, riding horses and herding his own farm animals. He appeared fit and looked as if he would have been right at home on America’s western frontier in the nineteenth century.
It should now be clear that the Kurdish region had good raw material for a transition. They were wildly enthusiastic about the overthrow of Saddam (who had murdered legions of their kin) and grateful to the United States for having done it. Yet their very competence made the politics of the country more complicated. The international community was united in its view that Iraq had to be a single, unified state. Anything else would have destabilized the delicate geopolitics of the region, particularly with Turkey, whose own Kurdish population also harbored ambitions for self-determination. The Kurds waxed and waned in their enthusiasm for a unified Iraq, and not just because of national aspirations. There was money at stake too. The Kurds wanted control of their own oil wealth, and so did Baghdad.
The Shia also had effective leaders and organized political parties. They were Arab, but as subjects of the Sunni-led states, they experienced deprivation and persecution. In Iraq they were about 60 percent of the population, with large concentrations of them living in the south of the country. Saddam had been especially brutal toward them, using chemical weapons to wipe out rebels near the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf in 1991. It was estimated that up to 180,000 Iraqi Shia died in the crushed rebellion. After the war, mass graves holding more than 300,000 souls were discovered in the country, the great majority of them Shia.
Not surprisingly, the Shia were also buoyed by the overthrow of the dictator. But relations were complicated with them by two factors: splits within the Shia community and the role of Iran. In post-Saddam Iraq, two secular figures vied for power: Iyad Allawi and the late Ahmad Chalabi. Both had lived in exile in London, spoke perfect English, and were partial to Savile Row suits. And though they looked like modern politicians, they played an insider’s game, rarely seeming to connect with the concerns of ordinary Iraqis. We found Allawi to be relatively reliable. We would eventually learn that Chalabi was both cunning and dishonest.
The other heavyweight in Iraqi politics was a Shia religious coalition. Its leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, wore the white robes of a cleric and an ayatollah’s black turban. He was polite and pious, did not speak much English, and maintained close ties to Tehran. Still, there was much to like about him, and he could be surprisingly sentimental. I will never forget one really difficult meeting after which he asked, “Will you do me a favor?”
A favor? I thought, not knowing what to expect.
“My thirteen-year-old granddaughter loves you. She watches you on television. Will you meet her and her mother when they come to Washington next month?”
Several weeks later, the Hakim family arrived and the granddaughter walked right up to me and said, “I want to be foreign minister too.” I remembered how her grandfather had beamed when he talked about her. Maybe he wasn’t so reactionary after all.
Hakim kept his distance from the rough-and-tumble of daily politics, delegating much of that to Adel Abdul Mahdi. He too had been in Europe as an exile but seemed to have a better feel for the politics of the street in Iraq. In many ways, he was our best interlocutor on the Shia side.
It was challenging to manage the personalities. But unresolved issues dating far back into the history of Islam made it even harder. In AD 632, when Islam split into two confessional groups in a fight over who should lead the faithful after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, the Shia were unified under a single authoritative leader—a figure whose writ was not unlike that of the Holy Father in the Catholic Church. For centuries that leader was a member of a religious council operating in Najaf, now in modern Iraq. But as Sunni leaders cracked down on Shia in the country, the council had to operate underground and could not be a source of inspiration for the people. Some of the putative leadership of the Shia shifted to Qom in modern Iran. Though Persian, the ayatollahs, the latest of whom is the Ayatollah Khamenei, sought to speak for Shia wherever they lived. This, along with Iran’s more traditional Persian geopolitical aspirations, is at the core of the Sunni concern about a rising “Shia crescent.”
When Saddam was overthrown, Najaf was reborn. The man whom Iraqi Shia saw as the rightful heir to leadership—the Ayatollah Sistani—emerged. He was a powerful presence and wielded enormous influence. But he would very rarely meet foreigners, and no American official ever saw him. He spoke through his son, who issued statements on his behalf.
While this might have been a challenge, it turned out to be a blessing—a remarkable gift. This cloistered cleric had democratic instincts far beyond those of many of his countrymen. His first edict was to declare that clerics should not serve in government. There needed to be a separation of religion and politics. We often found ourselves in the odd position of wanting this religious man to say something political.
Unfortunately, he was not the only religious figure in Iraq. Muqtada al-Sadr, a rival of Hakim, was a minor cleric who had not completed his theological studies and thus lacked religious standing. But he was a fire-breathing nationalist whose father had been murdered by Saddam. He was virulently anti-American and directed a violent militia that targeted our forces all of the time and often the security forces of his own country. Many Iraqis said that he was crazy. Maybe—but he was a power to be reckoned with in the landscape.
Sorting out the politics of the Shia was thus really difficult. One man, one vote promised to create a Shia-led Iraq. That was a red flag for Sunni Arabs—those living in the country, and those who led the powerful countries of the region.
We so wanted the Sunni states to embrace Iraq—in part as a counter to Iran’s influence. After several attempts, I finally managed to get the Iraqi foreign minister invited to my meeting with the Gulf Cooperation Council (the Arab monarchies), Egypt, and Jordan in 2006. Hoshyar Zebari, a highly regarded Kurdish leader, entered the room proudly. But after listening to harangues from his colleagues about instability in Iraq, he had had enough. “You treat us like a virus,” he said. I held my breath for what he would say next. “I’m not sure if you’re more afraid of the Shia part or the democratic part,” he said. That was brilliant, I thought to myself. But it really underscored the problem. The Sunni states felt vulnerable on both fronts, which caused them to vacillate between resignation and aggression.
To make matters worse, the Iraqi Sunnis lacked coherent leadership. Before the war, Sunnis had been 20 percent of the population, and one of them—Saddam—had held 100 percent of the power. In truth, they too had been tortured by him, persecuted and exiled by him, and subjected to his misrule. But dictators rarely rule just by fear. They have their ways—bargains that make it easier to control the population. Some Sunnis had benefited from those arrangements.
And the deteriorating security situation complicated matters further. It was sometimes difficult to tell when the Sunnis were part of the solution and when they were part of the problem. In this complex environment our military could not stem the violence. The chaotic situation on the ground robbed our political strategy of needed breathing space to mature.
The Disaffected Sunnis
The institutional landscape among Sunnis consisted of four groups: a few exiles who had lived principally in Europe; Sunni tribes who inhabited territorial enclaves, some of whom had been protected by Saddam and others who had simply been left alone; the army, which Saddam had shaped to serve him and no one else; and a few men who had run afoul of the dictator enough to be imprisoned but not enough to be killed.
When the Iraqi transitional government was formed, everyone understood the importance of Sunni representation. In the lead-up to the war, we were worried about revenge killings and were determined to protect the Sunnis as best we could to make sure that they had a place in the new Iraq.
A few Sunni exiles did play prominent roles in the occupation period. For instance, Tariq al-Hashemi, who, like several others, had lived in exile, was relatively effective. He too liked fine suits and spoke perfect English. But he had an impeccable Sunni lineage—the grandson of a former general in the Ottoman army and a nephew of the tutor of Iraqi king Ghazi. He had attended the military academy but insisted that he had never joined the Ba’ath Party. Hashemi was always cognizant of how his fellow Sunnis viewed him. He craved the approval of the tribes and feared backlash from Sunni terrorists. He had good reason for concern. His sister was gunned down in Baghdad in 2006, one day after he had stood with Shia and Kurdish leaders and called for the insurgency to be put down by force.7 Two of his brothers were killed in the same year.
The interim government also included a few Sunnis who had been imprisoned by the Ba’athist regime. The man who would become speaker of the parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, came from this background. When we met at our ambassador’s house in 2005, he flashed a smile adorned with several gold teeth. “I know who you are,” he said to me. “I’ve known who you are for a long time.” I admit that I was getting a bit uncomfortable and wondered where the conversation was going. “When we were in prison,” he continued, “we heard about the things you were saying about Saddam. During the war, we found a picture of you and hung it up on the wall. All the prisoners loved you. You liberated us.” That frankly gave me the creeps, and I’m not even sure the story was true, but I was grateful for the sentiment he was trying to express.
These men—exiles and ex-prisoners—were entrusted with representing Sunnis during the occupation and several years beyond. But they lacked deep roots in the community. It is fair to say that they were the weakest element of the institutional landscape. Yet we largely depended on them to give Sunnis a voice in the new Iraq.
Unforced Errors
The fact is that we made a number of mistakes throughout the occupation that cost us and cost the Iraqis. From the very start of the war, we simply did not have enough forces on the ground to occupy a country the size of Iraq. We defeated Saddam’s army but we couldn’t secure the country. Colin had been concerned about it and brought it to the attention of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dick Myers. Steve Hadley and I had repeatedly asked the Pentagon to plan for “rear area security,” to protect liberated land as our forces raced through the country.
The president finally raised the issue in an NSC meeting several weeks before the invasion. “Condi is worried about this,” he said, leaving the impression that he was not. After that meeting Steve Hadley came into my office. “I would resign. That was unfair.” “I know,” I said. “I’ll talk to the president, but we’ll just have to keep hammering away at the issue.” He did subsequently discuss the issue again with the secretary of defense. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he asked again. And he got the same answer—the Pentagon expressed confidence in the plan and the sufficiency of the troop totals. They were wrong. That made everything else that we did an uphill climb.
And we compounded that problem with other missteps, particularly with the Sunnis. In the fall of 2002, President Bush was trying to better understand the lay of the land in Iraq. He asked to meet with as many Iraqi nationals as possible, and on this particular day we had an Iraqi Shia academic, a businessman in exile, and a former army officer. All had escaped Saddam and were thrilled to be in the Oval Office with an American president who might finally deal with the dictator.
The former army officer had a different take on the message, though. He was a man of about fifty who fled the country in the chaos of the 1991 Gulf War. I kept wondering how he had gotten out alive—but there he was. “Mr. President,” he said, “don’t underestimate how important the army can be in helping you. Most of them hate Saddam. He tortures his own officers. If you treat them well, they will help you.” The president was deeply affected by that exchange and wanted to make sure that we took this view into account.
Our visitor that day was not the only one who advised us about the army. It made sense, of course, since it is generally not a good idea to alienate men with guns—at least until you disarm them. Moreover, lower-ranking officers could be useful. The challenge would be to distinguish those who had really been with Saddam from those who had simply had no choice but to serve him.
“Have You Seen the Order?”
Colin Powell was on the phone, somewhere between annoyed and alarmed. “Have you seen the order that Jerry sent out in Baghdad?” I said that I had not. “He disbanded the army!”
I was shuffling through papers on my desk trying to see if I had anything to that effect. “I’ll get back to you,” I said and hung up the phone.
“Steve,” I yelled to my deputy in the next office. “Do you have the order?” After some back-and-forth we learned that Colin was right. We had disbanded the army. I tried to get Jerry on the phone but couldn’t. Realizing that I hadn’t told the president, I headed down to the Oval Office. “He is going to be furious,” I told Steve as I started down the hallway. But the president was calm. “Well, that wasn’t the plan, right?” I acknowledged that and went back to my office to see what had happened.
Indeed, the plan was just the opposite of disbanding the army. It was to keep 150,000 forces instead. They were to be vetted, tried out on reconstruction-type work, and then used for security. Needless to say, that plan had been abandoned with the CPA order to disband the army.
To be fair to Jerry, the Iraqi army, like so many other institutions, seemed to have vanished into thin air by the time the order came down. It didn’t remain coherent; whole units disappeared, and in a sense the army kind of disbanded itself. Still, the assault on the men with guns backfired. Not only did we forgo their help, but we threw hundreds of thousands of armed people off the payroll and onto the streets. It was one of the biggest blunders of the post-invasion period.
Jerry was empowered to make decisions on the ground. He did so under time pressure and difficult circumstances. But a decision of that magnitude needed full NSC review. This case was emblematic of communication breakdowns between the Pentagon and the CPA and between the Pentagon and the White House. I felt that I had failed to wire the various parts together into a cohesive whole. The national security adviser has to do that on behalf of the president. After several of these “failures to communicate,” I started to talk directly with Jerry almost every day.
Don was furious, believing that I was usurping his authority and interfering in his chain of command. At one of our weekly lunches, he informed Colin and me that he was washing his hands of the whole thing. “From now on Jerry reports to the White House,” he said petulantly. Colin rolled his eyes. I tried to protest that I was just trying to get better coordination. But Don insisted on his stance. I decided that his pique was worth it if we could avoid screwups like this.
The mistake of disbanding the army was exacerbated by the broader policy of de-Ba’athification. This was an extremely sensitive issue because it threatened so many ordinary Iraqis. People often joined the Ba’ath Party because it was the only way to keep a job or get a promotion. There were thousands of teachers, university professors, civil servants, and scientists, among others, in this category. I understood this from studying the Soviet Union. Membership in a totalitarian party was often the way to get ahead—not a sign of ideological purity. The State Department and the intelligence agencies did careful analysis, suggesting the appropriate level at which people might be trusted. Again, there was room to review individuals on a case-by-case basis.
The question was how to carry out the process. Jerry believed—rightly, in my view—that this sensitive matter had to be handled by Iraqis themselves. It was entrusted to Ahmad Chalabi, but he was not just any Iraqi. He turned out to be a determined and opportunistic politician. Chalabi used the committee to carry out a vendetta against the Sunnis, giving him cachet and enhancing his popularity among the Shia. Or at least that is how he saw it.
In the end, the Iraqis had to undo much of the work that the committee had done. In June 2004, about a year after de-Ba’athification began, Bremer dissolved the commission and Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi allowed thousands of vetted Ba’athists to return to the government and military. But the damage had been done. The Sunni population felt disenfranchised and collectively punished for Saddam’s crimes. It was really difficult to keep them engaged in the effort to build a new Iraq.
The Tribes
Nor did we work effectively with the tribes early on. Iraq’s tribes were not tribes in the sense of Kikuyu in Kenya, with different languages and ethnic backgrounds. Rather, they were highly structured familial groupings—clans—that kept order and managed the affairs of territorial enclaves throughout the country. The most powerful of these were the tribes of al-Anbar province. There were about 150 tribes in all.
As with the army, we knew that the tribes were important to the future of Iraq. Our initial idea was to supplement Jay Garner’s mission with tribal engagement, led by Zalmay Khalilzad. Zal had been born in Afghanistan and had come to the United States to get his PhD. He later became a citizen and taught at Columbia. He had been our ambassador to Afghanistan and was very successful there. But he knew Iraq too. He first visited Baghdad while serving in the Reagan State Department, and he was director of policy planning at the Pentagon during the Gulf War and its aftermath. Zal was well liked among people of the region. I don’t believe that cultural affinity is a result of ethnic heritage—and Zal was, after all, an Afghan. But there was something about Zal—he was at home with leaders in Baghdad and they were at home with him. I once asked him about it. “Well, you have to sit and drink tea—not hurry, take time,” he said. “That’s as true in Baghdad as in Kabul.”
We wanted Zal to use that affinity to bring the various factions into Iraq’s postwar governance. In December 2002, he took the lead in our efforts to work with the Iraqi opposition, attending several meetings abroad including an opposition conference in Iraqi Kurdistan in February 2003. As the war began, he was in Turkey, working to identify external and internal Iraqi leaders who could form a provisional government, and he was ready to enter the country as soon as the security situation permitted.
When Jerry Bremer was appointed, I went to the president and told him that we should go ahead with Zal’s mission. He was reluctant, having just entrusted Jerry with enormous authority in Iraq. “Ask Jerry,” he said. “It would have to be okay with him.” I did. Jerry demurred, saying that he wanted to engage the tribes himself. Perhaps there could be a role for Zal later.
We will never know whether the different approach would have worked. I don’t think that Jerry was incapable of working with the tribes. But he was so busy in Baghdad. And these were not people you summoned to the capital. You had to have tea with them where they lived.
That was not the only problem in engaging the tribes, though. The insurgency in Sunni provinces that was fueled by a coalition of Saddam’s officers and disbanded army personnel found many tribal allies who also feared exclusion. All of this was exacerbated by the rise of Sunni terrorists who took the name of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Led by the clever and diabolic Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they carried out a violent campaign in the Sunni provinces. They found ways to accommodate the tribes when possible and to coerce and compel their cooperation when necessary.
We saw this most clearly in Fallujah, where our conventional military tactics did little to stem the tide against any of these forces. As it became obvious that we could not stop the violence, the tribes became even more tolerant of the terrorists. These rough, secular men did not have much in common with Zarqawi’s religious zealots—but they were not going to risk confrontation when we could not protect them.
Further, our military tactics were not defeating the terrorists, but we were angering the population. Raids with heavy military equipment destroyed too many houses and killed too many tribesmen. Saddam had, we learned, never made that mistake. An Arab leader asked me one day, “Why did you try to pacify Fallujah? Saddam never tried to pacify Fallujah. He knew the tribes were smugglers and gunrunners. He just said, ‘You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone.’ That is what you should have done.” As I said, even dictators have their ways of ruling—that was one that had not occurred to us.
And sometimes our efforts were undermined not in Washington but by incidents in the field. None was more damaging in that regard than Abu Ghraib.
Don was contrite as he briefed the president on the horrific story that was unfolding at the Iraqi prison. “I have seen the photographs,” he said, “and they are awful.” American soldiers had been involved in abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners and the full, awful story was about to hit the news. The president said that we would admit wrongdoing and punish those responsible. “I just don’t want to sully the reputation and honor of all of our people,” he said sadly. Don asked if he could speak to the president alone. When I came back into the room, the president told me that Don had offered to resign. “I didn’t accept it,” he said. It was the right call because what had happened at Abu Ghraib was not Don’s fault. But we never recovered fully from the fallout. The images lasted and reinforced Sunni suspicion and distrust of the United States.
A Glimmer of Hope
Despite the difficulties and missteps, we made progress on the political front. Jerry Bremer helped the many Iraqi factions to agree on a set of laws for ruling the country. The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) formed the basis for democratic governance and laid out the principles that would later be enshrined in the constitution. The TAL guaranteed fundamental political rights for Iraqi citizens, including freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, and outlined the process by which power would be transferred to a three-branch transitional government, which would then be responsible for drafting a permanent constitution for approval by referendum.
I was at a seder at the home of the Israeli ambassador, Danny Ayalon, when I got a call from the Situation Room. Jerry Bremer was on the phone. “We got it,” he said. “Everyone has signed off and there will be a ceremony on Friday morning after prayers. The leaders will all be there with their wives and children. Some of them with several of their wives,” he joked.
I felt a deep surge of emotion. There weren’t many times in 2003 when things had gone right in Iraq. This was one of them. I congratulated Jerry, who had taken so many slings and arrows. Then I called the president even though it was pretty late. He too was kind of emotional. “It is their first baby step,” he said. I silently filled in the rest of the sentence—toward democracy.
On Friday morning, I waited for television coverage of the ceremony, but something was wrong—the start of the event was well overdue. Just as I was about to call him, Jerry called me. “What’s going on?” I asked before he could say anything. “Well,” he said, “the Shia aren’t here. The children’s choir has already performed all of the songs they know—twice.” It turned out that there had been a last-minute disagreement about some of the language. Everyone returned the following Monday morning; the children’s choir sang; and the TAL went into effect.
Still, the successful experiment in governance led the Iraqis to desire more: They wanted sovereignty. We had long discussions in Washington about whether they were ready. The security forces were in their infancy and completely dependent on coalition forces to keep a semblance of peace. The terrorists practically owned Anbar, and Sadr’s forces were a constant threat to destabilize the south of the country. Efforts to rebuild the infrastructure were slow, often held hostage to the security situation. The unreliable electrical grid had become a focal point for our reconstruction efforts and a source of tension with the population. This was due to another unpleasant surprise about how Saddam had run the country. Most of the generating power had gone to Baghdad, leaving the rest of the country with long periods without service, or with partial service. When the CPA tried to even out distribution, we learned that there was not remotely enough power to light the whole country. Baghdad residents lost their privileged position and complained loudly about the deterioration of their services.
In other words, the Iraqis were not really ready to run their own affairs. But their leaders believed that ending the occupation could help stabilize the country. We believed that they would not tolerate the occupation much longer. Together, we set in motion a plan to make Iraq sovereign on July 1, 2004—a little more than sixteen months after the war had begun.
The blueprint from Jerry Bremer and the CPA entailed a handoff to an interim government that would write a new constitution. There would then be elections for a permanent government based on the new document. This seven-point plan appeared in the Washington Post on September 8, 2003. The first three steps had already been taken: The Iraqi Governing Council had been established earlier in the summer; it had formed a committee to determine how to draft a new constitution; and it had appointed Iraqis to head all twenty-five public ministries. The next three steps were still to come: drafting a new constitution, ratifying it by popular vote, and electing a new permanent government. The final step, to be taken after the election, was to disband the coalition authority.
Jerry’s plan broke in the press before we could fully debate it in Washington. But frankly, it didn’t seem like a bad road map for the way ahead. At least to us.
Ayatollah Sistani did not agree. He issued a blistering statement saying that it was unthinkable to have the Iraqi constitution written by people who had not been democratically elected. There would have to be elections first, and then the drafting of the founding document.
The president called the National Security Council together to talk about the situation. One by one everyone extolled the virtues of writing the constitution before the elections. I no longer remember why except it seemed to make sense to have electoral rules before you had an election. The president interrupted: “How did I get on the wrong side of people wanting to elect their leaders?” he asked. That quieted the debate. The Ayatollah Sistani had an important ally—the president of the United States. The Iraqis would have their elections and then write their constitution.
“Iraq Is Sovereign”
On June 28, I was attending a NATO meeting in Istanbul with the president. Only a few Americans, Brits, and Iraqis knew that Iraq was about to become sovereign. The official date of the handover was to be July 1, but we had secretly moved it up to wrong-foot terrorists who might want to launch an attack. I was called out of the chamber and told that Jerry Bremer was on the phone. He had handed the letter abolishing the occupation to Allawi, who was president of the IGC. I returned to the meeting and gave President Bush a note. “Iraq is sovereign. The note was passed from Bremer at 10:26 Iraqi time,” it said. He wrote on the bottom of it, “Let freedom reign!” and handed it to British prime minister Tony Blair. The men were sitting next to each other simply by virtue of alphabetical order. They shook hands firmly and turned back to the affairs of NATO.
Elections to a National Assembly were held six months later. The United Nations did splendid work with the Iraqis to help them through the process. The country seemed to have a sense of common purpose, at least for a brief time. In January 2005, the front pages of newspapers and television screens throughout Iraq, the Middle East, and the world showed proud Iraqis voting for the first time. The finger dipped into purple ink used to certify that one had voted became an instant symbol of the new democracy. People turned out in significant numbers—58 percent overall, though Sunnis less so. The security situation made voting difficult and terrorist threats did keep some people away. We worried too that there were some Sunnis who were signaling that this was not their election.
And the voting broke down roughly—though not completely—along sectarian lines, both geographically and in terms of vote totals. This was, I suppose, to be expected in a first election. The main Shia coalition dominated in the south and came in first overall, with 47 percent of the vote; the Kurdish coalition dominated in the north and came in second with more than 25 percent of the total; and a smattering of smaller parties, representing secular and Sunni factions, took the remainder.
The new transitional leadership of Iraq reflected the rough makeup of the country: Talabani the jovial Kurd became president. His vice presidents were al-Mahdi and Hashemi, a Shia and a Sunni, and the speaker of the parliament was a Sunni, the former prisoner Mashhadani. By virtue of their numbers, the Shia parties would select the new prime minister. The competition was fierce and in the end a consensus candidate, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, won—more because he was not hated than because he was admired. To be fair, everyone thought he was honest.
He was also really odd. In my first meeting with him, he took me on a verbal tour of his encyclopedic—and quite wrong—knowledge of American history. Mixing up presidents along the way—Abraham Lincoln was apparently a Founding Father—he was trying to make the point that democracy required selflessness. I sensed that he lacked focus and a program for governing. But his job was to do one thing and one thing only: shepherd the writing of the constitution and the referendum afterward to get it approved.
He and the other leaders managed to do that, but not without considerable difficulty. With the help of constitutional experts assembled by the UN, the Iraqis produced a document. The initial draft bore the mark of compromises between Islamic law and liberal tenets. For instance, one provision stated that no law could contradict Islamic principles; another that Iraq’s Supreme Court would include a number of experts on sharia law. This sent Sunni Arabs into the streets to demonstrate against the draft. Moderate Sunni parties were mollified when the transitional assembly agreed to consider changes once a general election was held.
The document created the structure of the new government as a mixed system with a president who was more than ceremonial but without a well-defined portfolio. The parliament was to be bicameral, with a quarter of the seats in the lower house held for women. The prime minister would hold most of the authority, including command of the armed forces, but would be subject to recall by a majority vote in parliament. Like the TAL, the constitution enumerated the rights of citizens and limited the power of the government. Freedom of the press, assembly, and religious conscience were enshrined. The independence of the judiciary was to be respected.
And the country was established as a unified and federal Iraq with broad powers flowing to the provinces. Many of the laws that would make this system function were to be drafted later by the parliament. A national army was created and was to take its members from all parts of the country. The police were to be recruited locally. The peshmerga were grandfathered in.
Private property rights were enshrined too and a budget law (essentially an appropriations bill) had to be passed each year. The parliament was charged with writing and passing a law on sharing oil revenue. This was a litmus test for just how much power would reside in the provinces. For the Kurds in particular, this was the sine qua non for participation in a federal and unified Iraq.
The referendum passed in October 2005 with support from 78 percent of voters. The provinces dominated by Kurds and Shia—twelve of the sixteen—voted overwhelmingly in favor. The Ayatollah Sistani had issued a statement of support: “His highness favors the participation of citizens in the referendum and their voting ‘yes’ for the constitution, despite the failure to eliminate some of its weaknesses.” Americans tend to be made nervous by the involvement of religious figures. But I was really happy to see the statement, even if the ayatollah’s followers considered it a fatwa and therefore compulsory.
Sunni support was far weaker. A veto provision designed to protect minority interests meant the constitution would fail if two-thirds of voters in any three provinces voted against it. “No” votes exceeded two-thirds in two Sunni provinces, with 82 percent voting against in Salaheddin and 97 percent in Anbar. Fortunately, Nineveh, a mixed Kurdish and Sunni Arab province, voted 56 percent “no”—below the two-thirds threshold. The referendum passed and the constitution was adopted. There was obviously a lot of work to do with the Sunni Arabs.
I was visiting Tony Blair at Chequers (the prime minister’s equivalent of Camp David) the morning after the voting. We sat in his lovely garden eating a mostly British breakfast (I skipped the kippers), waiting in suspense until the outcome was assured. When word came that the referendum had indeed passed all the requisite tests, we both felt that Iraq had turned a corner. In some sense it had. The structure that Iraqis affirmed is the one that has largely held since 2005.
National elections for a permanent government were held six weeks later, in December 2005. This time, Sunni leaders implored their constituents to participate in the process.
“I’m Tired of Doing Their Dirty Work”
In the early days, the most common response when Iraqi leaders fell out of favor with one another was to call the American ambassador—or if the situation was really intolerable, the American secretary of state. I felt at times as if I were keeping the peace among teenagers hurling insults at one another and periodically threatening to quit. In part, they had trouble telling each other the truth face-to-face: all smiles when they were together and ripping each other apart behind each other’s backs.
This behavior reached its height when, after the 2006 national election, Jaafari’s party nominated him to be prime minister. The process of forming a government had dragged on and on. Iraqis were losing patience with their new leaders and the levels of violence were not abating, though there had been some hope that they might after the elections. In February, the country experienced a devastating attack—Sunni terrorists bombed the Golden Mosque of Samarra, one of the holiest shrines of the Shia. To their credit, leaders from all confessional groups condemned the attack, and some traveled to the shrine in a show of solidarity. It was one of those moments when the Iraqis seemed to be maturing and understanding the demands of leadership.
But the renewed sense of purpose didn’t help them break the logjam on government formation. Zal explained that no one really wanted Jaafari to be prime minister.
“Then why did they nominate him?” I asked.
“Well, no one else has the votes either, so they just left it with the status quo. But he’ll never get the support of the parliament,” he added.
“Have you told him that?”
“About a thousand times,” he said.
So Prime Minister Blair and President Bush decided to send Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and me to tell Jaafari to step down. I told the president that I didn’t like having to do the Iraqis’ dirty work. But Jack and I boarded a plane for Baghdad and upon landing went directly to see Jaafari. We sat down and he immediately launched into a long monologue on his plans as Iraq’s first freely elected prime minister.
Jack tried, politician to politician, to explain that it was unlikely he would actually be able to take up the post. “Sometimes it’s time to step down and do the best thing for the country,” he said. Jaafari was having no part of it, noting correctly that the democratic process had produced him. “Who am I to step aside when my fellow citizens want me to serve?” he asked plaintively.
We weren’t getting anywhere, and thirty minutes or so into the conversation, I decided to try a different tack. “You aren’t going to be prime minister,” I blurted out. “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 was a bit shocked, I think, by my tone. As the translation rolled forward, Jaafari looked a bit hurt. But he kept insisting that he would be prime minister.
We then went to see other Iraqi leaders. “Did you convince him?” they asked. Can’t you people see that democracy is hard work? Sometimes you have to do unpleasant things, I thought to myself. We shuttled back to Jaafari and delivered the message again. This time there was no one in the room except the three of us and an interpreter. He finally seemed to get it. After our trip he began to suggest publicly that he might withdraw, and then, three weeks later, he did. The Iraqis took it from there and resumed their search for a new prime minister.
Zal called a few days after Jaafari stepped down to say that the process was still dragging on. “They just can’t agree. It looks like al-Mahdi might win, but it will be close.” That was music to my ears because we all liked the affable and competent man—even if he was essentially Hakim’s lieutenant.
A few hours later Zal called to say that Mahdi had lost by one vote. “Great. So what now?” I asked in exasperation.
“Some people are talking about Nouri al-Maliki,” he responded.
“Who?” I asked.
Zal laughed. “We don’t know much about him, but he might be the last man standing.”
Maliki was a compromise candidate and came not from one of the major parties but from Dawa, a group that had been forced to operate in a secretive, cell-like fashion during Saddam’s reign. Maliki had fled the country in Saddam’s day, seeking refuge first in Tehran and then in Damascus. We were told that he hated the Iranians. That, of course, endeared us to him. He turned out to be a good fit for the country at that moment.
I traveled to Baghdad with Don Rumsfeld to meet the new prime minister. We both liked him, principally because he seemed to know what he wanted to do. Iraq was descending into chaos after the bombing of the Golden Mosque. Shia militias were engaging in revenge killings against Sunnis—and Sunnis were returning the favor. The country had been deprived of leadership during the long process of government formation. It was a relief to finally have a prime minister.
Later that evening, Maliki and I met alone in Zal’s living room in Baghdad. As he entered, he impressed me as so different from many of those who had returned from exile. For one thing, he was wearing a really bad brown suit. No designer suits for this man, I thought. I don’t know why, but I found that reassuring.
Maliki spoke almost no English, but he was animated in conversation. He talked about gaining the confidence of all groups. We talked about the problems with the police, who were overwhelmingly Shia and were often complicit in violence against the Sunnis. I told the prime minister that I knew what it was like to be at the mercy of police whom you did not trust. Telling him about growing up in Birmingham, I recalled what it was like to live in a neighborhood when Bull Connor’s henchmen came through. “Seeing the police in your neighborhood if you were black was not a reassuring sight,” I said. Maliki didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t even want to see some of them in my neighborhood,” he said, chuckling. Then he turned serious. “A lot of them are just thugs.”
Nouri al-Maliki served as Iraq’s prime minister for eight years—a remarkable run in the rough-and-tumble of Iraqi politics. The members of the ruling group that included Talabani, Hashemi, and Mahdi (a surrogate for Hakim) disliked Maliki and tried on more than one occasion to get rid of him. Of course, they wanted us to do it for them. Our response was that they had elected him—now they would have to work together.
Most of the focus was on trying to pass a budget and an oil law; build security forces; purge the police of sectarian elements; and deliver essential services like electricity to the population. The U.S. Congress even insisted on a set of benchmarks for governing in exchange for the substantial assistance that Iraq was receiving. The Iraqis resented the notion of being graded on their performance, a point we tried to make to the Congress. But we dutifully reported on how Baghdad was doing. There seemed to be little recognition of how hard it was to make new institutions actually work. To their credit, the Iraqis were trying to use their democratic processes—passing legislation rather than ruling by decree. In such a divided country, this was a very hard task indeed.
“Pretty Soon You Will All Be Swinging from Lampposts”
The governance problem was exacerbated by the horrible security situation. Revenge killings were occurring almost daily as sectarian violence worsened considerably throughout 2006. It was a period of nearly full-scale civil war as neighborhoods and communities were being cleansed on a sectarian basis. Visiting Baghdad again late in 2006, I asked to meet with Sunni leaders—including some tribesmen—and then separately with Shia.
Before I could say a word, the Sunnis handed me grotesque pictures of children with severed heads and limbs. I think it was meant to shock me, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time I had seen photographic evidence of atrocities. “Let me tell you something,” I said to them. “We have a saying in the United States. We can hang separately or we can hang together.” I paused and let the interpreter say the phrase a couple of times. “Do they understand?” I asked.
He nodded. “Well, you can stick together or the next time I come you’ll all be swinging from lampposts.”
“Did they get that?” I asked.
“You bet,” he answered.
About an hour later, the next group made the same photographic presentation—but this time the victims were Shia. I wanted to make the point that turning on each other was not the answer. Either they had to pull together to solve their problems or they would be devoured by the chaos.
The morning after returning to Washington, I went to see the president and told him about all that had happened. “I’m not sure they are going to make it,” I said. He could see that I was pretty despondent and really tired. “Well, what should we do?” he asked. Throughout my time with him, I had tried not to dump a problem in his lap with no answer. But this time I had nothing to say. “Let me go and think about it, sir.” It was the low point for me—professionally and personally.
Another Chance to Govern: The Violence Begins to Subside
Late in 2006, intelligence reports continued to be bleak, yet we now know that things were starting to turn slowly in favor of a more stable Iraq. John Taylor, a colleague from Stanford who had been undersecretary of the Treasury in the first term, called me one morning. “My son is serving in Anbar and he has sent a note that I think you ought to see,” he said. John sent a copy of the e-mail to my executive assistant, who passed it on to me. It was a revelation. The young Marine talked about how cooperation with the tribes was improving. Our soldiers were being treated well by the tribesmen and their families, he reported. The insurgents were losing ground.
Indeed, a few months earlier, I had received news on June 7 that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed in a U.S. airstrike. He had been the mastermind of al-Qaeda in Iraq and had orchestrated the February bombing of the Golden Mosque. He hoped to plunge the country into civil war, and he had succeeded. I have reflected on how I became hardened enough to celebrate the demise of another human being with absolutely no remorse. Today, a gruesome souvenir occupies a treasured space on my bookcase. The unit that killed Zarqawi gave me a stone from the house where he met his demise. The gray-and-black piece of slab has jagged edges—clearly the result of an explosion. It says simply AMZ: 6-7-2006.
And on the ground in Anbar, just as John’s son had predicted, we began to get reports of offers from the tribes to cooperate with us. Apparently, Zarqawi’s fighters were very bad guests—compelling cooperation through brutal tactics, delivering the severed heads of children to their parents, and marrying their daughters off to al-Qaeda fighters. Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was even more demanding and escalated these practices. The sheikhs had eventually had enough. They might not have liked us, but we were, at least for the time being, the lesser of two evils.
In time, though, the cooperation would become real and deeper. First, we finally created a mechanism for tribal engagement that worked. We dispatched teams of diplomats, aid workers, and security experts to live among the tribes and help them in matters of governance and reconstruction. These Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) gave us a structure for real engagement in the Sunni heartland.8 They didn’t have to come to Baghdad—we went to them.
On one occasion, an American diplomat, Jason P. Hyland, welcomed me to the PRT in Mosul. It was a fine example of what we were trying to do. In this case, Hyland had helped the Iraqis to form a town council made up of elected officials who met to resolve the city’s problems. The job was made difficult by its ethnic and sectarian mix. It was a majority Sunni Arab city with significant populations of Kurds and other minorities. After greeting the participants I said, “I’m here to listen and to help in any way that I can. I’ll report your views directly to the president.” Much to my amazement, the meeting wasn’t at all about what the United States could do. The Sunni sheikh, his deputy, and the ten or so members of the council were much more engaged in debating each other. That was a good sign. But you could see that they were struggling to be civil. The chairman in particular was trying to restrain himself as he listened to the deputy go on and on about Kurdish rights. But he did restrain himself. In fact, he asked each member of the council to speak, telling me that everyone had a right to an opinion. I’m not sure he really believed it—and I did wonder if that was his practice when I wasn’t in the room. Hyland assured me that it was always the case. They weren’t being civil just for show.
The situation was improving too, because the tribes organized to work with us to expel al-Qaeda from al-Anbar province. They were fierce fighters and with training and American airpower turned out to be a formidable force.
Still, the tide was not turning quickly enough and levels of violence remained unacceptably high. The big problem was in the central part of the country, where the population was a mix of Sunni and Shia. The military used to say that 80 percent of sectarian violence in Iraq occurred within thirty miles of Baghdad. The south of the country was relatively free of that kind of violence because it was almost all Shia, but it was nevertheless extremely dangerous for our soldiers. Tehran was helping radical Shia militias—including those of Muqtada al-Sadr—to kill our troops. Too many Americans were dying. Too many Iraqis were dying.
Each morning I opened the Washington Post to “Faces of the Fallen.” The Post had begun the series in 2003 to memorialize Americans killed in the war. I made myself look at every one of the photos—a harsh reminder of the costs of the war. All of our top national security officials met with Gold Star families and visited Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital.
I tried to visit wounded soldiers at least a few times each year. On Good Friday, I would go to noon services and then in the afternoon go to one of the hospitals. During one visit, the doctor accompanying me asked if I would visit a particular patient’s mother who wanted to meet me. “Of course,” I said. He told me that it would be rough going. The young man—an African American in his midtwenties—had sustained a brain injury and cried out uncontrollably. “Be prepared,” the doctor said. I opened the door and entered the room. His mom came over. All that I could say was, “I’m so sorry for your sacrifice and I’m praying for your family.” She thanked me for coming and asked if we could take a picture. “He’ll be all right,” she said. I knew that he probably wouldn’t be. At times like that, no goal, no matter how worthy, seemed worth the sacrifice. But I had to hope—and still do—that one day a stable, secure, and democratic Iraq would honor soldiers like that young man.
The Iraqis were taking huge losses fighting the insurgency too. Sitting in my office one day, Steve Hadley said something really profound. “The Iraqis have to win their freedom,” he said. “We can’t do it for them.” By 2006, the Iraqis were doing just that—with their own blood, not just that of Americans. They had a very good defense minister who was making progress in training the army, particularly the special forces. But they were overmatched and we didn’t have the strategy or the numbers to help them.
Pete Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked to see me one afternoon. He was a Marine—the first to be chairman. Pete was a soldier, not a Washington bureaucrat. “I’ve been thinking,” he began. “If the number of trained Iraqi troops is increasing and we’re making progress—why is the security situation getting worse?” Pete said that he had quietly (meaning without Don’s permission) asked a group of colonels to take a fresh look at our strategy in Iraq. I wanted to jump up and hug him.
For three years, I had listened to the Pentagon brief the president, using largely useless metrics, like ammunition dumps destroyed and a version of a “body count”—how many terrorists had been killed. I kept thinking back to Vietnam where metrics like these had given Lyndon Johnson a false sense that the United States was winning the war.
And I had listened with growing concern and anger as the State Department was blamed for not finding a political solution. In one session, the U.S. commander in Iraq, George Casey, asked for more civilian personnel. “The State Department needs to bring me as many civilians as possible,” he said to the president.
I don’t know why, but I snapped. “General, when you can protect them, I’ll send them,” I barked. The room fell silent.
Later, after the meeting, Steve Hadley called me and asked me to talk to George. “You embarrassed him in front of the president,” he said.
“Yes, I know. I will call him because he’s a good man. But I meant what I said, Steve. And I won’t take it back.”
We were all coming to terms with our failing strategy. The security situation, the Pentagon would say, would improve when the political situation improved. Steve put it best. “Sometimes a security problem is just a security problem,” he told the president.
All In
In November 2006, President Bush decided that it was time to change direction. He asked Don Rumsfeld to step down as secretary and brought Bob Gates to head the Pentagon. George Casey returned to Washington, and David Petraeus deployed to Baghdad to head the military effort. Though John Negroponte and Zal had been excellent ambassadors, we decided to bring in fresh legs in Baghdad. Ryan Crocker, one of the best officers in the Foreign Service and our ambassador to Pakistan—one of the toughest posts in the world—headed to Iraq.
But change in personnel was not enough—we needed a change in strategy too. The generals who had fought in Iraq after Saddam was overthrown—Petraeus, Pete Chiarelli, Ray Odierno—returned to Washington in 2004 with a chance to reassess what they had done. The military is very good at exercises in “lessons learned.” These generals and Pete Pace’s group of colonels, which included H. R. McMaster, developed a new approach. In order to help with the Iraqis, you had to live with them, train with them, and fight with them. It was dangerous work and it took many more people than we had on the ground. Together with aid workers and diplomats deployed in the PRTs, American soldiers went right into the heart of the fight.
The president’s new policy became known as “the surge.” It was a gut-wrenching decision for him—and frankly for all who advised him. I was really skeptical at the start, believing that we might achieve little and yet lose more American lives. When the NSC met on December 8, 2006, to consider the policy, the president and I argued publicly in an NSC meeting—the first time we had ever done so.
“Mr. President, if you send more troops in and don’t change what we are doing, we will just have more people killed. And if the Iraqis keep up their sectarian ways, nothing will work.”
“So what’s your plan, Condi?” the president asked. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?”
“No, Mr. President,” I said. “We just can’t win by putting our forces in the middle of their blood feud. If they want to have a civil war, we’re going to have to let them.”
I was furious. But he was the president and I wasn’t going to argue further with others in the room. After the meeting, I followed him into the Oval Office. “You know I’ve been all in. No one has supported this war and worked harder than I have,” I said—the how dare you unsaid but clearly meant.
“I know,” he said quietly. I felt so awful at that moment. This war was “his” war, and he was not prepared as president to lose it and repeat America’s tragic retreat after Vietnam. I started to see that he believed surging U.S. forces was his best chance to avoid Johnson’s fate.
The personnel changes that the president had made reassured me that we might succeed. Bob Gates and I were friends. We had gone through the extraordinary events of the end of the Cold War together while serving on George H. W. Bush’s NSC. There were few people I trusted more. And David Petraeus was one of the best minds in the American military. We had dinner together one night at the Watergate. “I tried to have this conversation back in 2003 when you were national security adviser,” he said. I didn’t understand what he meant. “Don Rumsfeld canceled the meeting,” he explained. He went on to talk about how much we needed close cooperation between civilians and the military if we were to succeed.
And I had done one other thing: I stepped outside of channels and called General Ray Odierno, who was now commanding our forces in Anbar. Ray, a giant of a man with a shaved head and a tough persona, had been my Joint Chiefs liaison in my first two years as secretary. He had helped me develop the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
“Ray,” I said, “you and I are not having this conversation. But tell me. Will the surge do as advertised?”
“It is our best chance. And I think it will work,” he answered. That was enough for me.
At the very end of 2006, the national security team was at the president’s Crawford ranch for a series of meetings to review Iraq. A couple of hours before dinner, I saw the president standing at the fishing pond near the end of the property. The sun was setting on an unusually warm day, and at first I thought, I should just leave him alone. But something told me to go ahead and join him. He was looking out over the plains and motioned for me to come on down. “Can you support me on this?” He didn’t need to fill in the antecedent. “I can,” I said. “But you know that this is our last card.”
The president had done his homework on whether the Iraqis were really prepared to win their own peace. This time there could be no excuses—no blaming America for every shortcoming, and no blaming each other. Before he made the decision to surge forces, the president met with Maliki in Amman, Jordan, in November 2006. The Iraqi prime minister was well prepared. He had a military plan of action—a fairly sophisticated briefing—that he handed over to the president. The problem was that Maliki wanted to execute the plan himself, which is not a bad thing in its own right, but our commanders did not think the Iraqi military would be ready for such an operation for at least another year. President Bush knew the surge could not wait. He met privately with Maliki, and told him, “Let me lend you some of my forces.” We were all in.
Histories will be written for years to come about the surge and its success. Anbar was taken back from al-Qaeda, the black flag of the terrorists torn down by local tribesmen as they chased them from town after town. Most important, sectarian violence in and around Baghdad and in the center of the country declined dramatically and tailed off over time. Al-Qaeda in Iraq continued its attacks but at a level that did not threaten the government. And in the south of the country, with more American forces on the ground, the Iranians faced a tougher task.
We had told the Iranians that we knew they were providing the weapons and the training that were killing our soldiers. The Russians carried the message for us. “We won’t cross the border, but if we find your people in Iraq, we will capture or kill them.” In a stroke of good fortune, we caught the deputy commander of the Quds force inside Iraqi territory. He was taken to Irbil and questioned. We told the Iranians that he was “singing like a bird” about everything they were doing and exposing their operations. They were less active after that.
Maliki proved to be an able commander in chief during this period. At one point, in March 2008, he ordered Iraqi security forces to take back the refinery in Basra from Iranian-backed Shia militias. American generals objected, telling him that his forces were not ready. Maliki launched the operation anyway. As we sat in the Situation Room at the White House, every one of us proclaimed the stupidity of the prime minister—everyone except President Bush. “He is showing that he is in charge. It is an important message to his people,” he said.
The president, a politician himself, understood what Maliki was trying to do. The Iraqi prime minister entered the liberated area on the back of an Iraqi tank. He was, for the moment, a symbol for his people—of what Iraq could achieve.
The improving security situation gave the Iraqis some breathing room to take on the other tasks of governing. Here the picture was decidedly mixed—but not without some successes.
The parliament’s two big tasks—pass a budget and pass an oil law—were intertwined. And both were proxies for the limits of federalism. The relationship was this: The budget had to be based on revenue, mostly from oil. But the formula for sharing oil revenue between the Kurdish region and Baghdad was a test for the political arrangements between them.
The Iraqis were caught in an endless loop—until they could sort out revenue projections, they couldn’t pass a budget. That slowed the allocation of funds to important tasks like paying the army or letting contracts for building electricity plants. Sunni areas, largely without oil production capability, had also been promised funding for various projects.
One project, the building of a new military academy, became symbolic of the political tensions between Baghdad and its regions. On one of President Bush’s final trips to Iraq, he met with Iraqi leaders and the Sunni tribesmen who had successfully expelled al-Qaeda from Anbar. The tribesmen were a tough lot, unshaven, with rough, dark skin. I remember thinking back to the Arab diplomat’s advice. Why did we try to fight this bunch back in 2003? It was surely better to have them on our side. And now they were.
Maliki seemed more uncomfortable with these men than the Americans did. He didn’t take the center seat saved for him, but a corner chair at the end of the table. His body language was just terrible. He was almost in the fetal position. He’s just not a natural politician, I thought.
On the other hand, Jalal Talabani—a terrific politician—was in his element. “The brave sons of Anbar,” he intoned, “have played an essential role in saving Iraq. You shall have your military academy.” I remember thinking that Jalal would have been great in American pork-barrel politics. Unfortunately, the funding for the academy was not forthcoming for several more years.
The Iraqis did find other ways to appease the Sunnis, though. In 2008, large numbers of former Ba’athists were allowed back into their jobs and thousands of prisoners were granted amnesty. The country finally passed the “Law of the Supreme Commission for Accountability and Justice,” which tried to give a modicum of protection to innocent Sunnis while acknowledging the crimes of the Ba’ath Party.
Still, Iraqi leaders continued to struggle with all of the major issues of governance, and admittedly it was frustrating. Our Congress was brutal in its assessment of their incompetence. There seemed to be little sympathy for how hard it is to make democratic institutions—especially new ones—work. On one occasion, when testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I almost lost it. As one senator droned on and on about how the Iraqis still hadn’t passed a budget, it took all the self-control I could muster not to retort, And neither have you. The legislature of the mature American democracy had failed to pass an actual budget in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The Iraqis finally did so in 2008 with a budget law authorizing $48 billion in expenditures. They finessed the oil revenue question, with the Kurds agreeing to a budget formula in lieu of an oil law.
A hydrocarbon law was indeed drafted in 2007. According to the constitution, “Oil and gas are owned by all the people of Iraq,” but it does not say what the autonomous regions are and are not allowed to do. In the absence of firm rules, the Kurds have passed their own regional law and attracted considerable foreign investment, despite the jurisdictional uncertainties. The Kurdish deal terms are significantly more oriented toward the free market and thus more favorable to business.
Shia parties sometimes support the Kurds since they want to maintain some flexibility for the south—also an oil-producing region. Obviously, the big loser would be the central government and particularly the Sunni region, which has virtually no oil production.
In my class on political risk at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, we give the students a hypothetical case: whether to invest in an oil field in Kurdistan even though Baghdad objects. About 70 percent of the time, these future business leaders take the chance. That’s the sentiment the Kurds are counting on, and so far it has served them well.
The Iraqis have made some progress on other sticky problems as well. One ticking time bomb for Iraq was the status of Kirkuk—a region that sits partly in Kurdish territory but has a very large Sunni population. The Kurds had routinely threatened to annex it, giving provincial elections added importance. The passage of a 2008 provincial electoral law was hailed as a milestone. And at the end of 2009, the Iraqis passed a critical national elections law, stepping back from a constitutional crisis that threatened to delay balloting. Dr. Haider Ala Hamoudi, an expert on Iraq, has noted that the United States did not draft any of the amendments. The Iraqis managed to do so in a process that he said was “messy but worked.”9
When the Bush administration left office in January 2009, Iraq had been the most trying and the most dominant issue. But in the end, despite all the trials and sacrifices, I felt that the Iraqis were ready to embrace their chance at democracy. Sometimes they should have taken our advice—but often things worked out even when they didn’t. President Bush had met weekly with Maliki by video, elected leader to elected leader. It was affirming for the Iraqi prime minister and a good way to gently prod him in the right direction. Now it was up to him.
The country had come a long way—it was more secure, and for that I was grateful. I had personally experienced some scary times in Iraq. I always flew to a U.S. military base, usually in Turkey. From there I would take a C-130 to the Baghdad airport, sitting in the cockpit with the young pilots, who were often members of the National Guard. Then we would take a Black Hawk helicopter, machine gunners hanging out of the windows, into the Green Zone, the protected enclave for the international community and a number of high-ranking Iraqi officials.
On one trip, as we were about to land, the plane suddenly pulled up. “What just happened?” I asked, hoping that my heart rate would come down so that I could breathe.
“Oh, ma’am, there was some mortar fire. But we’re not sure if it was just random or meant for you,” the young man said.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” I replied.
Another time, a sandstorm prevented me from taking a helicopter into the Green Zone. We had to drive along what had been dubbed the “highway of death,” because explosions along it were frequent. We made it without incident, but as the car moved slowly among stalled trucks and automobiles, I tried not to focus on the stricken faces of my security guards.
My last trip to Iraq showed me just how much had changed. I made the rounds with the politicians and joined them for lunch at Talabani’s house. But Hakim was ill and asked if I would come to see him. He lived in the “red zone.” I would travel into territory where a year before I could not have gone.
As we slowly made our way to the cleric’s home, signs of conflict were everywhere. The streets were pockmarked with holes made by mortar fire, and there were more than a few bombed-out buildings. Iraqi soldiers patrolled on foot, and helicopters appeared above periodically. But things were finally quiet and people went about their daily tasks—shopkeepers selling goods and customers buying them, and youngsters playing in the streets.
As my armored motorcade passed those places and people, I felt a surge of satisfaction and hope. Perhaps one day the Iraqis who had endured so much chaos would enjoy a peaceful and democratic future. I felt that we had given them a chance.
After the Islamic State Is Defeated
In 2011, President Obama fulfilled his campaign promise to pull all American forces out of Iraq. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that we had signed in 2008 was set to expire. In truth, the firm 2011 date had been a compromise with Maliki, who wanted to show that Iraq could stand on its own two feet. Elections were coming up in 2009, and he thought that it would be a popular move. Everyone, including Maliki, thought that the SOFA would be renegotiated or extended. He told President Bush that he would be able to do so after the elections—he meant his, not ours.
The Obama administration did not succeed in extending the SOFA. The same terms that had been acceptable to the Pentagon in the prior agreement should have been acceptable in a new one. Bob Gates, secretary of defense for both Presidents Bush and Obama, said the following: “The only chance we would have had for an agreement would have been with [President Obama’s] intensive involvement personally, and that didn’t happen.”10
It is a pity, because Iraq was on its way to a better future. The American sacrifices—and those of Iraqis—were beginning to pay off. Whatever one’s view of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the hardest work had been done and the ground was prepared for a decent outcome for Iraq and the region. In 2010, in the final elections before American forces left, Iraqi voters delivered a remarkable result: Iyad Allawi, a Shia, won the largest share of the vote as the head of an avowedly non-sectarian party, with considerable Sunni support. The political system was beginning to mature and the violence had subsided.
I have been asked repeatedly, “Knowing today what you do, would you still counsel the invasion of Iraq?” Well, of course, what you know today cannot affect what you did yesterday. That said, had I known that we would not be prepared to keep forces in the country—in small numbers—to help the Iraqis find democratic stability, the decision would have been much harder for me.
When U.S. forces departed, Vice President Joe Biden declared Iraq stable and free. He was right about half of it. Within a year, the civil war in Syria became a new front against stability and peace. The remnants of al-Qaeda that the surge had defeated in Iraq regrouped across the border. Now, with the chaos that obliterated national lines, they came back and eventually formed the core of a new menace—the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS. Our intelligence agencies have admitted that they did not see the threat emerging. And the Iraqis were ill-prepared to handle the challenge on their own. ISIS poured into the vacuum.
Without the steadying hand of American influence, Maliki gave way to his own worst instincts. He was a proud and prickly man who cataloged every slight, perceived or real. In a matter of months, he was using his power to go after his enemies, particularly Tariq al-Hashemi, whom he accused of trying to overthrow him. That alienated Sunnis, and increasingly he gave in to his sectarian streak—firing competent commanders in the security forces and the police and replacing them with those loyal to him. They were mostly Shia, of course, exacerbating tensions between the sectarian groups.
After almost a decade in office, Maliki was a spent force. Despite his success in the 2014 elections, many Iraqis no longer trusted or respected their prime minister. He had lost the confidence of the United States too, especially after the Iraqi army lost control of Mosul. Reminiscent of Jaafari years before, at first he tried to hang on. He threatened to take his supporters to the streets. But the ploy didn’t work and he soon stepped down, saying that he would return to the parliament and work for the causes that mattered to him. He was given a ceremonial title of vice president and accepted the face-saving compromise. It was a mature response from a mercurial man. Arab strongmen didn’t usually step down. This was a sign that something had changed in Iraq for the better.
The country continues to function in a quasi-democratic fashion—the institutions are weak but at least present. The parliament meets and then disbands due to boycotts by one group or another. Then they reconvene, unable to do much work, but they do keep trying. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has survived multiple no-confidence measures. And he keeps at it, re-forming his cabinet and shaking up his government in hopes of finding a workable formula. The people protest the incompetence of their leaders, and—after one bloody incident a year or so ago—the state no longer interferes.
The government respects the basic rights of Iraqi citizens, according to Freedom House. There are a dozen private television stations in addition to 150 print publications. The Internet is not restricted and Arab satellite TV is readily available, though journalists have complained more in recent years about harassment from sectarian groups. Iraqi athletes participate in world competitions like the Olympics. They no longer fear reprisals from a brutal dictator if they lose.
Women make up 25 percent of the parliament thanks to a formula passed in the 2009 electoral law. Iraq is a conservative society and women still face obstacles, but they are not legal, governmental restrictions. Forty-five percent of university students are women, as are one in three university professors.11 That is a step forward.
Freedom of religion is guaranteed and there is no official religious body to interfere. Yet religious minorities are being driven out of the country. This is not due to policy but because the government cannot protect them from sectarian militias and terrorists. And, sadly, the Iraqi state cannot yet secure its citizens more generally. Bombs go off with regularity in the streets of Baghdad—the work of ISIS, which still occupies a swath of the country’s territory.
Slowly, though, ISIS is being beaten back by Iraqi security forces, the Sunni tribes, Kurdish peshmerga, and American airpower and advisers. As of late 2016, the United States has more than five thousand troops in Iraq—about half the number the generals wanted to leave behind in 2011 when Iraq was stable.
A positive outcome in the war against ISIS is by no means assured. But there is a good chance that the so-called Caliphate they hoped to establish will fail and that the extremist group will be defeated. The larger question is whether a unified Iraq will survive. When the war is over, the Kurds will most assuredly push for greater autonomy. They have expanded their territory by about 40 percent since 2014 and taken a number of villages around Mosul, as well as Kirkuk. Barzani has taken a tough line rhetorically, saying that land won with Kurdish blood should never again be ruled by Baghdad. Many observers think that he is staking out ground from which to bargain when the war ends. Others take him at his word. One thing is clear: The Kurds have built a relatively peaceful and prosperous region within an unstable Iraq. It remains to be seen whether they will demand distance from Baghdad or a divorce.
The Shia in the south will have to find a way to resist the pull of the “Iranian crescent.” Iranian-backed militias will claim—with some justification—that they too contributed to the defeat of ISIS. Tehran will be influential, but how influential? As one former ambassador said, “If Iran were really calling the shots, the Iraqis wouldn’t be pumping four million barrels of oil a day—and keeping the price of oil low when Tehran needs the revenue.” Iran could not have wanted to see American forces, even in limited numbers, back in Iraq. The Iraqi Shia are Arab, not Persian, and that has always been a limiting factor in Tehran’s influence. The Iranians will have free rein if there is no American counterweight. The scale of Tehran’s writ will be determined by policy choices—ours as well as theirs.
Iraq’s institutions will bear the mark of what the country has gone through to defeat ISIS. Perhaps there will be a new “Articles of Confederation” that reflects the geostrategic reality of the country. As long as it is a democratic one, something will have been gained. And at this moment, Iraq and Tunisia are the only Arab countries that have quasi-democratic institutions on which to build. When the Middle East settles down, there may be a new democratic opening. This time there will be something there that was absent before—political institutions, weak though they may be—that might be able to mediate differences between peoples, peacefully.
Egypt and Tunisia: When Old Men Fail
It had been a really strange trip. I slept fitfully that September night in 2008 after my visit with Muammar Qaddafi in the Libyan capital. My meeting with “the Leader” had gone later into the night than planned—my security detail sitting anxiously outside the door, banned from joining me in the room. I had arrived in Tunis well after midnight. Now, startled by my alarm, I awoke with that sensation one has after a bizarre dream. Did I really just sit in his kitchen and have dinner with his female security guards who many believe are also his daughters? Did he really give me a video—with pictures of me set to music—called Black Flower in the White House? Okay. Whatever his weird affection for you, thank the Lord, that visit is over. Time to move on. Get your mind around what you need to say to Ben Ali.
The meeting room in Tunis was palatial, as they all are in the Middle East. There was enough malachite and gold to make the Russian Winter Palace seem modest by comparison. The Tunisian president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, hair dyed jet-black, was cordial but distant, and I quickly realized that the longer I talked, the less he engaged. I was trying to make several points about cooperation in fighting terrorism and the more contentious one that Tunisia had a responsibility to take back some of its citizens who were prisoners at Guantánamo. Ben Ali kept insisting that it had already done so. But they hadn’t, and none of his entourage seemed anxious to tell him that he was wrong. He was befuddled and slow, slipping in and out of genuine attention to what I was saying. This reminds me of meeting with Hosni Mubarak, I thought. He always told those tired stories—sometimes repeating the same one within a matter of minutes in the same meeting. These are failing old men who are out of touch and shielded by those who won’t tell them what is going on. It really is sad.
Three years later, as I watched the events of the 2011 “Arab Spring” explode into the world’s consciousness, I thought back on those meetings with Mubarak and Ben Ali. They never saw it coming, but they should have. The level of discontent in their countries was high. Unemployment and corruption and a sense of powerlessness oppressed the populations as much as the brutality of the security forces. A citizen could largely avoid the ire of the police by keeping his mouth closed. The daily humiliations—hopeless poverty, imperious bureaucrats, and the anger they engendered—could not be ignored.
“Mr. President, Reform Before Your People Are in the Streets”
As we have noted, authoritarian regimes do not dominate all of society in the way that totalitarian/cult-of-personality rulers do. There is space for independent organizations—business groups, universities, and civil society. And the size and robustness of that space varies from country to country and at different times within a country. The chance for reform is present because there is a nascent infrastructure on which to build.
But in the case of Egypt and Tunisia, the regimes did not take that opportunity, though Egypt came close in 2005. In fact, Egypt provides an object lesson in what could have been. The story below is one of arrested reform. The regime almost did the right thing, making hesitant but significant changes in the way that politics was practiced. And then Mubarak panicked and pulled back at the end of the year. That sealed his fate and the fate of his regime when in 2011 the Egyptian people—and the people of the region—said they had had enough.
Freedom’s “Indian Summer”
I was sworn in as secretary of state on January 26, 2005. The timing could not have been more fortunate. People seeking freedom seemed to be winning everywhere, and I felt like there was really a strong favorable wind behind them—and us. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and the Tulip Revolution in Tajikistan were in full bloom, with pro-Western governments emerging in all of them. But it was the stunning events in the Middle East that suggested the Freedom Agenda was indeed on the right side of history, even in the world’s most troubled region.
In January 2005, the Iraqis held successful “Purple Finger” parliamentary elections, with large turnouts even in areas threatened by terrorism. The iconic picture of newly freed citizens holding up their hands, their fingers stained with purple ink—the equivalent of a sticker saying “I voted”—swept across the world’s media. The moment was emotional for me and for all of us who had been involved in the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. President Bush invited representatives of the Purple Finger Revolution to the first lady’s box at the State of the Union address. The sustained, bipartisan standing ovation for these Iraqi patriots was stirring, and for that moment, a sense of pride in what America had done echoed through the chamber.
In Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, the wealthy businessman who was the country’s prime minister, was assassinated in February of the same year. This created a revolutionary moment as more than a million people spilled into the streets of Beirut to demonstrate against the Syrians and Hezbollah, who were suspected of complicity in his death. They demanded the removal of Syrian forces that had occupied the country since the 1970s.
I watched those events on TV in London from my room in the Churchill Hotel. Earlier that morning, the French foreign minister and I had issued a joint statement on the events in Lebanon. Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush didn’t agree about most issues in the Middle East, most especially about Iraq, but regarding Lebanon they had found common purpose. In 2004 they jointly engineered a UN Security Council resolution calling for the withdrawal of Syrian forces.
Watching the television coverage from Beirut, I thought back on the events that secured that international agreement. It was August 2004 and we were in New York for the Republican convention that nominated the president for a second term. I was in my room at the Waldorf Astoria, my attention split between his speech on TV and my telephone calls to our UN ambassador and the French foreign minister. When the president returned to the hotel that night he asked me to come to his suite. “Do we have the votes?” he asked. “I think so, as long as everyone holds firm,” I said. I returned to my room and waited for my appointment to call the foreign minister of the Philippines—at 3 a.m. He promised to “look into it.” The Philippine ambassador would eventually abstain, but we would win the vote, nine in favor and six abstentions. I told the president that the resolution would pass. He smiled and said, “I should call Chirac.”
Now, in March 2005, that resolution gave the force of international law to the Lebanese people’s demand that the Syrians get out. The Saudis, who loved Hariri, leaned heavily on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Amazingly, Damascus relented. Though everyone knew that Assad would leave his secret security network behind, the pictures of Syrian forces humbly and hurriedly leaving Lebanon was exhilarating.
The pro-Western “March 14” movement (named for the day of a massive rally protesting Hariri’s assassination and led by his son, Saad) took power in subsequent elections. Hariri’s longtime friend, technocrat Fouad Siniora, became prime minister. The Lebanese people had won the day.
So I was confident and excited when I headed to Egypt in June of the same year to give my speech on freedom at the American University of Cairo. Egypt was a regional heavyweight, culturally, politically, and historically. I wanted to argue that just as Anwar Sadat had led the region to peace in his landmark opening to Israel, Mubarak could lead the region to democratic reform. I wanted to challenge but not embarrass the Egyptian president.
Before giving the speech, I asked to meet with Mubarak. At least it was morning and he was alert. I had learned to always meet the Egyptian early in the day. He experienced what physicians call “sundowning.” As the day goes on, some older people have more trouble concentrating. That was the case with Mubarak. And I always tried to sit on his right side, as he was nearly deaf in the other ear.
Our ambassador had given the president’s staff a heads-up before I saw him. I foolishly thought that Mubarak might be in a mood to listen given all that was happening in the region, including in Egypt. Before I could say anything beyond “Good morning,” he preempted. “Go ahead and give your speech,” he said.
I persisted, trying to preview the content of my remarks for him. “Mr. President,” I said, “I just don’t want you to be surprised by what I am going to say.”
“Go ahead and give your speech,” he repeated. “The Egyptian people need me. They need a strong hand. Don’t you understand that all that stands between the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt—is me!”
I tried to interject that I was not calling in any way for him to step down, but just to bring change. “Mr. President,” I concluded, “reform before your people are in the streets.” The meeting ended on that note.
Egypt badly needed to change its stagnant politics and its underperforming economy. From the time of Sadat’s assassination and the rise of Mubarak in 1981, three groups fought to define Egypt’s future. Civil society—human rights advocates and intellectuals—tried to carve out a little space within the political sphere. At times they could be relatively influential, mostly by appeal to international opinion and, in the case of the universities, by demonstrations, strikes, and riots. Islamists were also a factor due to their discipline, support among the rural and pious populations, and, at times, their resorting to violence. And finally, there was what some call the “deep state”—embedded constituencies resistant to change that largely helped to prop up the regime. The military, large family businesses, and the governmental apparatus—particularly the security forces—fit that definition.
The country was perpetually in economic difficulty. Bread riots broke out periodically when the government tried to end expensive and crippling food subsidies to the population. The number of people living in poverty increased from fifty-eight million to seventy-eight million between 1990 and 2008.12 The business community consisted in large part of big family conglomerates that were very close to state officials and thus a ready source of corruption. For many years, ordinary Egyptians saw no rise in their real incomes—or worse. Per capita income fell by 8.7 percent between 2005 and 2009.13
Mubarak ruled this complex country for thirty years. He treated his supporters well, particularly in the business community and the security forces. The opposition was kept at bay by constantly raising the specter of an Islamic takeover—a narrative that Egypt would become like Iran.
“You will not see a single veiled woman,” the Egyptian foreign minister, Aboul Gheit, told me as he introduced me to his staff in 2005. “I have a lot of women working for me. They are smart and educated and they would never wear the hijab,” he intoned. On another occasion, the minister arranged a dinner after a conference on Iraq. He had intended to have the Iranian foreign minister sit next to me, hoping to start a dialogue between us. When I arrived, Aboul Gheit explained that the Iranian had left. “He was offended by the violinist,” he said, laughing. Onstage a Ukrainian violinist in a skimpy red dress was performing show tunes. “That’s the problem with these people,” he said. “They just can’t have any fun.”
The sarcastic comment masked a more serious point about the political landscape in Egypt. The tensions between secularists and Islamists were unresolved in the country. Most urban dwellers and educated people valued the president’s ability to keep the religious authorities out of their lives. But the Islamists had their own following among some intellectuals and also in the countryside. The most important Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in 1928 but had been banned for decades after coming into conflict with the state. One of its most prominent members, Sayyid Qutb, was executed in 1966, but his extremist ideology inspired generations of terrorists who followed. Another member, Ayman al-Zawahiri, split from the group in 1979, believing it had become too moderate and too interested in the political process. Zawahiri would later merge his new organization into al-Qaeda and, after the death of Osama bin Laden, become its leader.
Elections in the country were essentially for show—the reaffirmation of Mubarak’s rule. But in the lead-up to the elections of 2000, something began to change. Pockets of opposition to the president were emerging. Mubarak was particularly alarmed by the growing power of the Islamists. He responded by arresting two hundred members of the Muslim Brotherhood and banning them from politics. So adherents ran as independents and won significant representation in that election and in subsequent ones. Despite the formal ban, the group remained tightly organized, providing alms in poorer parts of the country where the government was failing. The Muslim Brotherhood could not operate in the open, but they did so in mosques and madrassas. They were the most structured and effective political opposition, even though technically they had been excluded from politics.
On the other hand, secular pro-democracy forces had trouble finding their footing. In 2001, Ayman Nour, a young legislator, formed the Al Ghad (“Tomorrow”) Party. It was a promising step, supported by university students, human rights activists, and even some members of the business community. Nour was finally able to register his party three years later in 2004. Then he declared his intention to run for the presidency. Within three months, prosecutors had accused him of falsifying signatures and he was arrested.
The president did not see that these secular democrats could have been allies for him in tempering the influence of the Islamists. He saw only adversaries and opposition to his goal of extending his rule. He vacillated between repressing the Muslim Brotherhood and tolerating them. On the other hand, he constantly harassed the liberals, closing their offices and jailing their leaders. It was now largely a matter of holding on to power for the aging president. And anyone who challenged his right to do so was the enemy.
But when in 2004 he made clear his intention to seek a fifth six-year term, and some hinted that his son Gemal might succeed him, the Egyptian people responded. A broad movement of intellectuals and human rights and democracy advocates formed Kefaya (“Enough”). Earlier reform efforts had focused on lifting the state of emergency, reining in police powers, and updating the constitution. This time the movement went right to the heart of the matter—the need to limit executive power and the term of the president. The coalition that included Nour’s party also welcomed moderate Islamists into its ranks. Their platform demanded lifting the state of emergency so that there could be free assembly, removing restrictions on the formation of political parties, and the release of political prisoners.
The unfolding events in Egypt complicated U.S.-Egyptian relations. Mubarak did not trust President Bush and resented the Freedom Agenda. He took the calls for reform in the Middle East as a personal insult. In fact, the Egyptian visited the United States in 2003 and did not return throughout the president’s tenure. Matters reached a crucial point when Nour was jailed on January 28, 2005.
I met with the Egyptian foreign minister in Washington on February 15, 2005. The meeting focused on Lebanon, Sudan, reconstruction in Iraq, and some matters relating to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But everyone knew that tensions between us were high. I was scheduled to go to Cairo the next week for a Group of Eight meeting with the Arab League.
“Did the status and imprisonment of Ayman Nour come up in your conversation?” a journalist asked at the press conference following the meeting.
“Yes, I did raise our concerns, very strong concerns about this case,” I replied.
“Are you going to Cairo?”
“Our delegation has not yet decided, but I’ll get back to you.”
That was a thunderbolt as speculation spread that I had told the Egyptians that I was canceling the trip to protest Nour’s detention. In fact, I hadn’t decided, hoping to use the trip as leverage to get him released. The Egyptians refused to budge on Nour, and on February 22, I told them that I was not coming, making the public announcement on February 25. The Egyptians fumed and vented loudly. As the New York Times reported, they “rejected any foreign interference in Egypt’s internal affairs.” Then the government petulantly announced that it was they who had canceled the trip. That statement was not true.
Mubarak Opens a Path to Change: The Events of 2005
Pressure was building on Mubarak at home and abroad. Television screens across the world were filled with images of Egyptians protesting their government in general and their president in particular. Remarkably, he responded with a plan for change. On February 26, he “requested” that the parliament take up the issue of electoral reform. Though Mubarak’s party dominated the legislature and could protect him, it was still a significant move. The proposed legislation included the direct election of the president by secret ballot; the opportunity for political parties to run candidates; and “more than one candidate for the people to choose from with their own will.” Nour welcomed the announcement from prison. On March 12, Ayman Nour was freed and declared his candidacy for the presidency.
The referendum that established the rules for the elections was a disappointment to the opposition. Strict limitations on who could run, including a requirement that any party would have had to be in existence for five years, stacked the cards in the president’s favor. The balloting was to take place in one day, making it difficult to have enough judges to oversee the polling. Independent candidates had to be supported by 250 members of the People’s Assembly, the Shura Council, or local elected councils—bodies dominated by the president’s party. And during the voting on the referendum on May 25, the government resorted to violence, beating opposition figures and reportedly assaulting women. The actions of the government only served to energize the opposition, however, as protests continued.
The worried leadership again turned to undermining Ayman Nour, who was widely regarded as the most likely threat to Mubarak despite the limiting electoral rules. After my speech in Cairo on June 20, I met with Nour. He was clearly suspicious of American intentions, did not want to be associated with the Freedom Agenda, and at the same time insisted that we help more. This was the dilemma that we faced time and again in the region. No opposition leader wanted to be seen as doing the bidding of the United States. But they needed us to advocate for them and wanted us to punish their governments. It was a delicate line to walk.
Nour’s trial began on June 28, but with the key witness against him recanting his earlier testimony, the government’s case was in tatters. Rather than let Nour be exonerated and stand for the presidency free of the legal issue, the state requested a delay until September 25. The election was to take place on September 7.
With all of the constraints and trickery, it was unlikely that anyone would defeat Mubarak. And to be fair, the president was supported by large parts of the population. But even this limited experience with contested elections was a heady one for the people of Egypt—and the president of twenty-four years seemed ready to embrace the moment.
Omar Suleiman was in town, and he asked to have dinner with Steve Hadley, the national security adviser, and me. It was a quiet July evening at the Watergate restaurant, and we expected to talk about Hamas, the Israelis, and other matters of that kind. He was, after all, the head of the security services—feared by his adversaries and trusted by Mubarak: the Egyptian president’s right-hand man.
Imagine our surprise when the conversation turned to the elections. “What do presidents do to get reelected?” Suleiman asked. Steve and I looked at each other and at him as he asked about the details of carrying out a free election. “How do security forces keep order but not be seen to interfere in peaceful protests?” he continued. As he kept going, I was stunned by the nature of the questions from this hardened police chief.
Steve and I related various experiences on the Bush campaign. And then Steve said something that seemed to lighten Omar’s mood. “President Bush enjoyed campaigning.” I’m not sure Suleiman could imagine Mubarak “enjoying” the process, but he clearly liked the notion. It was a strange conversation, because Mubarak was going to be elected. His party dominated the rulemaking; he had a huge financial advantage; and there would be no electoral monitors to catalog the inevitable fraud. Even so, Omar seemed genuinely interested in having the president actually win the people’s trust.
During the ensuing monthlong campaign, Mubarak acted as if he actually wanted to convince people that he should be elected. He gave speeches, traveling around the country and laying out a governing agenda for the next six years. And he seemed to enjoy it.
For their part, other candidates made their case with little intimidation. Even the Wafd Party, which adopted as a slogan a single word that meant “We have been suffocated,” did so openly. Ayman Nour traversed Cairo in an open horse-drawn carriage on the first day. He gave remarkable, defiant speeches. “We are a nation of freedom and democracy in our roots. But this nation has been transformed into one person and not a nation, to one person, and not Egypt.”14 The Muslim Brotherhood was oddly passive, urging people to vote but not endorsing a candidate.
Our ambassador reported almost daily on events in Cairo. “I actually saw a story today,” he told me, “that accused Suzanne Mubarak [the president’s wife] of corruption. The cafés are full of people debating politics. It seems as if fear has broken down and the atmosphere is almost festival-like,” he said.
Mubarak won, of course, with 88.6 percent of the vote. But he was terribly disappointed at the low turnout, suggesting that Egyptians had not considered the entire enterprise worthwhile. Still, those who did participate witnessed a new openness in Egyptian politics that might have laid the foundation for further progress. The election was obviously imperfect, but it was the first truly contested presidential election, a significant fact in post-Mubarak Egypt.
Unfortunately, the presidential election was the high-water mark. Two months later, in November 2005, parliamentary elections were held. The Wafd Party and Tomorrow (Nour’s party) were unable to sustain their momentum, again hounded by the government and denied resources. The big winner was the Muslim Brotherhood, which claimed more than half the seats it contested through independent candidates. The National Democratic Party (of Mubarak) held 324 seats and the Brotherhood 88. All others held just 30.
Mubarak was alarmed by what had happened in the elections. At my next meeting with him early in 2006, he all but accused the United States of strengthening the hand of the “Brothers,” as he called them. He looked directly at me and asked, “Are you satisfied?” Satisfied with what? I thought. He was referring to the election result.
Then I remembered a conversation that explained that comment. During a meeting with Saudi king Abdullah, he told me that he now trusted me. He had come to believe, he said, that I didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood to rule the Middle East after all. Where did that come from? And then I realized that it had come from the Egyptians. “I’m all that stands between the Muslim Brothers and Egypt”—that was always Mubarak’s trump card in any conversation about the virtues of democracy. He seemed honestly to believe that we viewed the Muslim Brotherhood favorably.
In light of the electoral results at the end of 2005, the Egyptian government began backpedaling from the modest reforms it had made. In response to the jailing, once again, of Ayman Nour, I postponed consideration of the U.S.-Egyptian Free Trade Agreement. Doing so was a double-edged sword, because FTAs tend to empower more liberalizing elements in a society—opening the economy, undercutting corruption, and sometimes helping young people looking for opportunity.
During a press conference with the Egyptian foreign minister, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post asked the question that I dreaded: “You met Ayman Nour here on your last trip here and now he faces a prison term after a trial on what appears to be trumped-up charges. His party is destroyed. How disappointed are you by that result, and what will you say to civil society representatives tomorrow as they struggle to develop under this authoritarian government?”
I answered that I was of course disappointed. But I essentially said that I would tell them to keep trying, that progress is not always a straight line, and that we would support them.
During a question on the postponement of the FTA, my mind wandered. I knew that my answer to Glenn had not been very satisfactory. So I took another crack at it. “Let me go back.… The president made very clear in his State of the Union that the United States would stand for the right of men and women in every corner of the earth to have the same rights and indeed the same responsibilities that we as Americans are fortunate enough to enjoy.… I came here to Cairo to give that speech because this is a central, perhaps the central, place in Arab civilization in terms of history, culture and scientific progress.… Egypt can and I think will lead this entire region in terms of economic and political reform.… That, I think, is a statement not just of hope but confidence.… We’re going to stay on course, continuing to discuss reform and the need to move forward toward democracy… and listen to all voices in Egyptian society, because it is really very critical that Egypt lead in this area.”15
I looked out at the members of my traveling press corps—Glenn, Helene Cooper of the New York Times, Janine Zacharia of Bloomberg, Anne Gearan of the Associated Press, Arshad Mohammed of Reuters, and Andrea Mitchell of NBC, to name a few. They had watched March 14 rise in Lebanon. They had covered the Purple Finger election. They had seen the awakening of politics in Egypt. Now, at this disheartening moment for freedom in the region, I saw in these tough and skeptical journalists signs of empathy.
They, like me, knew that Mubarak would not lead the region to change. Indeed, the regime doubled down on repression. The hated law on emergency powers was extended for two years. Most had expected that it would be lifted. A new constitutional referendum in 2007 further tightened the requirements for independent candidates to run, hoping to stall the progress of the Muslim Brothers but limiting other political forces as well. Violence spiked against opposition rallies and detention of activists of all stripes increased. Mubarak systematically stripped away the nascent institutions that might have helped Egyptians—many of whom shared his secular orientation—to make a democratic transition.
This would turn out to be his last chance for peaceful change. The president sealed the fate of his regime when he backed away from the political opening of 2005. Now it was only a matter of time until the tired and illegitimate regime could no longer hold power.
The denouement came in December 2010, when a fed-up street vendor in neighboring Tunisia set himself on fire. His death sparked a social-media-driven revolution across the Middle East, as popular protests forced the departure of Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali—a first in Arab history. Now there was nothing standing between the octogenarian Egyptian president and his angry and despondent people. They turned on him, calling for his ouster. “Erhal!” (“Leave!”) became the slogan of the day.
The young people in the streets desperately wanted to embrace a democratic and brighter future. The population in the region had doubled over thirty years: 60 percent of Middle Easterners were twenty-five years old or younger. Tired, corrupt governments could not provide for them. The Middle East Monitor spoke of “a visceral sense of national humiliation and lack of self-esteem.”16
A Second Chance for Democracy
As frustrated citizens poured out into places like Tahrir Square, there was another momentary opening for democratic change. But the energy in Cairo and other major cities was without direction and political purpose. Ayman Nour tried to channel the passions of the moment, and so did Kefaya, but they were spent forces—wasted in earlier struggles with the government. The Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei came home, but he had been out of the country too long—doing important work at the IAEA, but disconnected from Egypt’s aspirations. The secular forces that the president should have nourished years before were unable to cohere at this crucial moment.
Mubarak tried belatedly to save his regime. He fired his cabinet but refused to step down, appointing a vice president for the first time in his presidency—Omar Suleiman. Clashes between government and anti-regime forces took place daily as security forces failed to maintain order.
Two months into the crisis, Mubarak continued to insist that he would hold power until elections could be called. In a dramatic speech on February 10, 2011, he finally said that he would not run in the next election, though he would discharge his duties until then. It was too late—the Egyptian people were calling for his immediate ouster, and some for his head. He resigned the next day, transferring power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. The military would then oversee a hurried process to write an interim constitution. Many worried that the rapid move to elections would give secular forces little time to gather themselves and compete. They were right. The well-organized Muslim Brotherhood—now legal as a political party—won an impressive victory in peaceful elections across the country. When the several rounds of parliamentary balloting were done, the Brotherhood controlled 47 percent of the seats. A second and even more conservative Islamist party controlled another 24 percent. Though the Brotherhood had promised not to run a presidential candidate, it did. Mohamed Morsi won, the first Islamist to be elected head of state in the Arab world. Mubarak’s nightmare had come true—and it was, at least in part, his own doing. He more than any single figure was responsible for the barren political landscape and the dominance of “the Brothers.”
Of course the story did not end there. The Muslim Brotherhood’s brief reign in Egypt was tumultuous and incompetent. The country was in serious economic trouble, experiencing catastrophic declines in foreign reserves and a slide in the value of the currency. Morsi begged for assistance, promising economic reforms to meet IMF conditions for a $4.8 billion loan package. The United States granted Egypt $250 million but told the president it would closely monitor how he governed.
While seeking foreign assistance, however, Morsi seemed intent on doing everything to drive a wedge between his government and millions of secular Egyptians and religious minorities. The draft constitution did not provide safeguards for the rights of women. And, according to Morsi’s critics, the document would have given Al-Azhar, Egypt’s oldest university and one of Sunni Islam’s highest authorities, power to pass judgment on the religious merits of the nation’s laws.
Under pressure, Morsi kept pledging compromise, but the Islamic and autocratic tilt of his policies and their effects continued. He was blamed, whether fairly or not, for attacks on religious minorities and those seen as insufficiently respectful of Islam. The arrest of a popular television satirist, Bassem Youssef, on March 30 for insulting Islam and Morsi seemed to demonstrate an inextricable link between the president and his religious beliefs. Less than a week later a group of Muslims attacked the main cathedral of the Coptic Orthodox Church where a funeral for Christians killed in sectarian violence was being held. The head of the church, Pope Tawadros II, blamed the president for not protecting them.
Morsi did nothing to quiet his critics. In fact, he seemed to double down, increasing the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. He appointed Islamists to thirteen of the twenty-seven governorships in the country. If he had any intention of bringing Egyptians together to bridge their religious differences in democratic institutions, he hid it well. Violent protests again swept the country, with millions of Morsi supporters and millions of his critics facing off as the future of Egypt hung in the balance.
On July 1, the army gave the president forty-eight hours to engage the opposition and find a solution. He did not, and on July 3 he was ousted. Thousands of demonstrators cheered the military takeover. Thousands more protested it. Violence continued for several months more, but in time, the army reestablished order.
Presidential elections, reminiscent of an earlier time, were held. Just two candidates participated and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi won. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested, and many, including Morsi, sit in jails today, a death sentence on their heads.
And that is where Egypt now stands. For the fourth time in its modern history, a military man rules the country. As for most of the past sixty years, the state of emergency is in full force. The parliament is largely a rubber stamp. NGOs, especially those with foreign donors, are under siege. And the Muslim Brotherhood is jailed, while some of its adherents have gone underground—a fifth column within Egypt promoting violence and engaging in terrorism. The democratic openings of 2005 and 2011 seem very far in the past.
Yet, despite these dark prospects and the repression unleashed by the Sisi regime, the dream of a freer and more democratic Egypt lives on. It can be seen in the stories of activists who, at great personal risk to themselves, continue to advocate for reforms. One such figure, a young Egyptian woman who studied law and human rights in the West, returned to Egypt in 2011 to help her country realize its full potential. She and her colleagues—and millions of like-minded Egyptians—persevered through the roller-coaster ride that followed Mubarak. In 2014 she was arrested for taking part in a protest outside the Presidential Palace. It was a rally against a harsh new ban on protests. Her case drew public attention when she was sentenced to three years in prison, and she used it to shine a spotlight on the thousands of prisoners who suffer unnoticed, facing worse conditions and even abuse. Sisi eventually relented to international calls for her release, but not before she had spent more than 450 days behind bars. In doing so, she joined the long line of democracy activists, from Gandhi to Mandela, who have paid the high price of imprisonment in order for their country to have a better chance at freedom.
Now released and undeterred, this young activist and others like her are the reason to have hope for Egypt. They have learned hard lessons about the challenges before them, and they have proved themselves willing to bear the burdens of their cause. Someday Egypt’s future will be brighter, and they will have another opportunity to build their dream. It might be a far-off and distant future. But those who think otherwise discount the human yearning to live free.
Tunisia Shows the Way
Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest tyranny and injustice under the Ben Ali regime. He was a simple man who was fed up with the daily humiliation of paying bribes to keep his small business alive. His country has had challenges since Ben Ali fell in January 2011. But, unlike Egypt, Tunisia has overcome the obstacles in its path—at least so far. It has approved a new constitution with support from secularists and Islamists. It has found a place in the new system for people who had been exiled by the old regime, as well as former members of that regime. It has held several free and fair elections at the local and national levels. And, in the years following Ben Ali’s ouster, it has peacefully transferred power from one party to another on more than one occasion.
Ben Ali and Mubarak looked like carbon copies of each other—tired, isolated men who had lost touch with the problems and aspirations of their people. So why has Tunisia succeeded thus far where Egypt failed?
Like Egypt under Mubarak, Tunisia under Ben Ali had a prominent Islamist organization that was banned by the government but survived underground. Like the Brotherhood, Tunisia’s main Islamist group, called Ennahda, reemerged to play a central role in the attempt to form a new and more democratic government. But unlike the Brotherhood, Ennahda has so far adopted a more conciliatory approach to its political rivals, and it has demonstrated a willingness to share and even relinquish power. This is not simply because Tunisian Islamists are more moderate or prone to compromise, although that may be part of the explanation, particularly among the top leadership. It is also because Ennahda and the other actors in Tunisian politics face an environment in which compromise offers the best alternative to conflict. There are multiple forces that balance each other. As some scholars have argued, the most important reason why Tunisia has been more successful than Egypt is not because “all sides wanted democracy, but rather that all sides had no choice but to settle for democracy.”17
The Tunisian institutional landscape is richer than that of Egypt. Ennahda is one of several organizations competing for power. It has had to contend with a variety of other actors—from an independent national labor movement, to a new political party backed by allies of the old regime, to a populace willing to return to the streets if it feels the “revolution” has been betrayed—all of which have been powerful forces in preventing Ennahda from asserting its dominance in the same manner as the Brotherhood attempted to do.18
In Tunisia, an influential player in post-2011 politics has been the country’s national labor union, which was part of a coalition of civil society groups—including lawyers, human rights activists, and others—that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. Tunisia’s national labor union played an integral role in the country’s independence struggle of the 1950s and has always maintained some autonomy from the ruling regime. Egypt’s national labor union, conversely, has always been more or less an extension of the state, and it lacked the nationalist legitimacy required to play an effective independent role after 2011. If Mubarak had opened more political space in the mid-2000s, and done more to foster the independence of institutions like labor unions and the judiciary, Egyptians would have been better positioned to take advantage of the opening they created in Tahrir Square in 2011. Instead, at least for now, that moment has passed.
But just as Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation was a spark that set the region ablaze, the story of Tunisia’s struggle for democracy continues to reverberate outside its borders, and nowhere more so than in Egypt. Tunisia’s victories are fragile, and its future setbacks are certain. But its experience offers lessons for pro-democracy forces around the region.
The Tunisian example demonstrates the importance of a diverse institutional landscape. The country has a vibrant civil society that has been actively engaged at every stage of the post–Ben Ali transition. Often, pro-democracy forces are isolated from the larger population, led by intellectuals and operating largely in major cities. In Tunisia, the nationwide labor union, reminiscent of Solidarity in Poland, gave the opposition stronger footing and legitimacy with the population as a whole. The richness of the landscape was a check on more extreme factions—particularly among the Islamists. When draft language limiting the rights of women was being debated for the constitution, an uproar among women’s groups and other members of civil society forced its proponents to retreat. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a quartet of Tunisian civil society groups because of their role in mediated disputes during the tumultuous process of establishing a democratic government. Although that process continues to this day—and will hopefully continue well into the future—it was a timely recognition of the power of these groups and the important role they can play.
Tunisia still faces many dangers ahead. It has produced more ISIS terrorists than any other country, and it has also experienced terror attacks at home. Yet its story suggests a way forward in laying the groundwork for democratic openings in the Middle East and elsewhere: Find constituencies with deep roots in the society and the breadth to reach outside of urban areas. The lesson is that democracy is strongest when its base is widest. Tunisia’s fate—like that of any young democracy—still hangs in the balance. But little by little it is building a stable future and providing a path ahead that others may follow.
Arab Monarchies: Will They Reform?
The countries most affected by the 2011 unrest in the Middle East share a common trait. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen were all founded as Arab “republics” in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, while the unrest seemed to spread from one “republic” to the next, it appeared to skip over the region’s monarchies, with the exception of the small Kingdom of Bahrain. In one sense, this is not surprising. The “republics” were never really republics, after all, and it is not as if their populations didn’t notice. Arab monarchies do not rule with regard to formal democratic procedures, but they do by and large enjoy some legitimacy. The republics, on the other hand, have long experienced a fatal gap between what they claim to be and what they really are, and in 2011, fear broke down and their people finally called them out on it. They no longer wanted a “president for life,” they said. They wanted their “republics” to live up to their name.
Although the Arab monarchies, especially those in the Gulf, have so far withstood calls for political reform, they do not have time to rest comfortably. Louder demands for change will eventually come their way too. The question is, Will they be ready? The challenge for them today is to prepare for that day now.
Education Reform: A Substitute for Political Rights?
The monarchs have for the most part tried to modernize their societies through progress in areas other than politics. They remain repressive of political dissent, as evidenced most brutally in Saudi Arabia by the harsh punishments for even minor bloggers. Yet, in addition to the freedom gap, the Arab Human Development Report noted that the Arab world risked being left behind due to shortcomings in two other important areas: education and women’s empowerment. These two areas have become increasingly linked in the changes taking place in the region. Education reform has emerged as a safe way to address gender issues—at least for now.
Ironically, the monarchs’ wives have led some of these efforts, despite the patriarchal nature of the societies. In Qatar, Sheikha Mozah is an outspoken advocate for this cause, creating partnerships with American universities like Texas A&M. She travels across the world speaking about the subject. The widow of the founder of the United Arab Emirates (and the mother of the ruling bin Zayed brothers) has not only educated her daughters but pushed for opportunities for women across the country.
Sheikha Fatima of the United Arab Emirates wears an abaya and a silk mask that covers all but her eyes and will not see men outside of her family. And so it was very good to be a female secretary of state. She always made time for me, gathering her daughters, daughters-in-law, and other women for a conversation over tea. I would listen intently as they traded stories about the region and the circumstances of various leaders. You see, there was a wives’ network that stretched from Cairo to the Gulf, and it was an amazing source of insight into the complex relationships dictating the direction of politics in the region.
The UAE has relentlessly pursued the cause of women’s education. Emirati women play a wide role in the economy and society. They serve in appointed positions in politics, diplomacy, and the judiciary. And they are educated in fine universities. I have taught several of them in my undergraduate and MBA classes at Stanford. According to the government, women make up more than 60 percent of the students enrolled in higher education and more than 70 percent of total graduates. The ruling families of the Emirates with their small indigenous populations see economic development and women’s empowerment as inextricably linked.
In Saudi Arabia, the most conservative of the monarchies, the advocacy for education reform is most closely associated with the late king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. I saw this firsthand during my many visits with him. One met the king very late at night—no earlier than 11 p.m. After intensive discussions of the long political agenda in the region—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and the Palestinians—Abdullah would ask if we could take a little break. By this time it was already one o’clock and I knew that we would spend at least another hour or so together.
After the brief pause, he always seemed more relaxed. We were essentially alone—with only my interpreter, Gemal Helal, whom the Arabs trusted completely, and sometimes Adel al-Jubeir, the king’s closest aide. The conversation would turn quickly to the broader philosophical challenges facing the kingdom. Abdullah was fascinated by American education and would ask questions, usually prefacing them with, “You teach in a university.”
Abdullah had a very nuanced understanding of the educational landscape in his country. He explained that Saudi students had once gone abroad in large numbers, studying in the United Kingdom and the United States. His foreign minister and nephew, the late Saud al-Faisal, was an example. Educated at Princeton, he was at ease in any cultural setting. The next generation, forty-somethings, Abdullah noted, largely stayed home. They didn’t speak foreign languages and they took a curriculum at King Fahd University that was heavily weighted toward religious studies. “They have no useful skills,” he said. That’s quite an admission from a deeply pious man, I thought to myself.
Abdullah told me that Saudi Arabia could not afford to lose another generation and had insisted on sending students abroad. But after 9/11, the number of Saudis studying in the United States dropped precipitously. Several of the suicide hijackers had gone to college in the West. This made intelligence agencies—and especially the Congress—wary of foreign students. And many Saudis were afraid to come. They were not alone in facing barriers to university study in the United States. Stricter screening and cumbersome tracking rules caused a plunge in American exchange student programs across the world.
In every meeting with the president, foreign leaders would complain about this. I will never forget one encounter with the prime minister of Singapore. He asked each member of his delegation, “Where did you go to school?” Every one of them had attended an American university. “Mr. President,” the prime minister said, “you are shooting yourselves in the foot. Educating these people in the United States is more valuable than anything else that you do.” The president was moved, and I took responsibility for trying to get the numbers back to the pre-9/11 level. By 2007 we achieved that goal, including in the Middle East.
Still, Abdullah did not want to depend solely on foreign institutions to train future generations. And so he launched a plan to build a world-class university in the kingdom. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology was established with a $10 billion endowment. “It will be like Stanford,” he said, perhaps flattering me a bit. “Strong in science, medicine, and technology.” I knew the king well enough to ask the next question. “Will women attend, Your Majesty?” I asked. Abdullah laughed. “Of course.” I didn’t want to ask if they would have to sit in separate classrooms. But if I had, I would have been pleased to learn they do not. Today in Saudi Arabia, more women graduate from college every year than men.19 Saudi women are entering the workforce in greater numbers, with female employment rising 48 percent between 2010 and 2015.20
Still, conversations with the late king about women’s rights were always a bit contradictory. On one occasion he told me flatly that women would vote in ten years. That was 2005, and in 2015 the franchise—such as it was—was extended to female citizens. Abdullah went to great lengths to receive delegations of women, something that his predecessors had not done. Although women were not allowed to vote or run for a seat when the first elections were held for municipal councils, they won those rights in 2011, and exercised them for the first time in 2015. Saudi women went to polling booths just as Saudi men did (but at different locations), and by the next day, twenty Saudi women had won seats on the municipal councils.
On the other hand, Abdullah just didn’t see why the prohibition on women driving was an issue. He once explained that it wasn’t really safe to drive in Saudi cities. The logic of that answer escaped me, but I didn’t push. And, of course, despite some of the changes, women remain second-class citizens in the kingdom—dependent on a male guardian’s permission to marry, apply for a passport, travel abroad, pursue certain jobs, and carry out other basic life activities. Every day, they face social pressures and public dangers if they stray from the strict rule of the hated religious police.
Still, one senses that the monarchs are searching for a way to get ahead of the demands for reform. In a few cases, there is even some movement on the political front.
The UAE has created a parliament-like majlis that advises the government on matters of policy. Half of its forty members are indirectly elected through an electoral college and the other half are appointed by the government. The majlis does not have the kinds of powers we traditionally associate with a parliament. But compared to the situation before its establishment in 2006, steps like these mark progress.
Morocco and Jordan have young monarchs who are relatively popular. In fits and starts, they have reformed the civil service, strengthened rule of law, and ceded some power to prime ministers. Morocco has now held several relatively free elections in which a moderate Islamist party has performed well. That party has even gone on to do a reasonably good job in government, hoping to get reelected the next time.
The al-Sabah family in Kuwait has also engaged in reforms. The Kuwaiti parliament functions as a check on the government in real ways. Comprising fifty members who run in elections, it serves as a national stage for debate, where the government’s policies face regular scrutiny and criticism. It can be dismissed at any time, and there are no political parties, but different groups are represented by different blocs, with one bloc for liberals, another for Sunnis, another for Shia, and so on. Parliamentarians cannot initiate legislation, but they play an important role in overseeing ministerial appointments, in effect giving the people a voice in deciding who serves in some of the highest offices. Kuwaiti women were granted the right to vote and run for office in 2005, and the first female candidates were elected to parliament in 2009.
I was in Kuwait shortly after the first elections in which women were allowed to run, and I talked with several female candidates who had failed to win. They were crushed. I did my best to lift their spirits, reflecting on the long road to democracy. “Women didn’t get the right to vote in the United States until 1920,” I said. “And now I’m secretary of state.” They were inconsolable, though. They didn’t give up and ran in larger numbers in the next cycle. This time, they campaigned and pushed their message with men—reminding them that they too had mothers and sisters and daughters. Four won.
A week or so later after my visit, I opened a package at the State Department. It was a T-shirt that I had been presented in Kuwait—a gift from those who had met with me. “Half a democracy is no democracy at all” was emblazoned in white and light blue. I turned to Brian Gunderson, my chief of staff. “Truer words have never been spoken,” I said.
For the most part, the monarchs are trying to address the three gaps that the Arab Human Development Report identified—on freedom, knowledge, and women’s empowerment—as if they were separable. But they cannot likely be solved fully in isolation from one another. They are intertwined. Yet progress on any one of them brings the Middle Eastern monarchies closer to building a favorable institutional landscape. These are unlikely to ever become constitutional monarchies of the kind that helped ease the transition to democracy in Spain.21 But the role of these leaders is shifting, albeit very slowly. Continuity is not a bad thing if it is paired with a willingness to change.
In this regard, the biggest question is one of how these societies will balance religious beliefs and individual liberty. In many of them, particularly Saudi Arabia, religious reactionaries are a power in their own right. The bargain struck years ago between the Saudi monarch and the clerics is an impediment to change. At the time, “We’ll leave religion to you and you leave politics to us” must have seemed reasonable. Shaken by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Saudis took a shortcut to stability. In exchange for peaceful coexistence with the Wahhabis, followers of a puritanical strain of Islam, the kingdom ceded moral authority to the clerics. They, in turn, came to infiltrate larger and larger domains—including the export of their radical ideas abroad under the Saudi flag.
For years, the Gulf monarchies thought that the radicals would target only foreigners. They tolerated them and looked the other way, buying their loyalty with state funding. During one visit to Saudi Arabia, Steve Hadley and I were taken on a tour of the king’s extraordinary aquarium. As we walked through the glass tunnel, fish swimming all around us, Steve and I both noticed that there were not just tropical fish but also sharks. “How do you keep the sharks from eating the fish?” he asked. “Oh, if you feed the sharks enough, they don’t bother the fish,” our guide answered. Steve whispered to me, “That’s what they thought about al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, the Frankenstein of the Wahhabis—al-Qaeda and its kin—turned on those who had fed them. The bombing of residential compounds in Riyadh in 2003 was a turning point. Gulf rulers, particularly in Saudi Arabia, have tried to rein the clerics in, closing mosques and schools known for radicalism. But it is difficult to root out such entrenched influence. The society remains deeply conservative and, in many cases, at odds with the demands of modern governance.
Just consider this: Saudi Arabia wants to decrease its dependence on oil and modernize the economy. The young deputy crown prince Mohammad bin Salman has launched a plan—Vision 2030—to transform the economic landscape in the country. The plan aims to increase the share of non-oil revenue in public finances by 70 percent, reduce subsidies for water and electricity prices to zero by 2020, increase female participation in the workforce, and limit the growth of new jobs in the civil service. Another goal is to increase tourism beyond that associated with the hajj. The Saudis hope to attract more foreign businesses and the people who come with them. But life in Saudi Arabia can be grim, given the social restrictions. So they have proposed to create large gated communities—almost the size of cities—where foreigners, and maybe some Saudis, can pretty much do as they please. This odd compromise may be the best that they can do for the moment. But in the long run, the relationship between religion, politics, and society will have to be addressed more forthrightly.
The monarchs are not alone, though, in needing to find a way to reconcile religion and politics. The region has seen two extremes: the complete marriage of Islam and the state and, on the other hand, enforced secularism. Neither has worked very well.
Secularism as practiced in Egypt and Turkey led to the disenfranchisement of large segments of the population, particularly rural people. This was a boon to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and at the root of the success of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party. Religion and politics don’t mix easily—but the exclusion of religious people from politics doesn’t work either.
The Europeans fought wars for two centuries in order to finally expel religious authorities from the political space. The American Founding Fathers had a different answer, insisting that religious freedom could be guaranteed only through the separation of church and state. Neither of these roads seems particularly likely in the Middle East. But the region desperately needs an answer to the challenge. Institutions that recognize the rights of the individual citizen to make choices in this most personal of realms—religious belief—would be a good start.
Today’s Middle East is going in the wrong direction in this regard. Religious minorities, particularly Christians, are literally being driven from the region because governments cannot or will not protect them. This has been especially true in Iraq and Syria, but it is also a regional phenomenon, affecting Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and others. Secularists in Turkey hold their breath to see how far the reach of religious conservatives will spread after the coup attempt against Erdoğan in 2016. Religious people in Egypt wait anxiously to see whether all Islamists, no matter how moderate, will be branded Muslim Brotherhood and excluded from the political square. It is a gross understatement to note that the region has found no way to address the question of proper balance between religion and politics.
The uncomfortable question in the Middle East is whether Islam and democracy’s protections for individual liberty can coexist. Some would say that Islam’s claim to govern every aspect of an adherent’s life makes societies vulnerable to totalitarian-like impulses. Certainly, the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief reign in Egypt or Hamas’s reign in the Gaza Strip would support this view. On the other hand, Islamists in Tunisia have found a way to work with others who are not like-minded and Iraq’s parliament houses both religious and secular politicians. Further afield, India and indeed the United States show that Islam and democracy are not irreconcilable. Even Indonesia, younger in its democratic journey, has largely succeeded in containing extremism and embracing a multi-religious future, although not without difficulty.
This suggests that if there is to be a future for a democratic version of political Islam, it rests in the institutional context in which it operates. In other words, there is nothing inherently undemocratic about Islam as a faith—but individual citizens have to be able to make choices about how deeply religion will influence their lives. Essentially, it cannot be the business of the state to dictate this matter of conscience.
The Middle East is a long way from that place. Still, if it is to be found, it is more likely to come through free political discourse. At least then the questions will be debated in the open. That is the only way to temper the power of extreme elements on both sides—those who would ban religious people from the square and those who would insist that religious belief must dominate the political and social landscape.
Containing the Fire Next Time
The people of the Middle East have shown their impatience with the freedom gap, the lack of democracy that sets their region apart. Still, a chasm remains between the populations of the region and their rulers—and the efforts to address it are sporadic and hesitant. Weak democratic institutions exist in Tunisia and Iraq, but they are challenged every day by the ills of the region—sectarianism, terrorism, and violence. Beyond this, other countries lack even these fragile reeds to build upon in the future. So, to quote Lenin, “What is to be Done?”
The task now is to lay a foundation for the time of the next democratic opening. The institutional landscape needs to be richer and more diverse. This requires acknowledging three realities: Education is one answer but it is not enough; women’s empowerment and political liberalization need to go hand in hand; and liberal, pro-democracy forces must engage the entire population—including religious people and rural constituencies. Political change divorced from this broadened landscape is likely to backfire.
The Special Problem of Elections
In fact, the reality is that the most organized and capable political forces in the Middle East at the moment are the Islamists. While regimes repressed civil society—intellectuals, human rights groups, social entrepreneurs, community-based organizations, and journalists—the Islamists across the region organized in radical madrassas and radical mosques. They did the hard work of courting the disenfranchised and taking care of their needs. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood all provided alms to the poor, stepping in where incompetent authoritarian regimes failed. And their worst elements have motivated too many young men (and even women) to prove their manhood on a battlefield. Their strength is no accident of history—it is a direct outcome of the policies of those who have ruled the Middle East.
This has made “one man, one vote” fraught with danger for liberal, democratic values. We learned this lesson the hard way in the 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories. In the run-up to the elections, the reporting from our embassies and from intelligence sources suggested that Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party would win a close election. I went about my work that day, keeping tabs on what was happening but not really worried about the outcome. Not long before I was to be leaving for the evening, Liz Cheney, the deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East, stopped by. “Our people on the ground are reporting that the green flag of Hamas is flying everywhere. And Hamas is polling well in some of the Fatah strongholds,” she said. Liz’s news shook me a little, but I gathered my things and went home—still expecting the Palestinian Authority to win.
The next morning I went to the door of my Watergate apartment and picked up the Washington Post. The headline was as expected—“Hamas Makes Strong Showing in Vote; Exit Poll Shows Party Winning Near-Parity with Fatah in Palestinian Assembly.” “Whew! That was a close call,” I said out loud. Then I went upstairs to the gym for my daily exercise.
The 5 a.m. news was just starting and I noticed the runner at the bottom of the screen. “Hamas victorious. Palestinian Authority officials resign,” it said as it scrolled across. That can’t be right. I just saw that the PA won. I kept pedaling the elliptical—my heart beating a little faster after the bulletin. The runner at the bottom kept returning, each time heralding Hamas’s victory. Finally, I got off the machine and called the Operations Center. “What happened in the Palestinian elections?” I asked.
“Oh, Hamas won,” the young watch officer said calmly.
“Yes ma’am.”
Startled, I asked to speak to Jake Walles, our consul general in Jerusalem, who effectively functioned as our ambassador to the Palestinians. But instead I mixed up his name with our ambassador in Lebanon, Jeffrey Feltman. Jeff was a little surprised to hear from me, but he confirmed that the whole region was in a state of shock. Needless to say, Jake and Dick Jones, our ambassador in Tel Aviv, were as well.
When I arrived at the office and called the president, he said, “So what do we do now? They won the election—by all accounts fairly.”
“Let me talk to the Israelis and Abbas,” I said. By the end of the day, I had also convened the Middle East Quartet—the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the UN. We issued a statement that affirmed the outcome of the election but set conditions on dealing with the new Hamas-led government. They would have to accept the terms that Yasser Arafat negotiated in 1993: recognize the right of Israel to exist; renounce violence; and accept all agreements that the Palestinians and the Israelis had signed. Hamas never did. They remained isolated from the international community and proved to be completely incompetent at governing. As a Palestinian friend said, “Now people can see that they aren’t the glorious freedom fighters. They are just a bunch of politicians who can’t make the sewer system work either.”
The experience with elections that brought Hamas—branded by the United States and Europe as a terrorist organization—to power was chastening. It pointed to the danger of elections before liberal parties could find their footing. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt benefited in the same way.
But it is often difficult to delay elections until the landscape is broader—even if theoretically it would be better to do so. Voting is the single most important and symbolic act of a liberated people, and they are reluctant to wait. The circumstances of the first elections are not likely to favor liberal forces. Still, the electoral process brings challenges for radical forces too—forcing them into the democratic process where the people can judge them peacefully. Is it better, to quote my friend, to show that “they can’t make the sewer system work either”?
On the one hand, some elected Islamist parties have shown little regard for the democratic process that brought them to power, which appears to be their only goal. We have seen how the Muslim Brotherhood overstepped its mandate and sought to enforce Islamist values in Egypt, running roughshod over the interests of religious minorities and more secular forces. Hezbollah is not just a party; it is an armed militia. It has used the political perch in Lebanon to terrorize the region, with the support of Iran.
This is a warning that, at a minimum, armed groups should not participate in the electoral process. It goes without saying that an armed militia has an unfair advantage due to its ability to intimidate and threaten. There are multiple cases of post-conflict transitions in which political groups were allowed to participate only after disarming.22
Still, when Hezbollah turned its arms on Lebanese citizens in 2008, forcibly taking over parts of Beirut in a dispute with the government, it lost the claim to “armed resistance against Israel.” The Lebanese people punished them in the 2009 elections, leaving Hassan Nasrallah to fume that he had won the popular vote but the drawing of the electoral districts was flawed. Elections are about the only way that the Lebanese people can voice dissent against Hezbollah. There is also some evidence that the group’s foreign adventure in Syria is playing poorly at home.
Islamist parties in Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Tunisia have been less able to bend politics to their will. It is worth noting that all of them face real competition from organized secular forces. This suggests that it is not a question of having Islamists participate or not participate in elections. Elections will be held. The question is the institutional landscape in which they take place: the richer the better.
So it comes down once again to nurturing a diverse set of institutions. That means empowering entrepreneurs and businesspeople; educating and empowering women; and encouraging social entrepreneurs and local civic organizations. In 2016 the Atlantic Council gathered a group of experts and former leaders to assess the state of the Middle East and what to do about it. Their recommendations read like a road map for a richer institutional environment.23 And there is already some progress. In the summer of 2016, I met several young entrepreneurs from the region. There was a Jordanian man who founded an Amazon-style website for selling Arabic-language books; a social entrepreneur from the UAE who founded programs to empower youth and protect victims of sex trafficking; and an Egyptian scientist who founded a tech start-up that, in her words, aimed “to bring emotional intelligence to our digital world.” These visionaries are not alone in wanting to build a different future for their region. Human rights advocates, women in politics, business and social entrepreneurs, and intellectuals are the vanguard of a new energy—bottom up—for change.
These people, many of them young women, are determined but, in many countries, hunted. A blogger in Saudi Arabia is flogged for mild criticism of the regime. A journalist in Egypt is jailed for advocating for press freedoms. An activist in Bahrain goes on a hunger strike to protest her indefinite detention. It is reminiscent of another time in another part of the world—the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—when it seemed unlikely that protesters would ever be heard.
We know now that in international organizations like the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) these dissidents were finding their voices. There were safe places for them to meet and influence the rest of the world. When they returned home they often faced intimidation and, in some cases, arrest. But they kept meeting and speaking out, and when the opening came, they led democratic transitions—some more successfully than others.
In 2004 we created the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, which sought to support civil society. We hoped to model it on the CSCE. To be frank, Iraq clouded the effort, but nineteen countries participated, as did dozens of civil society groups from the region. At one of the meetings, a young activist confronted the foreign minister of Bahrain about press restrictions. Another spoke in guarded terms about women’s rights in the Gulf monarchies. And at the press conference, a young Syrian challenged me. “Why do you talk about freedom in Iraq and never in Syria?” he asked. I made a note to speak out about the regime in Damascus the next time I had a chance.
In today’s Middle East—some ten years removed from those exchanges—it is difficult to imagine a gathering of that kind. The Bahrainis have stopped listening to dissent, cracking down hard instead. The civil war in Syria has become the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our age, haunting us with images of children being pulled from bombed-out rubble, or dying in dimly lit hospitals, suffocating from the effects of chemical weapons. I can’t help wondering what happened to my Syrian questioner.
The larger political context has changed in the region too. There was a time when the talisman against dissent was to invoke the Palestinian-Israeli issue. So many times the Arabs would say, “My street”—meaning their people—“is up in arms about what the Israelis are doing.” I had to hold my tongue, because I wanted to say, How do you know what your street thinks? Why don’t you hold an election and find out?
Still, the region cannot be truly stable without a solution to the Palestinian problem. I traveled to the West Bank and Jerusalem twenty-three times as secretary trying to find one. But the story of the sadly unfinished business of delivering a two-state solution is not just a matter of getting the final-status issues right. Yes, the borders of the Israeli and Palestinian states will have to be settled and security arrangements will have to be put in place to protect both peoples. There will have to be a solution to the “right of return,” the insistence of Palestinians now generations removed from 1948 that they must be allowed to return to their homeland, which is now inhabited by Israelis. And the emotional issue of dividing the holy city of Jerusalem, claimed as the capital by both peoples, must be solved too.
For the eight years of the Bush administration, we tried to ease the way to the solution of these core issues by helping the Palestinians build decent political, economic, and social institutions. Hamas, we believed, could be finally defeated only if the Palestinian people saw an alternative—a Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas that had thrown off corruption and found a way to govern wisely.
The Palestinians made a great deal of progress, thanks in part to the help of the United States, Europe, and Canada in building effective security forces that even the Israel Defense Forces recognized as capable. And thanks to the enlightened leadership of men like Salam Fayyad, they made progress in building political and social institutions too.
I will never forget my first extended conversation with Salam in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in 2003. President Bush had convened a meeting of Arab leaders to discuss the peace process, in advance of a meeting between Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Abbas in Aqaba, Jordan. We were waiting for King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to arrive—holding our breath as to whether the “Keeper of the Holy Mosques,” as he is called, would overcome his reservations and attend. It was an interminable wait, feeling much longer than the actual two or so hours that passed.
Salam walked over to me and immediately started to talk about American football. He was an economist, trained at the University of Texas. After a few shots at the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, he turned serious. He already had ideas about improving transparency in the Palestinian Authority—putting the budget online, cleaning up the security services, which he called a bunch of gangsters, and improving the lives of his people. He would be prime minister twice.
Under his leadership, the battered Palestinian economy showed new life, with an influx of foreign aid and an increase in real GDP, which grew at an annual rate of more than 7 percent from 2008 to 2011.24 I remember well going to Bethlehem in 2008. It had been the site of horrible violence in 2001 when an Israeli tank shell blew a hole in the Church of the Nativity. Now we walked through a new and elegant hotel—the site a few weeks earlier of a successful outdoor dinner for potential investors. Salam gained the respect of everyone, including the Israelis.
Salam was thick-skinned—you had to be to tolerate the slings and arrows from those whom he challenged inside the Palestinian Authority. Abbas himself waxed and waned in his support of his prime minister, firing him twice, only to bring him back when there was no other alternative. I asked Salam how he put up with it all. He didn’t hesitate: “I am determined to build our democratic state—even if we have to do it under occupation.” And he set out to do just that.
Today, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken a backseat to the region’s troubles with ISIS, Syria, Yemen, and terrorism. Still, a stable Middle East will need a solution for the Palestinians too. And if they are ever to gain a homeland—the independent state that they deserve—it will be because they built democratic institutions despite the odds.
The Palestinian question has also receded due to the rising challenge of Iran. For the Arab regimes, a militant Iran is the threat of the age: a Persian power with designs on their borders, aggressively pursuing its interests with a latent nuclear capability in its pocket. Tehran’s behavior begs the question of whether Iran itself might one day—sooner or later—face a moment of truth, a democratic opening.
The Green Revolution and What Might Have Been
The powerful image of a bloodied young woman came to represent the tragedy of Iran’s people. Thanks to social media, the world got to observe their plight. For a few days in the summer of 2009, the mullahs who had ruled Iran for three decades seemed vulnerable.
Iran’s electoral system is not free and fair. Races are competitive and the franchise is open to women, but candidates are forced to undergo a rigorous vetting process and must be approved before being allowed to run. In practice, this process is led by conservative hard-liners who filter out anyone who would provide genuine opposition to the government. Most reform-minded candidates, as well as any others deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime, are disqualified and blocked from the ballot.
But in 2009, when the regime violated even these limited rights, cooking the electoral results to favor conservative candidates, they set off a firestorm. There is a lesson in this. Even elections that are not free and fair can have consequences. In this case, the result was a massive protest movement because the Iranian people had had enough. The sad spectacle of Iranians appealing for help from the West reminds us that the international community cannot ignore the plight of people seeking freedom. The Obama administration said nothing at first—and very little later on. The president apparently did not want to contaminate the revolution with outside interference. The brave protesters were carrying signs in English. They appeared ready to take the risk of associating their rebellion with America.
The opening did not last. The regime cracked down hard. The mullahs survived the scare of 2009 and continue to hold back pressures for change, at least as of this writing. There may be no greater gap in the entire region between the aspirations of the people and the posture of their government.
Iran’s population is young—70 percent of them are under the age of thirty. They are well connected to the outside world, and in the cities well educated and urbane. In many cases, they are remarkably pro-American. Jared Cohen traveled to Tehran and five other Iranian cities in 2004. At the time, he was a Stanford student, but he would later go on to head social media outreach at the State Department for me and then for Hillary Clinton. When Jared returned from his Iran trip he got in touch with me at the White House. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “When I said I was American, no one would let me pay for anything.”
I would later witness the same phenomenon. As secretary, I decided that we had to try to end the isolation of the Iranian people, even if we could do nothing about their government. With the president’s blessing, we established a modest exchange program. The first installment brought members of the Iranian equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control to Atlanta to meet their counterparts. Then we brought a group of young artists, all below the age of forty, to exhibit their work. I greeted them at the Meridian International Center in Washington and made remarks about the universality of the arts—careful to avoid anything political that might embarrass or endanger our guests.
Finally, the Iranians agreed to allow Americans to come to them in the person of the U.S. wrestling team. On game day, the fans waved American flags. At first I thought that the government must have encouraged it. That was decidedly not the case. After that show of affection for the United States—a spontaneous one, it turns out—Tehran decided that it had had enough of “people to people” exchanges.
The Iranian people crave freedom. The theocratic regime of the Ayatollah Khamenei refuses to bend. While some in the government seem to seek a more moderate course, they too are not truly moderates. They may want to shave the hard edges from the regime’s relationship with its people: Perhaps women should not have to fear the religious police if an ankle shows; certainly there ought to be enough trade with the West to fill the shops with foodstuffs and other goods; and why shouldn’t Iranians travel and study abroad? But the context is the same. Service in the Iranian government requires fealty to the tenets of the regime—religious orthodoxy; brutal repression of dissent; and a foreign policy that is messianic, reckless, and xenophobic.
No single revolutionary development could transform the Middle East more than the end of theocracy in Iran. While there appears to be no democratic opening on the horizon, regimes of this kind are brittle. Aging men head the theocratic regime. Khamenei, the only real power in the country, is nearly an octogenarian and is reportedly ill. The regime’s base of support is outside the cities with older people, the less educated, and rural populations. The Revolutionary Guard Corps and its fist, the Quds Force, protect the interests of hard-liners at home and abroad.
Prior to the nuclear arms deal with the United States and other international powers, the Iranian economy was in terrible shape, suffering from mismanagement and the effect of a decade of sanctions. GDP shrank by almost 10 percent between 2012 and 2014.25 Unemployment hovered around 20 percent, although many believed it was underreported. Prices rose for everyday goods as the value of the rial plummeted. The mullahs undoubtedly believe that they have bought time with a promise of reentry into the international economy.
Whether that greater engagement staves off decline and dampens pressures for change or accelerates them is impossible to know. But one thing is certain—if a democratic opening comes, Iran has an educated and young population that could take advantage of it. It does not, however, have independent institutions to help channel change. That is why the regime is determined to prevent the rise of civil society. This may for a time prevent the Iranian people from rising against their government, but it almost ensures that when they do, the landing will not be a soft one for the regime or the country.