Document Text Content
8 May, 2011
Article 1. NYT
End of Mideast Wholesale
Thomas L. Friedman
Article 2. Le Monde diplomatique
Is This the End of the Assad Dynasty?
Patrick Seale
Article 3. NYT – Books
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Inspector
Leslie H. Gelb
Article 4. Vanity Fair
Hillary Clinton - Woman of the World
Jonathan Alter
Article 1.
NYT
End of Mideast Wholesale
Thomas L. Friedman
May 7, 2011 -- If you look into the different “shop” windows across the Middle East, it is increasingly apparent that the Arab uprisings are bringing to a close the era of “Middle East Wholesale” and ushering in the era of “Middle East Retail.” Everyone is going to have to pay more for their stability. Let’s start with Israel. For the last 30 years, Israel enjoyed peace with Egypt wholesale — by having peace with just one man, Hosni Mubarak. That sale is over. Today, post-Mubarak, to sustain the peace treaty with Egypt in any kind of stable manner, Israel is going to have to pay retail. It is going to have to make peace with 85 million Egyptians. The days in which one phone call by Israel to Mubarak could shut down any crisis in relations are over.
Amr Moussa, the outgoing head of the Arab League and the front-runner in polls to succeed Mubarak as president when Egypt holds elections in November, just made that clear in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Regarding Israel, Moussa said: “Mubarak had a certain policy. It was his own policy, and I don’t think we have to follow this. We want to be a friend of Israel, but it has to have two parties. It is not on Egypt to be a friend. Israel has to be a friend, too.”
Moussa owes a great deal of his popularity in Egypt to his tough approach to Israel. I hope he has a broader vision. It is noteworthy that in the decade he led the Arab League, he spent a great deal of time jousting with Israel and did virtually nothing to either highlight or deal with the conclusions of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report — produced by a group of Arab scholars led by an Egyptian — that said the Arab people are suffering from three huge deficits: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and deficit of women’s empowerment.
The current Israeli government, however, shows little sign of being prepared for peace retail. I can’t say with any certainty that Israel has a Palestinian partner for a secure peace so that Israel can end its occupation of the West Bank. But I can say with 100 percent certainty that Israel has a huge interest in going out of its way to test that possibility. The Arab world is going through a tumultuous transition to a still uncertain destination. Israel needs to do all it can to get out of their story, because it is going to be a wild ride.
Alas, though, the main strategy of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas will be to drag Israel into the Arab story — as a way of deflecting attention away from how these anti-democratic regimes are repressing their own people and to further delegitimize Israel, by making sure it remains a permanent occupier of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Have no illusions: The main goal of the rejectionists today is to lock Israel into the West Bank — so the world would denounce it as some kind of Jewish apartheid state, with a Jewish minority permanently ruling a Palestinian majority, when you combine Israel’s Arabs and the West Bank Arabs. With a more democratic Arab world, where everyone can vote, that would be a disaster for Israel. It may be unavoidable, but it would be insane for Israel to make it so by failing to aggressively pursue a secure withdrawal option.
The second group that will have to pay retail for stability is the Arab monarchies — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco. These governments have for decades bought stability with reform wholesale — by offering faux reforms, like reshuffling cabinets, that never amounted to real power sharing — and by distracting their people with shiny objects. But these monarchies totally underestimate the depth of what has erupted in their region: a profound quest for personal dignity, justice and freedom that is not going away. They will have to share more power.
The third group I hope will have to pay retail is Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Under Mubarak, in an odd way, the Brotherhood had it easy. Mubarak made sure that no authentic, legitimate, progressive, modern Egyptian party could emerge between himself and the Muslim Brotherhood. That way, Mubarak could come to Washington once a year and tell the president: “Look, it’s either me or the Muslim Brotherhood. We have no independent, secular moderates.”
Therefore, to get its votes, all the Muslim Brotherhood had to say was that “Mubarak is a Zionist” and “Islam is the answer.” It didn’t have to think hard about jobs, economics or globalization. It got its support wholesale — by simply being the only authentic vehicle for protest against the regime. Now the Muslim Brotherhood is going to have to get its votes retail — I hope.
This is the key question: Will a united, legitimate, authentic, progressive, modern, nationalist alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood get its act together and challenge the Islamists in the Egyptian elections, and then rule effectively? Woody Allen famously pointed out that 80 percent of life is showing up. Wrong. Eighty percent of life is getting stuff done. The Egyptian centrists from Tahrir Square now need to show that they can form parties to get good stuff done. Nobody pays wholesale anymore.
Article 2.
Le Monde diplomatique
Is This the End of the Assad Dynasty?
Patrick Seale
2011-05-06 -- The disturbances started in mid-March in Daraa, a southern city on the border with Jordan, when a dozen children were manhandled, arrested and carried off to Damascus for scribbling hostile graffiti on a wall. Distraught parents came down into the street to vent their anger at such heavy-handed brutality. They were soon joined by others. The uprising had begun and soon spread across the country. No doubt it was inspired, in part at least, by the display of people power which has leapt with contagious speed from one country to another, shaking the foundations of Arab autocracy and giving a great jolt to the immobile political order in the Middle East.
In Syria, the authorities then made what may prove to be a fatal mistake. In a move that looked like panic, the security forces used live fire against the protesters -- and have continued to do so. By the end of April, over 550 people had been killed in different locations around the country, while many more were wounded and possibly two thousand arrested. With little reliable information coming out of Syria it is impossible to be certain of the figures. The state used particular violence against Daraa, a poor city in an agricultural region which has suffered from government neglect and crippling drought in recent years. As if to punish it for initiating the troubles, tank fire was used to quell the protests and something like a siege put in place. Electricity and water were cut off and food became scarce.
The deaths in Daraa and elsewhere -- and the emotional funeral processions that followed -- have clearly aroused great rage in the population and a thirst for revenge. President Bashar al-Assad’s legitimacy has been eroded. A strident call is ringing out increasingly for the fall of the regime. The president is now fighting for his political life and for that of the regime put in place in 1970 by his father, the late President Hafez al-Assad.
Forty-one years in power
The rule of the Assads, father and son, has now lasted 41 years, a score comparable to that of other long-lasting Arab autocrats, each apparently determined to be a président-à-vie. In no other part of the world have so many rulers clung so assiduously to power. Bashar appears genuinely to have believed that the Arab nationalist ideology he inherited, his opposition to Israel and his support for resistance movements such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, gave him immunity from popular discontent. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on 31 January, he claimed that Syria could not be compared to Egypt. “Why is Syria stable,” he asked, “although we have more difficult conditions? Egypt has been supported financially by the United States, while we are under embargo by most countries of the world. We have growth although we do not have many of the basic needs for the people. Despite all that, the people do not go into an uprising. So it is not only about needs and not only about reform. It is about the ideology, the beliefs and the cause that you have. There is a difference between having a cause and having a vacuum.”
Unfortunately for Bashar, this analysis has proved wrong. As if caught unawares, his first public speech on 30 March was a public relations disaster. It was delivered to an obedient parliament, which interrupted him repeatedly with acclamation and crass plaudits. In an aside, he seemed to concede that external crises had distracted him from making the reforms he had intended when he first took office. In a second speech on 16 April to his newly appointed cabinet, he announced the lifting of the hated state of emergency, in force since the Ba’ath Party seized power in 1963, and the abolishing of the dreaded Special State Security Court. But even these moves came to seem half-hearted when it emerged that demonstrations could only be held with prior permission from the interior ministry.
The difficult and perilous task Bashar now faces is nothing less than the profound restructuring -- under great popular pressure -- of a fossilised system of governance inherited from his father, but which is no longer appropriate to the modern age, and no longer tolerated by the bulk of the population. Like other Arabs, Syrians want real political freedoms, the release of political prisoners, an independent judiciary, the punishment of corrupt bigwigs, a free press, a new law on political parties allowing for genuine pluralism (and the cancellation of article 8 of the constitution which enshrines the Ba’ath Party as “the leader of state and society”), and an end, once and for all, to arbitrary arrest, police brutality and torture.
Can Bashar meet these demands? Does he have the will and ability to do so? Can he hope to prevail over the entrenched interests of his extended family, of his intelligence and army chiefs, of powerful figures in his Alawite community, of rich Sunni merchants of Damascus traditionally allied to the Assad family, and of the small but powerful “new bourgeoisie,” made rich by the transition from a state-controlled to a market-oriented economy, over which he has himself presided in the past decade? All these disparate forces want no change in a system which has brought them privilege and wealth. Above all, can Bashar change the brutal methods of his police and security forces? Could anyone in just a few weeks hope to change habits of repression ingrained over half a century, and indeed far longer? (For autocracy is not an Assad invention.)
The Bashar years
Until the outbreak of the crisis, Bashar al-Assad had little or nothing of the menacing pose of a traditional Arab dictator. His manner was modest and, at 45, he looked astonishingly young. His tall willowy frame has none of the robustness of a fighter, while his gaze, questioning and often perplexed, has none of the certainties of a man born to power. He was a young doctor studying ophthalmology in London when the accidental death in 1994 of his elder brother, Basil, an altogether tougher character who was being groomed for the succession, propelled him somewhat reluctantly onto the political scene.
The country he came to rule in 2000 seemed backward in an increasingly globalised and technologically advanced world. His first reforms were therefore financial and commercial. Mobile phones and the internet were introduced. Private schools and universities proliferated. In 2004 private banks and insurance companies were allowed to operate for the first time, and a stock exchange was opened in March 2009. A political and economic alliance was forged with Turkey (and visas abolished), which allowed trade to grow along that border, benefiting Aleppo. The Old City of Damascus was revitalised, ancient courtyard houses restored and hotels and restaurants opened to cater for the growing number of tourists. Before the crisis erupted, Syria was negotiating to join the World Trade Organisation and conclude an association agreement with the European Union.
But Bashar’s years in power seem to have hardened him. He developed a taste for control -- control over the media, over the university, over the economy (through cronies such as his exorbitantly rich cousin Rami Makhlouf), control over society at large. Free expression is not allowed. Political decision-making is restricted to a tight circle around the president and security services. Like his father, Bashar clearly does not like to be pushed around or to seem to yield to pressure. Even so, many Syrians still support him in the belief that, as an educated, modern and secular ruler, he is better placed than most to bring about necessary change.
At the time of writing, Bashar still seems to have a chance, if a slim one, of stabilising the situation and perhaps earning a further spell in power -- but only if he calls a halt to the killing of protesters and takes the lead of the reform movement, and in effect carries out a silent coup against the hardliners.
But it may well be too late for that. Indeed, Bashar may already have lost authority to men like his brother, Maher al-Assad, commander of the regime’s Republican Guard, who seems to advocate crushing the protests by force. If the army and the security services remain loyal, it will be difficult for the opposition to unseat the regime. But there have been ominous rumours of army defections as well as reports that some members of the Ba’ath Party have resigned.
It needs to be recognised that the Assad regime does have determined enemies, at home and abroad, who conspire against it in the neighbouring countries -- Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and also Israel -- and among Syrian exiles in London, Paris and the US. These enemies have smelled blood. Riding on the turbulent wave of popular dissent, they will not easily give up. According to US diplomatic cables, released by WikiLeaks and published in mid-April in The Washington Post, the State Department secretly financed a London-based network of Bashar’s opponents to the tune of $12m between 2005 and 2010.
A continuous whole
It is probably fair to view Bashar al-Assad’s term of office and that of his father as a single continuous whole. Not only did Hafez al-Assad decide that Bashar should succeed him, but he also bequeathed to him an autocratic system based on an all-powerful centralising presidency, and a set of principles and external allies and opponents which together determine Syria’s foreign policy. Bashar’s whole career -- like that of his father before him -- has been shaped by Syria’s contest with Israel. Syria has had to live, fight and survive in a hostile Middle East environment shaped by Israel’s overwhelming victory over the Arabs in the 1967 war, its seizure of extensive Arab territories including Syria’s Golan Heights and its subsequent close alliance with the United States, which put in place a sort of dual US-Israeli regional hegemony from which Syria and its allies have sought to free themselves ever since. The 1973 war waged by Egypt and Syria to recover lost territories and force Israel to negotiate a global peace had some initial success but failed to realise its objectives. Instead, Egypt made a separate peace with Israel in 1979 and was removed from the Arab line up. The rest of the region was then exposed to the full force of Israeli power.
Looking to its defences, Syria established a partnership in 1979 with the newborn Islamic Republic of Iran. And once Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 in a bid to expel Syrian influence, destroy the PLO and bring Lebanon into its orbit, Syria found local allies among the Shia resistance movements of South Lebanon -- of which Hizbullah became the most prominent. Waging a guerrilla war, and benefiting from logistical support and weapons from Iran and Syria, Hizbullah managed to force Israel out of South Lebanon in 2000, after an 18-year occupation. From this was born the Tehran-Damascus-Hizbullah axis, which over the years grew into the principal regional challenger of the United States and Israel.
Both the United States and Israel have done their utmost to disrupt this axis and prevent it acquiring any effective deterrent capability: Iran has faced constant demonisation, sanctions and threat of military attack because of its nuclear programme, while Israel has made repeated attempts to destroy Hizbullah, including its war on Lebanon in 2006. Syria, in turn, has faced intimidation, isolation, US sanctions and an Israeli attack in 2007 on its alleged nuclear facility.
Bashar has had to wrestle with his own crises. He survived George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” after 9/11, then faced the greater ordeal of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the long occupation that followed. Had the United States been successful in Iraq, Syria would have been the next target, as pro-Israel neocons, the main architects of the Iraq war, had intended. Syria was then confronted by the 2005 Lebanese crisis, triggered by the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Syrian forces were ousted from Lebanon and the Assad regime threatened with extinction by the combined pressures of the United States and France.
There is also a much older memory that still hangs like a dark cloud -- that of the massacres at Hama in central Syria in 1982. It was then that Hafez al-Assad put down, with great violence, an armed insurrection by the Muslim Brothers. Beginning in 1977, this Islamic group had launched a series of terrorist attacks against the regime, murdering several of the president’s close associates and eventually seizing control of Hama, where they killed Ba’ath Party and government officials. The regime regained control of the town, but only after a bloodbath in which between 10,000 and 20,000 people lost their lives.
Thirty years later, some Islamists still dream of revenge, while minorities such as the Alawites fear that if the regime were to fall, they would be massacred in turn. Emerging from underground, the Muslim Brothers have now called on the people to join the protests. The cry for freedom risks being drowned by sectarian strife.
Such has been Bashar al-Assad’s harsh apprenticeship. He has had to surmount a series of regime-threatening crises much like those his father confronted in his time. Both Assads felt some satisfaction at managing to survive them and thus provide Syria with a measure of stability and security, especially compared with Iraq and Lebanon. There was, however, a price to pay. Having to live and survive in a hostile environment inevitably conferred great powers on the security services, guardians of the regime -- to the increasing resentment of ordinary Syrians. A dialogue of the deaf ensued. The Assads’ intense preoccupation with external crises led them to neglect the internal scene. Who would need political freedoms, they no doubt thought, if given the benefits of security and stability? As the regime’s official daily newspaper Tishrin wrote on 25 April: “The most sublime form of freedom is the security of the nation.”
The recent explosion of popular anger has evidently taken Bashar by surprise, as it did other Arab autocrats. He has had to wrench his attention away from the perils and excitements of foreign policy to urgent challenges at home. To devise and implement far-reaching domestic reforms, as the present situation urgently demands, will require a radical change of focus. It will not be easy, and a favourable outcome is far from certain. Bashar now faces an internal threat to his regime at least as dangerous as any of the external threats he and his father confronted so successfully.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
Article 3.
NYT – Books
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Inspector
Leslie H. Gelb
THE AGE OF DECEPTION
Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times
By Mohamed ElBaradei
340 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $27.
May 6, 2011 -- The Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei has stated his intention to “nominate myself” to be president of Egypt, but this memoir will not improve his election prospects. In personal terms, it’s hard to imagine anything less thrilling to Egypt’s street revolutionaries than ElBaradei’s accounts of his meals (“The food was very basic, with few choices: noodles, meat and kimchi; no fruit or salad”) and accommodations (“a worn, drab-colored suite consisting of a bedroom and a salon”) in places like North Korea. Nor will his fellow Egyptians be much intrigued by the details of his battles against nuclear proliferators. At the moment, the protestors have other priorities.
On the other hand, foreign policy leaders and wonks everywhere will find plenty in this memoir to stir debates about the most vital task for global survival — the need to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, especially to rogue states and terrorists.
That quest is ElBaradei’s story. For decades he was an intimate participant in dramatic nuclear proliferation confrontations that dominated headlines. He served as a senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog and inspection arm, for 13 years (1984-97) before rising to its director-generalship in 1997. He resigned in 2009 after completing his third term and announced his interest in running against President Hosni Mubarak in the election scheduled for this year. In 2005, he and the agency were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their nonproliferation endeavors. Doubtless the Norwegian selectors, always ready to needle American hawks, also sought to reward his bold critique of the American-led war against Iraq, especially since they drew ill-tempered ripostes from top officials in the Bush administration, particularly “Dick Cheney and his faction.”
In many ways, this David-Goliath confrontation over Iraq both drove ElBaradei in his years atop the I.A.E.A. and also inspired this memoir. The Iraq story is well known. The Bush team insisted that Saddam Hussein — who had cheated on nukes and chemical weapons once before and been caught — had or was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and they demanded I.A.E.A. inspections of Iraq to confirm it. The agency conducted 247 inspections at 147 sites in Iraq from November 2002 until March 2003 and found no violations and no nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the United States insisted on its own “evidence” and went to war. There can be no exaggerating the negative effects of this experience on world opinion toward the United States and upon ElBaradei himself as I.A.E.A. chief.
ElBaradei’s self-proclaimed mission became preventing another Iraq-type war. To this end, he significantly upgraded the agency’s inspection capabilities, building on the work of his predecessor, Hans Blix. At the same time, ElBaradei decried American counterproliferation efforts as warmongering. These campaigns provided the three themes of his memoir: the need to strengthen the mandate and standing of the I.A.E.A., to restrain sword-waving by the great powers (read the United States), and to emphasize diplomacy and collective security instead.
First, and not surprisingly, ElBaradei is well aware of the atomic energy agency’s handicaps. For one, its inspections are generally restricted to Non-Proliferation Treaty members and only to those sites declared by those members. Extending this limited mandate to other sites requires a strong push from the United Nations Security Council. The agency has only some 2,300 employees, a very tight budget of about $450 million and limited intelligence-gathering resources. Of course, ElBaradei wants to buttress inspection authority and capabilities. He wants more intelligence-sharing from the big powers. He is particularly angry at Washington for not disclosing its intelligence that Syria was building a nuclear facility, and then for doing nothing to stop Israel from bombing that facility in 2007. He also pushes for tougher safeguards for nuclear material and for moving control of the developmental stages of the “fuel cycle” from national to international hands.
This is all sensible but probably not attainable. While the United Nations does a number of things quite well, it is not very adept or courageous when it comes to sensitive political matters and national prerogatives. Take, for example, the curious fact that the members of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights elected Libya to its chairmanship in 2003, despite its appalling record, because it was “Africa’s turn.” If this is how business is done, it is unlikely that the I.A.E.A.’s board of governors and the Security Council will ever endow the agency with the common-sense powers and capabilities ElBaradei wants.
Beyond this, ElBaradei insistently describes the United States and other great powers as more the problem than the solution. In a “new era, one characterized by clandestine activity and the willingness of some countries to blatantly deceive,” the Iraq experience showed “that this deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators.” ElBaradei goes on to fault the United States for offering direct dialogue with North Korea while refusing talks with Iran “without preconditions.”
He goes on to say that Washington does not seem to understand the actual causes of proliferation, which he writes “were rooted much deeper, in the extreme economic and social inequalities that prevailed between North and South . . . and the conflicts and tensions that continued to fester in specific regions.” Those tensions certainly lead to proliferation, but “economic and social inequalities” have no detectable bearing on why Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Iran, Syria and Israel have pursued nuclear programs.
ElBaradei passionately advocates making diplomacy the main recourse in counterproliferation — and he’s right to do so. But when he argues that “the increasing distrust between different cultures” form the barrier to “an enduring and collective security” he’s on shaky ground.
His credo is diplomacy above all else, for however long it takes and whatever the risk that nuclear weapons will be built in the meantime. He exhibits more sympathy for non-Western proliferators and their needs than for the major powers and their security and political concerns. At times, his narrative comes close to condoning the motives of states that seek nuclear weapons. “Iran’s goal is not to become another North Korea — a nuclear weapons possessor but a pariah in the international community — but rather Brazil or Japan, a technological powerhouse with the capacity to develop nuclear weapons if the political winds were to shift, while remaining a nonnuclear weapons state,” he writes. As for Iran’s concealing its nuclear program at Natanz, he says Iran “was not intending to ‘hide’ it per se.”
And he adds his voice to those who contend that the fight against proliferation can’t succeed unless the established nuclear powers (above all, America and Russia) reduce their stockpiles and move toward nuclear disarmament. It will be many moons and unerringly effective inspections before leaders in Washington and Moscow contemplate such a course. Surely ElBaradei knows this.
Nonetheless, “The Age of Deception” provides the grist for serious debate even as it helpfully chronicles the International Atomic Energy Agency’s journey and tribulations as it evolved from a relatively obscure group of technicians into an organization with growing international clout. But if those following in ElBaradei’s path think they can combat proliferation without the major powers — particularly the United States — assuming a central role, they are wrong. Checking proliferation will require more innovative and tighter cooperation between the agency ElBaradei loves and the United States, of which he no longer seems especially fond.
Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former senior official in the State and Defense Departments, and a former New York Times columnist.
Article 4.
Vanity Fair
Hillary Clinton - Woman of the World
Jonathan Alter
June 2011 -- It was four a.m. when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and by midmorning she was in the Oval Office conferring with President Obama. The night before, as her plane was en route from Tunis, they had agreed that the vote of the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on Libya meant that it was now decision time on launching a third American war in the Middle East, though no one in the U.S. government dared call it that. Muammar Qaddafi was ramping up his genocidal threats, pledging to show “no mercy” toward his own people (whom he described as “rats”) in the eastern city of Benghazi. Inside the White House, the president quickly settled on an American bombing campaign, but he and the secretary of state thought strongly that Great Britain and France should be seen as taking the lead. They agreed that there was no choice but for Hillary to sit down in person with both British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy. “I’m sorry, Hillary, but you’re going to fly over the Atlantic again,” said Obama, who was about to leave on his own foreign trip, to Brazil. So only hours after landing from Tunis, she was headed back to Paris.
By then it was clear that the “Arab Spring” of 2011 was creating tumult not just in the Middle East but inside the Obama administration. Not since the fall of Communism, in the late 80s, has a U.S. administration faced a chain reaction of foreign crises that seemed so much out of its control.
At first, Hillary looked clairvoyant: in January, when the street protests were still small in Tunisia, she lectured decrepit dictatorial regimes at a conference in Qatar that “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” Within days, demonstrators filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a vibrant plea for greater freedom that swiftly spread to Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, and eventually even Syria. But if Madam Secretary could be ahead of the curve, she was also sometimes behind it, caught in a dizzying series of upheavals that left her both exhilarated and exhausted. In early February, Hillary said the regime of Hosni Mubarak was “stable”; he was gone 17 days later. When she felt White House officials were pushing too hard in public statements for Mubarak to resign, Hillary complained to President Obama, who was unmoved. Yet on the big picture, especially the need to isolate the menacing regime in Tehran, the president and his secretary of state fully agreed. They understood immediately that, for all the facile accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy, a one-size-fits-all foreign policy wouldn’t work. Doctrines, they felt, were for the doctrinaire.
Hillary had been one of the first in the administration to privately raise the issue of a no-fly zone. But she retreated when her main ally in the Cabinet, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, loudly and publicly said a no-fly zone would mean attacking ground positions, and it was a bad idea to get involved in Libya. The White House was searching for a way to arm the rebels—a strategy Hillary found problematic—but also resisted a no-fly zone. “Lots of people throw around phrases like no-fly zone. They talk about it as though it’s just a video game,” White House chief of staff Bill Daley said dismissively.
Hillary decided to push her case on March 12, after the Arab League voted to request action from the U.N. Security Council—an extraordinary decision to break Arab ranks and ask the nations they had for so long denounced as colonialists to help. “Their statement moved her,” said a close aide, adding that two meanings of “moved” applied.
A myth quickly arose that the women in the administration—Clinton, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, and national-security aide Samantha Power, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning book on genocide was influential in Obama’s thinking—drove the debate. “The idea that the girls pushed the boys into war is ludicrous,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, who until recently served as director of policy planning at State. “We were dismissed for months as soft liberals concerned about ‘peripheral’ development issues like women and girls, and now we’re Amazonian Valkyrie warmongers. Please.” In truth, the president, as usual, was not persuaded by anyone to change his mind. He was always a reluctant warrior and decided to intervene only when imminent atrocities in Benghazi made sitting on his hands even riskier.
What the women policymakers did do was help mobilize the alliance. Rice worked hard for the broadest possible language in U.N. Resolution 1973, to allow maximum allied flexibility, while Hillary made sure that China and Russia abstained instead of vetoing the resolution.
Hillary already spends much of her life on her plane, but for six crucial days in March she might just as well have used her seat belt as a fashion accessory, flying nearly 20,000 miles on the Washington-Paris-Cairo-Tunis-Washington-Paris-Washington route. On March 14 and 15, she met with Nicolas Sarkozy. The French president was gung-ho to attack Qaddafi, who by then was reversing rebel advances and regaining the offensive. After taking the measure of Mahmoud Jibril, recognized as one of the leaders of Libya’s transitional government, Hillary agreed to U.S. intervention if the U.N. backed it. Viewing television images of the dictator’s brutality from her quarters at the U.S. ambassador’s residence strengthened her resolve. She took to seconding her husband’s much-repeated line that the biggest mistake of his presidency was doing nothing to prevent genocide in Rwanda.
Hillary’s personal connection to Sarkozy helped cement the coalition. In 2010, Sarkozy had gallantly steadied her after a shoe had come off her foot as she climbed the stone steps of the Élysée Palace. (“I may not be Cinderella but you’re certainly my Prince Charming!” Hillary inscribed a photo, which sits in his office.) Now, over mixed fruit and chocolate, the French president took the normal diplomatic flattery a step further in their “bilat” (diplo-speak for bilateral talks). “Hillary, I always like being with you,” he told her. “You are tough. You are smart. You are a good person.”
From Paris, on the 15th, she went with some trepidation to Cairo, where many young protesters still angry about her support for Mubarak refused to meet with her. Others vented to her face in a Four Seasons conference room before the mood changed and they talked about democracy building. Her 10 to 15 minutes in Tahrir Square the next day (where she was greeted cordially) and drop-by in Tunisia on March 17 left her small security detail jittery; the local authorities, her guards felt, had no clue what they were doing. She arrived back in Washington early on March 18 before heading across the Atlantic again. She arrived in Paris at six a.m. on March 19 and set to work rounding up support from other allies.
The rollout of the “kinetic military action” (the ridiculous euphemism used to avoid the word “war”) was botched and misleading. Hillary had little warning before Sarkozy announced that French planes were in the skies over Libya. At her Paris press conference she made it seem, with her frequent references to “they” and “them”—with the U.S. providing “assistance”—that someone else was leading the intervention. Hillary was safely on her plane en route back to Washington on the evening of March 19 when the world would learn that the core of the attack—112 cruise missiles directed at Libyan targets—was largely American. It would be another 10 days before she would go to London to arrange for the military campaign to be handled by nato. Whatever the burden-sharing logistics, the United States was in deep now, on a course that no one could predict.
Madam Secretary
For Barack Obama, the Arab Spring and its aftermath will shape just one critical piece of his record. But, for Hillary Clinton, the swirling challenges of the region are likely to determine her legacy. Many diplomats remain anxious; the world they knew has been upended. Yet they also understand that the months ahead will be Hillary’s moment to help turn those ripples into a permanent tide of reform and renewal.
But Hillary’s intense diplomatic efforts to forge a coalition to go to war in Libya came at the exact worst time, only two months after WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing Web site run by Julian Assange, began posting thousands of classified State Department cables online. Candid descriptions of foreign leaders (e.g., Putin is the “alpha dog” of a “virtual mafia state”) were published around the world and have already led to the departure of U.S. ambassadors in Mexico and Ecuador, with more fallout on the way. Hillary told staff that she could not fathom how an army private, Bradley Manning, with psychological problems and a drag-queen boyfriend could single-handedly cause the United States unprecedented embarrassment just by labeling massive downloads as Lady Gaga songs.
Several allies needed little comfort. “Don’t worry about it,” one leader told Hillary. “You should see what we say about you.” Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wasn’t so forgiving. In 2008 the loutish media baron and billionaire had described Barack Obama as “young, handsome and bronzato (bronzed),” but after WikiLeaks he chose to play the victim. It wasn’t clear whether he was genuinely upset about a cable describing him as “physically and politically weak” or merely projecting his anger over allegations in the Italian press about his relationship with a teenage Moroccan belly dancer suspected of prostitution. Either way, he unloaded on Hillary during an awkward one-on-one in Astana, Kazakhstan.
According to a firsthand account I heard an hour afterward in a hallway near the conference room, Berlusconi told Hillary, “The press is all over me. They think the U.S. is saying that I’m vain and stay out all night. I’m tired, Hillary, very tired. I had such a good relationship with ‘Beel,’ ‘George,’ and ‘Barack’—how can they say this about me?” Hillary explained that, as Berlusconi knew perfectly well, the cables were written by mostly lower-level people. “Look, Silvio, you and I have been friends for 15 years. I’ve been there. Nobody has had more things alleged—true or untrue—than me.” Mostly she let him vent. Her background as a politician and long history with Berlusconi and others wounded by the cables helped ease the tensions.
Even as she navigates these choppy waters, Hillary’s own vessel is solid and surprisingly leakproof. One of the least-noticed changes in American public life is how she has been transformed from a subject of constant gossip and calumny into a figure of consequence and little controversy. There are structural reasons: secretaries of state always exist in a zone slightly above grubby politics, which is meant—in theory, at least—to stop at the water’s edge. The right-wing attack machine can apparently concentrate only on one or two villains at a time, and since 2008 it has been Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s turn in the barrel, not Hillary’s. I tried for months to find people willing to lace into her. None would, not even politicians and TV blowhards who had once catalogued her distortions and dined out on despising her.
Hillary Clinton is now in her ninth straight year as the Gallup poll’s “America’s Most Admired Woman,” but being a great secretary of state requires more than energy, brains, and celebrity. Dean Acheson helped rebuild Europe after World War II. Henry Kissinger, who acted like the secretary of state for Richard Nixon even before he got the job, engineered the opening to China. But does anyone think Colin Powell left State with a better reputation than he had before becoming secretary? Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice broke the gender barrier and were competent enough, but left no historic imprint. The State Department isn’t called “Foggy Bottom” for nothing.
For any secretary of state, the prerequisite for success is a strong relationship with the president. “He’s hard for her to connect with,” admits one of her top people. “It’s hard for her to break through to the more-than-polite level.” That isn’t meant to suggest chilliness or dysfunction. “Is it Bush-Baker?” the aide continues, referring to the relationship between the first President Bush and James Baker, who was so tight with his boss that he felt obliged to resign as secretary of state to run Bush’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 1992. “No. But there’s a lot of mutual respect, and she feels like she’s always got a shot with him.” Imagine how it feels to be a supplicant, looking for her “shot” at impressing the president. It was only four years ago that Hillary said her main opponent in the Democratic primaries was “irresponsible and frankly naïve” when he promised to meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and other rogue regimes without preconditions during his first year in office. She hasn’t forgotten who turned out to be right on that one.
One day I asked Hillary point-blank how she gets along with Obama, with whom she meets a few times a week when neither is on the road. She gave me a predictable answer, that her relationship is “not only very good professionally but very warm personally.” Of course, “warm” is just another term of art in Washington, where the advice to anyone looking for a friend has long been to get a dog. When I ask for examples, she has to pause before recalling a very public moment: a spring day in 2009 when the weather was so good that the president suggested they go outside, where they were photographed chatting at a picnic table on the South Lawn. “It was exactly what I could have hoped for. It was spontaneous and heartfelt, and we had a good time,” she says. Her second example is a full hug she and the president shared in the Situation Room after the health-care bill finally passed.
She accepted the post, in November of 2008, only after President-Elect Obama—in an inspired move over the objections of many on his campaign staff—twisted not just her arm, she informed friends, but her fingers, toes, and every other bone in her body. The president, for his part, is proud of himself for choosing her. He knows that she represents the United States better than anyone but him and is—to the surprise of many Obama veterans—refreshingly low-maintenance. When budget season arrived this year and the departments all faced drastic cuts, Hillary used a Cabinet meeting to offer tips on how to avoid making cuts that would affect vulnerable people—children, the elderly—and look bad politically. (She recalled that Newt Gingrich’s effort to slash the school-lunch program, which put Gingrich on the defensive, was the real turning point in the 1995 budget debate.) Several second-tier Cabinet members thought it one of the most useful White House meetings they had ever attended.
I’ve interviewed Hillary numerous times since she was First Lady of Arkansas, and it’s usually frustrating. She’s terrific off the record: blunt, ironic, and incisive about people, including her husband. When she cuts to the nub of something and laughs infectiously, you can see why her friends consider her such good company. On the record is tougher, especially when she’s in a job where a single misplaced word can turn into an international incident. It’s not that she doesn’t trust at least some reporters; otherwise she wouldn’t risk private candor. But the distrust for the news media as a species—the sense of being burned and burned again—long ago made her wary and sometimes defensive.
Up, Up, and Away
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has flown more than half a million miles to 80 countries in her two and a half years on the job. Her plane looks like Air Force One on the outside, but isn’t as grand on the inside. It’s one of four Boeing 757s that the military fitted with 15 ordinary coach seats for reporters in the rear, a business-class staff workspace with tables in the middle that seats about 25, and Clinton’s quarters up front near an area jammed with communications gear. She spends most of her time in a small private room with a desk, a modest pullout sofa bed, and a flat-screen for secure videoconferencing. The intimacy of the quarters intensified an already awkward trip at the end of February when Samantha Power, who had been forced to resign from the Obama campaign in 2008 after calling Hillary a “monster,” traveled with the secretary of state to a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva. Some months before he died, Richard Holbrooke, the legendary special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had brokered peace between them, but now no one knew what would happen en route. “It was uncomfortable, but everyone was extremely professional,” said one official aboard.
For most of her thousands of hours in the air, Hillary changes out of her trademark pantsuit (yellow is her favorite color for clothes and in the décor of her homes) into a fleece top and sweats. Meals consist largely of fruit and vegetables (she has a special taste for hot peppers) and maybe a scotch or Bloody Mary. “Don’t bring me the dessert!” she loudly tells the flight attendants only moments before sauntering into the staff cabin, brownie already in hand: “I know—I’ve been bad.” Occasional cupcakes with candles are also exempt because Hillary is religious about observing staff birthdays. She resists movies (despite a weakness for anything with Meryl Streep, especially Out of Africa), reads yet more briefing papers than she’s already consumed in Washington, scans news on an iPad, and sometimes manages a few pages of a mystery, but mostly she sleeps, without any pills, often right through landing. “If she couldn’t sleep most of the way,” says Philippe Reines, her longtime press secretary, “she wouldn’t be able to function.”
Some of her best road stories involve Holbrooke, her close friend, a maestro of diplomacy for more than four decades. (Holbrooke was meeting with Hillary in her office last December when he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, where he later died from a ruptured aorta.) At his Kennedy Center memorial service, which played more like a roast, she recalled that Holbrooke was once, in Pakistan, so insistent on making a point that he followed her all the way into the ladies’ room. On boarding her plane, he would test every seat to see which was the most comfortable, then hound whichever official was assigned to it to trade with him. Hillary especially enjoyed when he would disappear into the airplane restroom and emerge like an oversize Easter bunny in his bright-yellow sleeping suit. “On hearing Winston Churchill’s motto, ‘Never, never, never, never give up,’ [Richard] called Churchill halfhearted,” she said. Hillary thinks this also perfectly captures her own theory of persistence.
Aloft, the secretary of state can often be found with a black binder clip in her hair instead of fastened onto classified documents. It helps. Her stylist, Isabelle Goetz, does her hair in Washington, but on the road—unless the ambassador’s wife can recommend someone good—she takes care of herself. For years she’s routinely done her own makeup, which is easier because she has good skin. And her genes seem unusually strong. Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, is 92 but looks more like 80. Hillary is 63 but seems a bit younger. She is one of those lucky people who look better—or at least not worse—with age.
All of this is relevant politically because it means that in 2016, when she’s 68, she is unlikely to be written off as too old to run for president. Since the beginning of the year, Hillary has said repeatedly that she will leave office no later than early 2013 and retire from public life. In Bahrain, just before the Middle East upheaval, I heard her be more direct than ever before on the subject: “I’ve had a fascinating and rewarding public career .... I think I will serve as secretary of state as my last public position and then I’ll probably go back to advocacy work, particularly on behalf of women and children, and probably around the world.”
Hillary isn’t as calculating as her public image. The 2000 Senate race, for instance, was practically serendipitous. But it’s hard to believe “Clinton” and “ambition” have been fully sundered. In 2016, the Democrats are unlikely to have anyone better or more acceptable to different parts of the party. The nearer-term options are far-fetched. When Bob Woodward said on CNN last fall that Hillary’s switching jobs with Joe Biden was “on the table,” the reaction inside both the White House and State Department was to scoff. Neither has an incentive to switch. With the Iraq portfolio already in his pocket, Biden gets plenty of foreign-policy action. His bigger concern is staying on good terms with Hillary. In late 2009, he worried that their long and friendly relationship was in jeopardy over Af-Pak policy. He wanted few troops and heavy reliance on Predator drones; she wanted an open-ended, hugely expensive counter-insurgency commitment. The president ended up sending many more troops than Biden wanted—a total commitment of 100,000—but with withdrawal deadlines beginning this year that Clinton, siding with the Pentagon, opposed. To ease the tensions, Bi