Condoleezza Rice on Her Worst Year—and the Iraq Surge

Tensions around Iraq had reached a fever pitch around 2006. It might have been the worst year of my professional career. It was a year in which Hamas won parliamentary elections [in the Palestinian territories]. You had the war in Lebanon. You had Iraq coming apart and the first sense that Afghanistan was not going particularly well. Obviously, what we were doing in Iraq was not working. I had taken a trip there in October—what I saw called into question the Iraqis’ commitment to their own multiconfessional future. In a sense, I felt I had to really hold out and not back the surge until I felt comfortable we were going to be doing something different. Just putting more American forces into a situation where we were trying the same strategy seemed to me just to be a recipe for getting more Americans killed.

I knew President Bush was looking for answers. By that time we’d been together six years [and] I owed him my honest and unvarnished opinion. We had a meeting in the Roosevelt Room: The Situation Room was being renovated. I said something like, “If they’re determined to have their own civil war maybe we ought to just let them have it.” That’s a pretty sharp thing to say to the President of the United States. Then he shot back, “So is your opinion that we should just let them kill each other while we stand on the sidelines?” I think it was surprising to people at the table, because it was pretty sharp, which was quite unusual.