Once the Egyptian people are in the streets, determined to change the government, you have no choice. It is hard to support an authoritarian regime; we have tried over the years to encourage friendly regimes like the Mubarak regime to reform before it got to that point. There were ways to give the people a way to organize and be a counterweight to the Muslim Brotherhood but the [Mubarak] regime didn’t allow that to happen, and once the people were in Tahrir Square, it was too late.You mention the “Arabists” in the State Department and the perceived pro-Arab bent in general. Are these latest uprisings posing a problem for these experts, who must navigate between supporting US interests and supporting democracy? Absolutely, it poses quite a challenge. I recall Bush, in the second inaugural, I said that we can no longer support a policy that for 60 years has talked about stability and tried to trade it for democracy. I remember the realists [at the State Department] rushed to the barricades and said we should defend American interests. It turns out it is the realists that didn’t realize authoritarianism is unstable. I talked about ‘American realism’; pursuing our values is our best way to stability and indeed defend our interests. There is a fair amount to answer for in assuming authoritarian regimes are stable. But we need to remember we are not an NGO. We don’t have the option of not dealing with authoritarian regimes. We have to deal with Egypt and the Saudis, and so on, but standing for the proposition that they need to reform quickly was a very wise position for the President [Bush], to be on the right side of history.Turning Iraq into a democracy might be an example of being on the right side of history. You mentioned in an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that the ideal situation would have been to see Iraq become a pillar of democracy. I wonder, in all the discussions about Iraq over the years, has the public and media missed this issue? That America was deeply committed to creating a new pillar of our alliance system in the Middle East, a democratic and moderate one? You are right, people did miss this. We didn’t use military force to take down Saddam to bring democracy, we went after Saddam because he was a security threat. While the intelligence on his weapon stockpiles turned out to be wrong... [the fact that] Saddam had WMD was not a theoretical issue. He had been close to a nuclear device and used gas on his own people. It was a very real proposition that this destabilizing factor who supported terror, that he was a real threat to our security. That is why we went to Iraq. But once we had overthrown him, we had to have a view towards the future, and wanted to have a democratic government. We had the belief, strategically, in an Iraq that is an ally and friend of the US and doesn’t threaten its neighbors and would shift the regional balance, so that was very much in our minds.
In light of that, do you think the Bush administration’s policy was vindicated by Barack Obama’s actions, despite his early critique of your administration’s policies? I do think so. History has a long arc, not a short one.One has to be careful about talking about legacies. But the president’s belief that authoritarianism was not stable...the idea that people must move forward to freedom for stability, that has been vindicated. The president understood the real two-state solution had to come not only with a focus on borders, but also with democratic institutions and decent leadership. He said early on that we would not deal with Yasser Arafat, and the Europeans criticized us. Finally, I do think that the fact we talked about an Iranian threat but not [about] an arms race with Iraq is a direct result of what we did in Iraq. All of those decisions that were controversial are bearing fruit.
We may not be talking about an arms race with Iraq, but the situation in Syria is an ever-present issue in the region. US Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford recently had to leave that country because of threats to his life, based on his opposition to the regime’s crackdown. How do you view his actions in Syria in light of the fact that it was you who recalled the US ambassador after Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri’s death in a bombing attributed to Syria and Hezbollah? I absolutely think that Ambassador Ford did the right thing. I know him personally, he is a fine foreign service officer. Going [out of the embassy and] to Homs is in the finest tradition of the US – standing with people seeking freedom. I speak in the book about withdrawing our ambassador [to Syria] in light of the evidence that Syria was complicit [in the murder of Hariri]. It was obviously better to have someone on the ground to make that stand; you see it in the way our diplomatic people have done it in Belarus and Cuba, and Ford is to be admired for what he did.What are your plans for the future? To be a professor at Stanford. I love being back at Stanford. I consider myself an academic who took a multiyear detour. I’ve been there for 30 years; I love teaching, I love writing and although I may miss my time in government and I am proud of my public service, I am happy to be a civilian again.