Jerry Doesn't Miss Condi

BEIRUT -- The world is a better place today because Condoleezza Rice has retired from American public service, and my water turtle Jerry has found a new home with friends in Beirut.

My water turtle Jerry has always been the best barometer I know of American diplomacy in the Middle East. For the entire five years of his life to date, his antics in and out of his water tank on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean have always echoed larger worlds. He had the misfortune five years ago to be born into the era of Condoleezza Rice. He tried his best -- within the limits of a water turtle's world -- to help the lady deal with the many challenges she faced.

Water turtles do not have many ways to communicate with humans, but Jerry and I understood the code he developed. His behavior was usually intimately associated with -- and a response to -- American diplomacy in the Middle East. When the United States was wreaking havoc in Iraq, Jerry would sulk for days on end, neither eating nor swimming. He would burrow under the mound of colored stones I bought him and remain there, signaling that events in progress were not to his liking, and that a change in direction was needed.

His most profound communication method was his frequent attempt to jump out of his water tank -- often successful in his younger days when his body mass was much smaller than it is now. He did this first by paddling furiously across the length of the tank and then propelling himself over the edge with a flying leap, perhaps making believe he was a sailfish for just a fleeting moment. As he grew larger, he could no longer do this. Instead he used a different technique of grabbing the edge of the tank with his front legs and pulling himself over into a new and larger world. Sustainable freedom -- he understood better than Condoleezza Rice -- was attained by repeated, diligent self-effort.

Jerry's escapes were always a household drama, as we would have to spend some time and energy looking under every piece of furniture to find him, including lifting large couches. I also eventually noticed a pattern: Jerry attempted a dramatic escape every time Condoleezza Rice was in the Middle East. He was always trying to tell her that success did not come easily, and required a major exertion of effort and expenditure of stored political capital, or, in his case, stored food energy. Success in Rice's goals of promoting Arab-Israeli peace, democratic transformations, or counter-terrorism policies required the same sort of sustained perseverance and massive exertion of energy that Jerry demonstrated in his repeated escapes from his tank home. Like him, Rice had to dare to leap out of her tank to engage the world with courage and ingenuity.

We did not fully understand this at first. We thought Jerry simply liked the repeated challenge of a great escape, followed by sleeping in a less impressive hiding place (his most noteworthy destinations were the kitchen and a distant bedroom). Or we thought he simply wanted a larger tank, which we dutifully purchased.

I asked some biology professor friends about this and they explained that water turtles actually like to be in the open air on a regular basis. So we started taking him out of his tank once a day and letting him walk around. This brought him and us immense pleasure -- a negotiated, win-win diplomatic success. 

When Condoleezza Rice finally left public office last month, and the Obama administration quickly launched a new era of diplomacy with the appointment of Middle East special envoy George Mitchell, I took this as a reverse signal from American diplomacy to Jerry: Change has started. Time will tell if things improve in the Middle East also, but for Jerry the water turtle change has already happened. He is now living with young American student friends in another part of Beirut, in a spacious apartment where he roams freely. The last report I had was that he crossed the entire living-dining area in just under 90 seconds.

I am not totally sure of the geo-political significance of all this, but I do sense that there is a lesson here in the parallels between Jerry the water turtle's escapades and the travails of American foreign policy. It is simply that perseverance, focus and diligence pay off in the end, and negotiated agreements must serve the interest of both sides -- even in a power imbalance between a turtle and humans.

Jerry now enjoys the benefits of such a life-guiding philosophy. He is large, healthy and roams far and wide in his new home. Condoleezza Rice is out of public office, having failed to grasp the most simple principles of professional success and personal happiness that my water turtle Jerry mastered years ago.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.