Page 137 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

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Africans, resulting in widespread atrocities and rapes. Sudan has pow-
erful friends, especially China, which buys its oil and supplies it with arms.
Since 2003, it is estimated that up to 300,000 innocent men, women, and
children have been murdered on the basis of their ethnicity and nearly
2.2 million have seen their villages and livelihoods destroyed. In 2004,
Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled the Darfur conflict as genocide
and said it was the most terrible humanitarian crisis of the new century.
However, as Natsios feared, the Sudanese Embassy pushed back on
Vlasic’s visa application, and he was the only member of the delegation who
wasn’t able to go to Sudan. It seemed Bashir’s Sudan had no room for some-
one with Vlasic’s background.
However, Vlasic still traveled extensively with the Secretary of Defense
and even with Andrew Natsios (though not to Sudan), including an offi-
cial visit to Saudi Arabia during which he joined Secretary Gates, Secre-
tary of State Condoleezza Rice, and a number of others at a dinner with
King Abdullah at his summer palace in Jeddah. The meal was served buf-
fet-style from a serving area that seemed to go on forever. The dinner table
was covered with even more platters of food, leaving barely enough room
for the diners to set down their already overflowing plates. “We were in a
massive ballroom, with a beautiful tiled pool in the middle,” Vlasic
recalled. “One side of the ballroom was a huge aquarium, from the floor
to the ceiling, filled with beautiful corals and hundreds of fish from the
Red Sea, but it also had two big sharks about eight feet long swimming
around in the tank. And as the Saudis fed us dinner, they fed the sharks
their dinner at the same time. It was surreal. I was in a palace in Saudi Ara-
bia, dining with a king, princes, cabinet secretaries, generals, and sharks—
all at the same time!”
At the end of Vlasic’s Fellowship year, it was time for his class’s final
visit with the president. Each Fellow was given the chance to ask the pres-
ident a question or make a comment, and when it came time for Vlasic to
speak, he thanked President Bush for suggesting that he spend time with
Andrew Natsios. He told the president about how he been able to meet
with Natsios and even travel with him to Europe and Africa. President

36 Andrew S. Natsios, president’s special envoy to Sudan, Testimony before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, D.C., April 11, 2007.

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