But on that day the problem was that the Israelis were continuing to lay waste to the West Bank and Gaza. The images of dead innocent Palestinians, Palestinian men being rounded up by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and the siege of Ramallah played over and over on television. That the Israelis were not responding to the President’s call to stop was increasingly frustrating and embarrassing. When asked on CNN on April 7, 2002, what the President had meant by “without delay” in calling for an end to the Israeli operation, I’d said, “It means now.” An Israeli governmental official responded by saying that Israel would withdraw “without delay” when they’d finished their operation. That wasn’t exactly the response we were looking for. The offensive continued.
On April 25, the President hosted Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at his ranch in Texas. During the meeting the Saudi leader asked to be left alone in the living room with his delegation. We were a bit surprised but moved to the screened porch adjacent to where they were meeting. After a few minutes, Gamal Helal, the able U.S. interpreter, rushed into the room where we were sitting. The Arabs trusted Gamal after more than ten years of his being an interpreter and advisor to secretaries of state. He’d somehow been allowed to remain with the Saudis for their confab. He told the President that the Saudis were threatening to go home immediately if the President didn’t stop the Israelis and make them withdraw that day. The President asked rhetorically, “Does it matter if they leave?”
“It would be a disaster,” I said. Colin nodded his agreement and was immediately told by the President to “go and fix it.” He couldn’t. The President, temporizing a bit, asked the Saudi leader to go for a tour of the ranch and talk about religion. As President Bush has written in his memoir, the atmosphere improved while they were riding together in his pickup truck. He and the Saudi encountered a wild turkey that Abdullah took as a sign from God and a bond of friendship between the two men. When the President related the incident that evening at dinner, I thought, Whatever works.
The momentary easing of tensions with the Saudis did not end their insistence that the United States deal with Israel. And we had been turning up the pressure, pushing the Israelis to pull back. I was calling Danny Ayalon every day, sometimes several times a day. He was clearly troubled, but the IDF had a green light to finish what it had started. I appealed to Danny to at least end the siege of the Muqata compound. “Arafat is on CNN speaking by candlelight. You’re making him look like Mother Teresa. Turn on their electricity.”
“They have electricity,” Danny retorted. “He’s just doing that to evoke sympathy.”
“That’s the point,” I said. In another call, on April 27, I told him that the President had instructed me to say that there had better be some movement within twenty-four hours or he would publicly criticize Israel and the prime minister in the harshest terms. I reminded Danny that the President had taken a risk in calling Sharon a “man of peace.” Now it was time for him to prove it.
Finally we got some movement forward. Working with the British, we were able to come to a solution with the Israelis on one part of the problem. Some terrorists had holed up along with Arafat in his compound in Ramallah. Among them were militants who had been convicted of assassinating the Israeli tourism minister a few months earlier. The Israelis wanted the militants, and the Palestinians wanted to keep them jailed but in Palestinian custody. We worked out a deal to have them transferred to British custody in the West Bank. Then the Israelis agreed to start pulling back from Palestinian cities one at a time (in fact, they had already withdrawn from a few) and to announce that they’d continue to do so as long as there were no more attacks. At last, on May 2, five weeks after it had laid siege to the Muqata compound, the IDF withdrew, permitting the smiling Arafat to emerge to a hero’s welcome. The Israelis never seemed to manage public perceptions very well.
On June 10, Sharon visited the White House for the sixth time. The President told him that the United States would insist that the Palestinian Authority would have to reform before peace negotiations. There would have to be a new PA with new leadership. That was music to Sharon’s ears and brought Israel and the United States into close alignment. I leaned over to the President and asked him to reiterate one point, however. “That doesn’t mean that you can kill Arafat,” the President said to Sharon, who nodded in agreement.
WITH THE immediate crisis receding, we returned again to the question of what to do in the Middle East. Colin and the State Department again proposed a peace conference; the President again said no, not with Arafat. The Palestinian Authority had launched a hundred-day reform plan for governance, but we had little confidence that it would actually implement it. Yet there was clearly a void. If we weren’t ready to support negotiations, what were we prepared to do?
The question bothered the President, who was turning it over in his head almost daily. I would go to the Oval Office for our morning meeting, only to have him ask questions about the Palestinians. The one that was most on his mind was why the PA could not find decent leadership. He knew many Palestinians, mostly living in the United States, and they were entrepreneurial people. He just couldn’t understand why, even under occupation, the Palestinians had not “found their Nelson Mandela,” as he put it. The President wanted to give a speech to rally Palestinians and the world behind the cause of decent governance. Already at a press conference during an EU-U.S. summit, the President had called for elections in the Palestinian territories. The idea had gone nowhere and had barely been noticed amid the calls for a peace conference.
The President had become deeply convinced that the question wasn’t whether to establish a Palestinian state; it was “What kind of Palestinian state?” He wanted to put on the agenda the right of the Palestinians to live in freedom both from Israel and from their own corrupt leaders. Ironically, one cornerstone of the administration’s Freedom Agenda would come from the search for an enduring and sustainable end to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
I called Mike Gerson, and we sat down to sketch out ideas for a presidential speech. In the address the President would call for the establishment of a provisional Palestinian state founded on democracy, institutional reform, and the renunciation of terrorism. He’d also call on Israel to cease building settlements in the occupied territories and to eventually withdraw its forces to positions held prior to September 28, 2000. Further, he’d say that the Israelis needed to take steps to restore freedom of movement in the territories to help improve the Palestinian economy. And he’d state directly that the Palestinians needed new leadership.
The speech clearance process proved to be an interagency nightmare. We dropped the idea of a provisional state, accepting State’s view that the Palestinians would reject the proposal. They wanted permanent borders, not temporary ones. The debate continued over what the President should say. But the struggle over the wording was actually masking differences concerning policy. After almost two weeks, I told the President that we had a text but recommended that he hold an NSC meeting just to make sure.
We met for a final review of the speech on June 21. The Vice President was adamant that the speech should not be given because in the middle of the intifada it would give too much credibility to the Palestinian claims. Colin was concerned that in a speech denouncing Arafat, the United States would be seen as trying to choose Palestinian leaders. The President kept saying that he wanted to speak up for the Palestinians’ rights to decent lives and decent governance. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if democracy in the Middle East sprung first from the rocky soil of the West Bank?” he asked. The discussion continued, with Colin and the Vice President coming to the same conclusion for diametrically opposed reasons.
Finally I decided to speak up and voice my own opinion, something I rarely did in an NSC meeting. Usually I spoke only to clarify points for the President or to get agreement from him on a way forward. But he was struggling to find support for what he clearly and rightly wanted to do. “Mr. President,” I started
, but, noticing that my voice was quivering, I stopped and started again. “Mr. President, this is what the President of the United States does. He changes the terms of the debate, and heaven knows someone has got to do that in the Middle East.” I could tell that the President was a bit startled since I generally shared my views in private. But I was glad I’d said it.
After a little more debate he sat back in his chair. “I’m going to give the speech,” he said.
When the President makes a speech in the Rose Garden, it signals that the message is important. So, with the press gathered on the lawn facing the French doors of the Oval Office, the President delivered his speech. “I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror,” he said. “I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts.”
After he finished, we walked back into the Oval Office. He was gratified by what he’d done, and so was I. It had been a good and consequential speech but different from the expected calls for negotiations between the sides that were characteristic of the stale ideas governing policy toward the Middle East.
I decided to check in with William Burns, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs at the State Department. “How’s the reaction?” I asked. Bill is a consummate professional and not given to hyperbole, so when he said that the reaction in the Arab world was “pretty rough,” I knew what he really meant: “All hell has broken loose.”
Indeed it had. I called Colin. He was doing everything he could to calm the waters in the Arab world and to get the President’s true message out. But it was “tough,” he said and rushed away to engage in “damage control.”
We had a particular problem with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. President Bush had hosted Mubarak at Camp David on June 8 for what had been a pretty straightforward conversation about the Middle East. The aging Egyptian president considered himself an authority on the subject and, given his country’s historic peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the key to a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. Mubarak had a tendency to lecture his interlocutors about the region, and it often felt like a one-way conversation.
Nothing had been said to Mubarak about the President’s upcoming speech, let alone its content, which had yet to be determined within the administration. Still, Mubarak felt double-crossed after the speech, given the proximity of his visit to its delivery. He worried that some people might even suspect that he’d endorsed the President’s controversial call for Arafat’s dismissal. We managed to work with Mubarak from then on, but he never forgot what had happened.
The Arabists in the State Department were appalled too. One diplomat who was serving in the Middle East told a reporter at a cocktail party that he could no longer do his job thanks to “that speech.” Unfortunately the remark got back to the White House, shaking our confidence in him and adding to the perception that the professionals in the Foreign Service didn’t really back the President.
On the other hand, a previously arranged phone call with the leadership of the Jewish community that evening was just a love fest. “Thank you. Thank the President. Tell him there has never been a more important speech about the Middle East.” Well, I thought, we certainly have everyone’s attention.
The next day the President left for Kananaskis in Alberta, Canada, for a G8 summit, and as I opened my front door at five that morning, I was greeted by a screaming newspaper headline: “Bush Demands Arafat’s Ouster.” Seated in the President’s office aboard Air Force One, we reviewed the press line with Ari, who then left to face the traveling press corps. “Don’t you back off what I said,” the President had told him, aware of our diplomats’ tendency to explain yet again “what the President meant to say.”
I stayed behind, and we talked about the firestorm that was brewing. You could count on George W. Bush to stand firm even in the face of withering criticism. But our relationship of trust allowed me to probe a little deeper with him and to see how he was really feeling. For instance, in connection with bin Laden, when the President had delivered the famous retort about wanting him “dead or alive,” he’d asked me when we were alone if it had been a mistake. “The language was a little white hot for the President of the United States,” I’d said. He’d nodded his head in agreement and admitted that the First Lady agreed with me. He wouldn’t acknowledge the error publicly for some years.
But on this day he was absolutely confident that he’d done the right thing. Arafat did have to go if there were ever to be peace in the Middle East. I agreed, but we both knew that the G8 meeting was going to be rocky. The Europeans thought Arafat was the key to peace. They would take the President’s statement as a sign that he was pro-Israel to a fault. They weren’t the only ones. Apparently, the President’s mother had called him to ask how it felt to be the first Jewish President!
The first meeting when we arrived in Canada was with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, who didn’t even mention the Arafat matter. Jean Chrétien of Canada, however, was appalled by what the President had done, saying he had no “specific point of view” on whether Arafat should go. He kept his criticism within bounds but couldn’t help but lecture the President on the history of Middle East peace negotiations and the critical role that Canada had always played. The President listened politely but didn’t budge. Fortunately the evening was “downtime,” and Andy Card, Karen Hughes, and I had a relaxed dinner with him where the issue of what to do about the reaction in the Middle East was put on hold.
The next morning I went down to the gym to exercise and found myself in the company of Tony Blair, with whom the President was to meet that morning. “Well, George has stirred it up a bit,” he said with characteristic British understatement. The President came in a few minutes later and talked about the speech, explaining why he’d made it and that he had intended it as a clear indication of his dedication to Middle East peace.
Blair said that he thought he could help at the press availability after their meeting. He too thought Arafat to be a spent force. It was just that the Arabs and Europeans, who fully understood that fact, weren’t willing to challenge the orthodoxy that he was the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people. When the press asked Blair about the President’s speech, he masterfully found a way to support his friend. “I have tried as hard as anyone” to get Arafat to reform, he said, explaining that he had met with Arafat more than thirty times in recent years. “But we’ve got a situation where we have not been able to make progress, and there has been an attitude towards terrorism that is inconsistent with the notion of Israel’s security.”
The Arabs would soon settle down, and Colin successfully worked to build support for President Bush’s vision of a democratic Palestine, work for which he has never gotten enough credit. In early July the foreign ministers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt visited President Bush to discuss how to achieve the goals set out in the President’s address. The Jordanian foreign minister made a proposal, reiterated by the king of Jordan during a visit the next month, to translate the President’s speech into a written plan with performance-based benchmarks. The proposal would eventually result in the “Road Map for Peace.” The fact is that Blair was right: the Arabs knew that Arafat would never make peace, though they would never publicly acknowledge it. Given that they themselves were authoritarians, they were also somewhat uncomfortable with the emphasis on Palestinian democracy.
But the President had broken a taboo that needed to be broken. The Israelis had loved the speech, but they would soon find that the President expected Israel to support and engage a changing Palestinian leadership. The old Israeli claim that “there was no Palestinian partner for peace” would soon lose salience too. And the United States would be able to approach the question of Middle East peace on a fundamentally different basis: that of a two-state solution in which a democratic Palestine and a democratic Israel would live
side by side.
11
THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS WEAPONS
NOT EVERY DAY in the White House was taken up with a crisis, although it sometimes seemed that way. By the beginning of 2002 we needed to start to make sense, in a systematic way, of what the events of September 11, 2001, meant to U.S. security. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were no less consequential in our thinking than the attack on Pearl Harbor had been for U.S. policy makers in December 1941. Arguably the effect of the more recent assault on the American psyche was more disorienting because it had been not a powerful state but a well-organized network of stateless actors who’d successfully launched the most devastating attack on the U.S. mainland in modern history: and they’d done it at a cost of only several hundred thousand dollars, using commercial airplanes as a weapon and the territory of the failed state of Afghanistan as a base of operations.
We needed to call attention to the fundamental restructuring of U.S. security priorities necessitated by 9/11: how to defend ourselves in a world in which attacks came with little if any warning and with the possibility that such an attack might involve weapons of mass destruction. But defense in this new era required not just pursuing and defeating terrorists themselves but addressing the failed states that were breeding grounds for terrorism, human trafficking, and the illicit trading of arms and narcotics. In order to help failed states heal, we would come to see the importance of building stable democratic institutions that could provide for their people and prevent the use of their territory for dangerous transnational networks. Finally, those fledgling democratic states would need foreign assistance to achieve stability. The new security concept thus linked defense, democracy, and development—each integral to the success of the strategy.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 18
