We wanted the effort to be bold, but there was unanimous agreement that the parties were not yet ready to launch final-status negotiations. Abbas was on something of a short leash from Arafat, and Sharon was still declaring that he had “no partner for peace.” Our aims were modest but significant. We wanted the Palestinians to be clear that they sought a negotiated solution to the conflict and that there would be no more intifadas. We wanted the Israelis to acknowledge the rights of the Palestinians for statehood. We wanted the Arabs, particularly the Saudis, to show their brethren throughout the Arab world that the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” as the king of Saudi Arabia is called, was fully behind this effort. We even hoped that the Saudis might make a gesture toward the Israelis, perhaps opening a trade office.
The negotiations for the meeting were a real slog, as is every attempt to find common language when dealing with those parties. I handled the negotiations on behalf of the President from Washington, prodding each of the Arabs, the Palestinians, and the Israelis to accept language that would move the process forward. It isn’t unusual for the national security advisor to negotiate a document for a presidential visit. The State Department often steps back and supports such efforts rather than leading them. In this case, Colin and I worked closely together, sometimes tag-teaming our interlocutors to get the work done.
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, negotiated the Arab statement. Anything that the crown prince could accept would clearly work for the Egyptians and the Jordanians, who already had diplomatic relations with the Israelis. I’d known Bandar from my time in the George H. W. Bush administration. He was already twenty years into his tenure as Saudi ambassador, and despite his flamboyant lifestyle—he had a spectacular house in Virginia, another in Aspen, and a private plane—the talented diplomat enjoyed the confidence of both the crown prince and the White House. It was hard to get the Arabs to be bold enough, and I was pushing really hard. At one point, Bandar almost walked out on our deliberations, declaring that he’d done more than any other Saudi had ever even contemplated. I backed off, realizing that he was caught between Abdullah’s reticence and Washington’s expectations. We managed to get a good statement.
Negotiating with the Palestinians and the Israelis was no easier. Every encounter seemed to produce either a history lesson or a lecture about some UN resolution. One of my aides, seeing my frustration, noted that Israelis are among the most legalistic people on Earth; after all, the Torah is mostly about keeping the law, he said. I asked how one explained the Palestinians’ behavior. “They are cousins,” he answered.
We finally managed to produce the documents that would be issued at the summits. Only a fool goes to an important meeting in which the President will be involved without an agreed text. I would have to violate that rule once in a while, but it made for sleepless nights and the potential for embarrassment for the United States. This time we had the language locked down.
We arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh from Paris late in the evening. I had one last meeting with Prince Bandar and went to bed. The next morning we arrived at the meeting hall and were greeted by Mubarak. King Abdullah of Jordan and Mahmoud Abbas arrived shortly after. But the crown prince was not there. We waited and waited. I called Bandar, who wasn’t answering his phone. Something had gone wrong. The press was antsy, knowing that the scheduled time of the meeting had come and gone.
Soon we learned from the Egyptians that the crown prince was at his hotel and threatening to go home. Here we go again, I thought. Fortunately, some last-minute changes to the document mollified him, and the meeting was completed successfully.
The follow-on meeting in Aqaba went more or less according to script in comparison with Sharm. The Palestinian delegation included Salam Fayyad, who was at the time finance minister. He impressed us all with his determination to do things right, including posting the budget of the Palestinian Authority on the Internet as a step toward greater transparency. The University of Texas–trained Fayyad was exactly the kind of leader the President had talked about in his June 24 speech: smart, honest, and capable. He would become our most important ally in helping to put Palestinian governance on a more democratic footing.
The President decided to take Sharon and Abbas on a little private stroll around the gardens to impress upon them the importance of moving forward for peace. The rest of us stayed behind with the delegations, which were busily engaging each other without our involvement. At one point, the Israeli intelligence chief turned to Mohammed Dahlan, one of Arafat’s security heads, and complimented him on his Hebrew. “I learned it in one of your jails,” Dahlan retorted. These folks knew each other very well indeed.
The Aqaba meetings ended with statements by Sharon and Abbas. Sharon pledged to improve the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories and to remove the unauthorized outposts that Israeli settlers had constructed in defiance even of Israeli law. He recognized the importance of territorial contiguity for a Palestinian state and said that it was not in Israel’s interest to govern Palestinians. These were extraordinary statements for the “father of the settlement movement,” as Sharon was called. At the time of Camp David in 2000, Ehud Barak had made pledges on behalf of Israel, but he was a Labor prime minister. The conservative Likud party had never countenanced a Palestinian state. A few months later, Sharon would deliver a pathbreaking address at the Herzliya Conference in which he talked about the need for compromise. “We are willing to proceed towards its [the Road Map’s] implementation,” he said. “Two states, Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in tranquillity, security, and peace.” Sharon had arrived at the conclusion that it was time for Israel to make, as he had put it a few weeks earlier, “painful concessions.” Now a broad swath of the Israeli body politic accepted the need for a two-state solution.
Abbas, for his part, made clear that a Palestinian state could not be born of terrorism and called it a deadly obstacle to Palestinian aspirations. He pledged to make Palestinian institutions, including the security services, more democratic and accountable.
The President appointed an experienced diplomat, John Wolf, to monitor the progress on the obligations the two sides had taken. I took direct responsibility for overseeing U.S. efforts, traveling to Jerusalem and the West Bank to carry the President’s message to the region. I was concerned that I might be taking on too much of an operational role for a national security advisor. But it seemed to be one of those times when it was important to use my close relationship with the President to push the process forward. I felt bad that this produced press stories of a split between Colin and me. There was not. I kept him informed, and State supported my work. But some saw it as an affront to the nation’s chief diplomat.
In any case, the effort soon bogged down. I would learn valuable lessons about how frustrating it can be to get the Israelis to actually carry through on promises relating to the Palestinians. The illegal outposts were always going to be moved but were never quite moved. Gratuitous “security” roadblocks that kept the Palestinians from moving around in the West Bank were always going to be taken down but were never quite taken down.
The Palestinians were frustrating too. Abbas meant well, but Yasser Arafat would soon grow jealous of the prime minister’s new international stature. When the cautious Abbas tried to carry out reforms, he’d find resistance from Arafat’s security chiefs and from the old guard of the ruling party, Fatah; he almost always backed off or simply postponed actions. Then, on September 6, 2003, Abbas abruptly resigned.
Meanwhile, Salam Fayyad’s efforts to put PA finances on a more transparent footing continued, but he needed our help. The Israelis had long collected tax revenue on behalf of the Palestinians and then transferred it to the PA at their discretion. After the intifada began, the Israelis stopped the payments to the Palestinians, leaving them without their most important source of revenue. Fayyad had begged me to prevail on the Israelis. He was trying to build a decent economy, but the PA was out of
legitimate funds and he did not want to be dependent on the somewhat suspect sources that Chairman Arafat had used to run the authority.
I called Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s closest advisor. The prime minister always traveled with this lawyer, who, though not an elected official, was extraordinarily savvy in the snake pit of Israeli politics. Dubi, as he was called, was Sharon’s fixer. When I described the problem with the Palestinians, he explained that the Israelis never knew where the money was going and couldn’t take the chance that it was funding terrorists. I told him that Fayyad was different and asked him to meet with the finance minister.
After their meeting, Dubi called back to say that he was impressed with Fayyad’s good intentions, particularly his decision to hire an American financial services company to improve the management and transparency of the PA’s accounts. As Fayyad continued to implement sound financial reforms, the Israelis began to deliver the tax revenues. It was the first step in helping the new Palestinian leadership build a decent and honest government.
Thus, despite the setbacks, the period just after the Iraq war was important for the peace process. Long-standing conflicts are rarely resolved in one huge leap forward. Rather, progress is like a stepwise function, each step forward being followed by a plateau—but a new plateau.
The events of June put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict onto a new foundation, and after the terrible events of the intifada and its subsequent defeat, the two parties started, haltingly, to move forward. The international community would endorse the Road Map, a step-by-step plan in three phases that outlined the obligations of the two sides on the path to peace, in November 2003. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians would accept it, though the Israelis did so with stated reservations.
More important, we’d established that the character of the Palestinian state mattered as much as its boundaries. And most Israelis, as represented by Ariel Sharon, had accepted that the State of Palestine and the State of Israel should live side by side in peace and security. The Bush vision for a two-state solution was now the policy of the international community as a whole.
In Search of WMD
THE PRESIDENT DECLARED an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003 (under the unfortunate “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln), and, with the CPA established in Baghdad, our attention turned to finding Saddam’s alleged WMD so that they could be destroyed. George Tenet selected David Kay to lead the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which was to undertake a fact-finding mission concerning Saddam’s weapons; no weapons caches or stockpiles had been uncovered by our forces as they pushed through the country. Occasionally someone would make a remark about the absence of weapons. David Manning called one morning to report that the inspectors had dug up some devices in the garden of one of Saddam’s scientists. The devices turned out to be old, rusted pieces of weapons that were of no consequence. But despite finding nothing in the early days, we assumed that Saddam had simply been very good at hiding and dispersing weapons as war approached.
Yet around that time questions began to arise within the intelligence community about some of the prewar assessments on Iraq’s WMD programs. For instance, on May 25, the DIA’s civilian experts inspected two of the mobile labs that had been suspected of manufacturing biological weapons and concluded that they had not been used for that purpose, a fact that was not immediately reported to the President or the NSC.
Questions were arising about other reports as well. On May 6, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a column suggesting that in the lead-up to the war the administration had used intelligence that it had known to be false. Citing anonymous sources, Kristof wrote that the Vice President’s office had asked for an investigation into a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. As early as February 2002 the envoy had told the CIA and State Department that the information was “unequivocally wrong” and that the documents associated with the claim had been forged. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei had expressed doubts regarding the documents’ authenticity in his presentation before the UN Security Council on March 7.
George Stephanopoulos subsequently asked me on his Sunday-morning show on June 8 about Kristof’s claim and how information that some in the administration knew to be false had ended up in the President’s State of the Union address. I told him that it was possible that there had been some knowledge that the reports were not credible but that it might not have risen to our attention. I also reminded him that our entire case against Saddam did not hinge on a single statement in the President’s speech.
A few weeks later, as the President was preparing to leave for a trip to Africa, the story erupted. Former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times revealing himself to be the “unnamed former envoy” who’d investigated the Niger claims, purportedly at the request of the Vice President’s office. (The Vice President’s office had not been involved in establishing the Wilson mission. In fact, Wilson’s mission had been authorized by officials from the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division.) He stated that he’d traveled to Niger and concluded that it was unlikely that the sale had occurred, given the layers of government oversight over uranium mines and the physical difficulty of transferring the uranium to Iraq. He further alleged that he’d briefed the CIA and the State Department about his findings after his return.
The first time I’d ever heard of Wilson was when George Tenet had mentioned that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. George didn’t know her personally, but we both thought it an interesting coincidence, nothing more. Even George had not been aware of the mission.
The day before the President’s departure, George and I met with the President and the Vice President. George was uncomfortable with the chatter about the Niger report, noting that his agency couldn’t really vouch for the claim’s veracity.
We decided on the spot that the White House should just take the issue off the table and say that the claim should not have been included in the President’s speech. That seemed to me a pretty straightforward admission of a mistake. It was not that anyone had intended to mislead, but my view was that if the CIA couldn’t stand behind the claim, the President should never have said it.
The Vice President was dead set against taking any responsibility, arguing that the information had been in the NIE and was therefore legitimate. Some on my staff agreed, including my press advisor Anna Perez, who believed that the President’s critics would pounce on this one admission and draw a picture of a White House seeking to deceive. “They will smell blood in the water,” she said. I somehow believed that the press would understand a mistake as just that—a mistake. The Vice President and Anna were absolutely right.
The next morning, as we departed for Africa, the headlines were screaming that the President had used false language in the State of the Union. Given that no WMD had yet been found, there was now a growing presumption that the intelligence had been wrong or, worse, that we’d somehow manipulated it in a rush to war.
Before leaving, I called George Tenet, who was in Idaho. “George,” I said, “your people cleared that speech. You can’t leave the President hanging.” George said he would issue a statement that made clear that the Niger claim had come from intelligence sources. In other words, that the President hadn’t been lying.
By the time we got on the plane, the situation was spinning out of control. Ari suggested that I go on the record to explain the origin of the statement. I agreed to do so. But what I intended as a defense of the President and a matter-of-fact statement that the CIA had cleared the language was seen as an effort to blame the Agency. After almost twenty-four hours of negotiations, George issued a statement that more or less took responsibility for the “sixteen words,” but the story would not end there.
Throughout the Africa trip the traveling press hammered the President about the issue. Reporters can be that way, very much pack animals chasing one story relentlessly and then saying
that the President can’t escape scrutiny on the story. I always thought, Well, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you keep bringing it up. I remember visiting an impressive AIDS clinic in Uganda later that day and hearing orphans singing “America the Beautiful” while the reporters stood to the side, peppering Ari and Karen with questions about Niger and uranium.
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BUSH THE AFRICAN
DESPITE THE CONTROVERSY, we were enjoying the chance to highlight the President’s already exceptional record in Africa. We began the trip in Senegal, where we visited Goree Island, the port from which slaves had been shipped to the Americas. It was a deeply emotional experience for me as I walked through the archway that had led the slaves to the transit ship. I couldn’t help but think of Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” And I couldn’t help but wonder if any of my ancestors had crossed over from here into the tragic life ahead of them. I listened as the President acknowledged Africa’s contribution to the birth of the United States of America. “The stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America,” he said.
We had all looked forward to the trip, most especially the President, who’d been taken with the continent from the very beginning of the administration. I’d introduced the President to Jendayi Frazer, who’d become special assistant for African affairs for the NSC. Jendayi made a convincing case that Africa could be more than a charity case, and we set out to create a well-rounded policy that would deal with conflict resolution, economic development, and democratization. The events of September 11, 2001, added counterterrorism cooperation to that list. The President liked the African leaders and met with them frequently, seeing twenty-five African heads of state from 2001 to 2003 alone.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 27
