In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  I told the king that if it came to war, there were a number of fronts on which we would likely request Jordanian assistance. I advised him as well that the president was very interested in consulting with him in the weeks and months ahead. We realized that any military action could have serious economic and political consequences, and we wanted to do what we could to mitigate them.

  The king pressed for us to redouble our efforts on the peace process, and I assured him of President Bush’s commitment, noting that he had dispatched retired General Anthony Zinni to the region to do what he could to get the peace process back on track. I observed that even though we did not support some of the key elements of the initiative recently announced by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, such as the requirement that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders, we were hopeful that the initiative might provide a way for the parties at least to get back to the negotiating table. I also said, though, that we could not lose focus on the War on Terror. Attempts to reach a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians had been under way for over fifty years with little progress to show. We could not afford to conduct the War on Terror on a similar timetable.

  My next stop was Sharm el Sheikh, an Egyptian resort on the Red Sea, for meetings with Hosni Mubarak, a man I had known for many years. Mubarak, too, expressed his concerns about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, warning in private that continued violence was playing into the hands of extremists in the region and putting tremendous pressure on moderate Arab leaders like himself. I told him I would relay his concerns to the president.

  When we discussed Iraq and the threat it posed to the region, I again conveyed the message that the president had not decided on military action and was very interested in getting advice and guidance from our friends. Should it come to war, we would need some specific assistance from Egypt, such as overflight rights and logistics support. President Mubarak said that he was willing to consider the full gamut of our requests.

  My security detail was very concerned about my next flight. We were going to Sanaa, Yemen, and there was particular worry about someone using a shoulder-fired missile to take down our airplane as we came in for a landing. The Secret Service came up with a diversionary plan. During the trip I had been flying in the large 747 that is normally the backup for Air Force One. Parked next to it that morning at the Sharm el Sheikh airport was a C-17 military transport aircraft that usually moves large equipment or troops. Lynne and I approached the stairs to the 747 together, but only she got on. Together with a small group of staff members, I walked past the 747 and boarded the rear ramp of the C-17.

  Lynne and most of the staff flew in the 747 directly to Oman, while I took the C-17 into Yemen. For an additional diversion, the 757 I normally used as Air Force Two made an approach into the Sanaa airport immediately ahead of us—coming in as though to land, but instead pulling up and flying north to Oman. The C-17 executed a tight corkscrew maneuver to evade surface-to-air threats, and we landed safely at the airport. President Ali Abdullah Saleh, there to greet me, seemed unfazed by my unusual arrival.

  At this stop and others in the region, I was conscious that Arab leaders had relations with Saddam and that it was likely some of my messages would get back to him. I felt it was important that Saddam hear our resolve and that we do everything possible to make him understand that the president was determined to see Iraq comply with UN resolutions and that if it came to war, the United States would prevail.

  I flew from Yemen to Oman, where I had a working dinner with Sultan Qaboos, a gracious host, whose country was making significant contributions to the War on Terror. The next day, March 15, I visited American sailors on the U.S.S. Stennis in the Arabian Sea. Fighter jets being launched off the Stennis’s enormous carrier deck were conducting operations in Afghanistan, and I had a chance to thank the young Americans on board for their service—and to talk about what lay ahead. “Our next objective,” I said, “is to prevent terrorists and regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.” I went through the cafeteria line and had lunch with some of the sailors of the Stennis. I came away impressed, as I always was after I visited with our troops, by the commitment and competence of the men and women of America’s armed forces. I told the press corps traveling with me that my visit to the Stennis was the highlight of my trip—and I meant it.

  My next stop was the United Arab Emirates, where I met with President Zayed and some of his top aides, including Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, then chief of staff of the UAE armed forces and one of the most insightful and direct leaders in the Middle East. I then flew on to see Crown Prince Abdullah in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

  In the Desert of Saudi Arabia for one of my many visits with King Abdullah. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  King Fahd was still alive, but infirm, and the crown prince was the de facto ruler of the country. I had first met Abdullah twelve years earlier when I had flown to Saudi Arabia the first weekend after Saddam invaded Kuwait to secure basing rights for American forces. Although I did not always agree with him on policy, I had come to trust and respect him over the years as a plainspoken, honest man of deep faith.

  In a practice we would repeat numerous times over the next six years, we had dinner together with members of our staffs and then moved to another room to meet privately, with only my professional and trusted interpreter, Gamal Helal, in attendance.

  In Ramallah preparing to meet with Palestinian leader Abu Mazen with two of my key foreign policy advisors, John Hannah and Gamal Helal. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  I laid out for Abdullah the enormous impact of the 9/11 attacks on America. With three thousand Americans dead, we could not wait for terrorists to attack again and then deal with them after the fact. As the president had said, waiting for threats to fully materialize was waiting too long. Saddam, his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and his ties to terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, were of great concern. We intended to pursue a diplomatic resolution, but if we couldn’t achieve one, we would be compelled to act. And if war did come, I assured the crown prince, we would prevail.

  The crown prince was concerned about Saddam but skeptical about U.S. military action. He wanted more reassurance that we would, in fact, see it through. At the president’s request I conveyed an invitation for the crown prince to visit the president at his Texas ranch, and I offered to have Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers meet him in Texas to brief him about our planning prior to his meeting with the president. Abdullah accepted my offer.

  The crown prince also wanted to talk about the initiative he had put forth to advance the peace process. I told the crown prince we welcomed his initiative, and we hoped it would give impetus to the peace process at the upcoming Arab summit in Beirut and beyond. But, I cautioned, we viewed Arafat as a serious problem. Abdullah was not naïve about Arafat, but he saw him as the leader of the Palestinians, someone who should be treated as a partner.

  Following stops in Bahrain, Qatar, and finally Kuwait, I headed for Israel. On the way, I called a meeting in the plane’s conference room to discuss the Arab-Israeli situation.

  In Tel Aviv with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  The State Department representative on my trip, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns, lobbied for me to meet with Arafat. He argued that it would be wrong for such a senior U.S. official to travel to Jerusalem and meet only with the Israelis. Members of my staff—John Hannah, Eric Edelman, and Scooter Libby—objected to such a meeting. They argued that it would be seen as rewarding Arafat, who was still trafficking in terror. At a minimum, they suggested, if I agreed to meet, it would have to be in exchange for some positive action on Arafat’s part.

  Tony Zinni, our envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was waiting for me on the tarmac in Tel Aviv, and we conferred in my limo about Arafat. Zinni had been working to
get him to agree to key security steps on the path to a cease-fire. Would it be helpful, I asked, to offer up a meeting with me as an inducement for Arafat’s cooperation? Zinni said that it would, and so I offered to meet with Arafat provided he agreed to the conditions Zinni had set forth. Zinni was confident the meeting could take place before I was scheduled to leave the next day.

  That night at the King David Hotel, in a room overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told me he wanted to help General Zinni, that he wanted to secure a ceasefire and get back to negotiations. He was willing, he said, to begin reducing the Israeli presence in the West Bank, but he needed Arafat to take steps of his own. And he left no doubt that he would respond to further terrorist attacks with an iron fist. Sharon was a tough old soldier who had fought in Israel’s war of independence in 1948, the Suez war in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. He didn’t mince words, and I believed that ultimately peace would only come through a strong leader like Sharon. He would drive a tough bargain, but his word counted—and he would defend his nation against terrorists and extremists who had no interest in peace.

  As the hour for my departure from Israel approached, there was still no agreement from Arafat. I said I’d be more than willing to come back the following week. I would make a special trip to see Arafat if he met Zinni’s conditions. Instead, one week after my return to Washington, on March 27, 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, during Passover Seder, and killed thirty people. In the days that followed, Prime Minister Sharon sent Israeli army units deeper into the West Bank to hunt down the terrorists responsible.

  From Israel, I headed to Turkey, a country that had long been a friend of the United States. Turkey had stood with us in Korea and, as a NATO member, been an invaluable ally during the Cold War. We had major military facilities at Incirlik Air Base, from which we had conducted operations during Desert Storm and in the aftermath, when we provided humanitarian relief to Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. But by 2002 a worrisome change was under way, and my visit with Turkish leaders, though cordial, was far different from the one I had made in 1990, when we were seeking allies to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In fact, all of my visits in the region were different this time. All of our friends were nervous. But something deeper was happening in Turkey. In November 2002 the Islamist AKP party would win a majority in parliament, making Recep Erdogan, leader of the party, prime minister the following March. The newly elected parliament would reject our request to deploy the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division through Turkey when it came time to begin operations against Saddam Hussein, and we would ultimately send it through Kuwait.

  In general, I think we failed to understand the magnitude of the shift that was taking place in Turkey. The significance of an Islamist government taking power in one of America’s most important NATO allies was in a sense obscured because of all the other challenges we faced. Today, Turkey appears to be in the middle of a dangerous transition from a key NATO ally to an Islamist-governed nation developing close ties with countries like Iran and Syria at the expense of its relations with the United States and Israel.

  As I ended my trip and headed for Washington, I thought about what I would report to the president. As I saw it America had to pursue three broad objectives in the region simultaneously: vigorously prosecuting the war against terrorism, confronting Iraq about its support for terror and pursuit of WMD, and managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I did not believe, as many argued, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the linchpin of every other American policy in the Middle East. I saw instead a complicated region in which issues are interrelated and couldn’t be compartmentalized. We did not have the luxury of dealing with them sequentially, waiting until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved before we dealt with the threat that terrorism posed to the United States.

  It would have been wrong to push the Israelis to make concessions to a Palestinian Authority controlled by Yasser Arafat, who we knew was supporting, encouraging, and funding terror. At the same time it seemed clear to me that if military action became necessary in Iraq, we would need Arab support, and it would be easier to get such support if we could reduce the tensions between the Israelis and Palestinians.

  ON APRIL 4, 2002, President Bush expressed concern for the “mounting toll of terror” and announced he was sending Secretary of State Powell back to the region to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On April 12, with Powell in the Middle East, the National Security Council convened to discuss conditions for a possible Powell meeting with Arafat. In the middle of the discussion, an NSC staffer entered the Situation Room with news that there had been another suicide bombing in Jerusalem. There were six dead and over a hundred injured.

  Nevertheless, at a press briefing in Israel, Secretary Powell decided to float the idea of an international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The president had not agreed to this, and it was a bad idea. Giving Arafat a place on the world stage would only legitimize him at a moment he was making it clear that he had chosen the path of terror. Secretary Powell repeated the offer again a few weeks later, making a similar announcement in a press briefing in Washington with some of his European and UN counterparts. When I heard this I called National Security Advisor Rice from Air Force Two and suggested she needed to let Secretary Powell know that he was once more out of line with the president’s policy. We had all discussed next steps in the Middle East with the president in the Oval Office that morning, and he had not authorized Colin to announce we would participate in an international conference. I’m not sure what transpired between Condi and Colin, but the next day, when the Principals Committee—the NSC minus the president—met to discuss the Middle East, Colin apologized. He said he had “exceeded his brief” and gone beyond what the president wanted him to say.

  My concern as we discussed the peace process and next steps was that we all needed to remember our number-one priority was winning the War on Terror. I argued that we would benefit from a limited or interim Israeli-Palestinian agreement that would allow a cooling-off period and give time for new leadership to emerge on the Palestinian side. But it was critically important that we not launch high-profile international conferences or summit meetings in futile pursuit of a final settlement agreement that Arafat showed no willingness to embrace on any reasonable terms. Bill Clinton had made that mistake at the end of his second term with a high-profile, high-expectations, and high-stakes maneuver that brought Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Camp David for a series of talks that failed tragically and led to the renewed intifada. There was no way we could afford to repeat that train wreck if we wanted successfully to pursue the War on Terror.

  Looking back, I believe that Secretary Powell’s trip to the Middle East in the spring of 2002 was a watershed moment in relations between the State Department and the White House. Both Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, seemed to take the fact that the White House had been compelled to walk back Powell’s announcement of a Middle East conference as a personal affront to the secretary. I had built many relationships over the thirty-four years since I had first come to Washington, and it was about this time that I began hearing from a number of former and current high-ranking government officials that Secretary Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage were not only failing to support the president’s policies, but were openly disdainful of them. I knew that Powell had been stung by press reports that he was not a strong secretary, but now it was as though a tie had been cut.

  THAT SPRING WE HAD a visitor from another part of the world: Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao. As a matter of protocol, he and I were counterparts, and I had him out to the Vice President’s Residence for lunch. Of all the lunches I hosted over the years for visiting dignitaries, this one may have had the highest-ranking U.S. delegation. Flanking me on the U.S. side of the table were Colin Powell, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Commerce Secretary Don E
vans, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

  I was interested in finding a way to pull Hu aside so that the two of us could have a private conversation. He had been rigidly scripted in every one of his meetings with U.S. officials, never deviating from his talking points. I thought that if the two of us could talk alone, he might loosen up and we could have a real exchange. My plan was to take him into the library on the first floor of my residence after lunch.

  The Chinese delegation wasn’t on board with our plan. Moments after Hu and I had seated ourselves in the library, the doors flew open and Li Zhaoxing, a senior Communist Party member close to Hu’s boss, President Jiang Zemin, burst in. He had blown past my staff as they tried to explain politely that this was a one-on-one meeting, and now he seated himself between Hu and me. It was clear this was the minder reporting back to Beijing. Hu didn’t skip a beat and continued to deliver the scripted answers he’d been giving in other meetings.

  My relations with Hu were capped off by the visit I had with him two years later when I was in China in early 2004. By that time Hu had ascended to the presidency, and I had a sensitive message President Bush had asked me to convey in a one-on-one session. We agreed that a small meeting would occur after our larger session. The meeting went fine, I thought, and I had conveyed the message without any minder pushing his way in.