The White House decided to put off the vote in Congress to give diplomacy a chance to work. Secretary Kerry flew to Geneva and hammered out the details for removing chemical weapons with Lavrov. Just a month later, the UN agency charged with implementing the deal, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was quite a vote of confidence. Remarkably, as of this writing, the agreement has held, and the UN is making slow but steady progress dismantling Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal, despite extraordinarily difficult circumstances. There have been delays, but more than 90 percent of Syria’s chemical weapons had been removed by late April 2014.
In January 2014 Special Representative Brahimi convened a second UN conference on Syria in Geneva with the goal of implementing the agreement I had negotiated back in June 2012. For the first time representatives from the Assad regime sat down face-to-face with members of the opposition. But talks failed to produce any progress. The regime refused to engage seriously on the question of a transitional governing body, as mandated by the original agreement, and their Russian allies stood faithfully behind them. Meanwhile the fighting on the ground continued unabated.
The humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Syria is heartbreaking. As usual, innocent women and children are bearing the brunt of the suffering. Extremists continue to gain ground, and intelligence officials in the United States and Europe warn that they could pose a threat well beyond Syria. In February 2014, CIA Director John Brennan reported, “We are concerned about the use of Syrian territory by the Al Qaeda organization to recruit individuals and develop the capability to be able not just to carry out attacks inside of Syria, but also to use Syria as a launching pad.” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put an even finer point on it, saying that at least one extremist group in Syria “does have aspirations for attacks on the [American] homeland.” With a bloody stalemate continuing in Syria, this danger will only grow, and the United States and our allies will not be able to ignore it. More moderate members of the Syrian opposition also recognize the threat posed by the extremists trying to hijack their revolution, and some have launched efforts to drive them out of rebel-held territory. But that will be an uphill battle, requiring a diversion of arms and men away from the fight against Assad. In April 2014, there were reports that the United States would provide additional training and arms to certain rebel groups.
As Kofi Annan said at the first Geneva summit, “History is a somber judge.” It is impossible to watch the suffering in Syria, including as a private citizen, and not ask what more could have been done. That’s part of what makes Syria and the broader challenge of an unstable Middle East such a wicked problem. But wicked problems can’t paralyze us. We need to keep urgently seeking solutions, however hard they are to find.
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Gaza: Anatomy of a Cease-fire
The motorcade pulled over to the side of the dusty highway between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Security agents scrambled out of their armored vehicles and peered down the road, back toward the heart of the West Bank. Others looked up at the sky. Israeli intelligence had just shared reports that a rocket might have been fired by Palestinian extremists in the Gaza Strip. There was no way to know for sure where it was headed. American officials in the motorcade who had been riding in a standard-issue van quickly piled into one of the several heavily armored cars that provided better protection from a blast. With everyone situated we were back on the road, headed toward Jerusalem.
In the days before Thanksgiving 2012, the Holy Land once again felt like a war zone. I left a high-level summit in Asia and flew to the Middle East on an emergency diplomatic mission to try to stop an air war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza from escalating into a much more deadly ground war. To do that I would have to broker a cease-fire between implacable and distrustful adversaries against the backdrop of a region in turmoil. After four years of frustrating diplomacy in the Middle East, this would be a crucial test of America’s leadership.
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Nearly four years earlier, the Obama Administration had come into office mere days after the end of another conflict in Gaza, one also precipitated by rocket fire into Israel. In early January 2009, the Israeli military launched a ground invasion of Gaza to stop rockets being launched by militants across the border. After nearly two weeks of brutal urban fighting that left about 1,400 people dead in Gaza, Israel pulled back and resumed a de facto siege of the Palestinian enclave. For the next few years, persistent but low-level violence continued across the border. More than one hundred rockets were fired into southern Israel in both 2009 and 2010, as well as occasional mortar attacks. In some cases Israeli jets would retaliate with air strikes. This situation was far from acceptable, but by the standards of the region it was considered a relatively quiet time. But starting in 2011, as the extremists rearmed and much of the Middle East was swept by revolution, the violence escalated. Hundreds of rockets hit Israel that year. The pace accelerated in 2012. On November 11, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned about potential Israeli action against terrorist factions in Gaza after more than a hundred rockets hit southern Israel in a twenty-four-hour period, injuring three Israelis.
Since 2007, Gaza had been ruled by Hamas, the extremist Palestinian group founded in the late 1980s during the first intifada and designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. Its stated goal was not an independent state in the Palestinian territories, but the destruction of Israel altogether and the establishment of an Islamic emirate in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For years it drew financial and military support from Iran and Syria, and, after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, it competed with the more moderate Fatah Party of Mahmoud Abbas for leadership of the Palestinian cause. After winning legislative elections in 2006, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas and the Palestinian Authority in 2007, and it held on to power despite the 2009 war. Hamas and its foreign backers spent their money on arms smuggling to rebuild their stocks, while Gaza’s economy continued to decline and its people continued to suffer.
Then the upheaval of the Arab Spring shook up the Middle East chessboard, and Hamas found itself navigating a changed landscape. In Syria, its traditional patron, the Alawite dictator Bashar al-Assad, engaged in a brutal crackdown against the largely Sunni population. Hamas, a Sunni organization, abandoned its headquarters in Damascus. At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist party with ties to Hamas, rose to power in postrevolutionary Egypt, across the border from Gaza. For Hamas, it was like one door opening just as another one was closing. Complicating matters further, Hamas faced growing competition at home from other extremist groups, in particular Palestinian Islamic Jihad, equally intent on fighting Israel but not burdened by any responsibility to govern Gaza or deliver results to the people.
With Israel enforcing a blockade of Gaza by sea and keeping tight control of its northern and eastern borders, the main point of resupply for Hamas came through the short southern border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Under Mubarak the Egyptians were reasonably strict about smuggling and generally worked well with Israel, although Hamas found success digging tunnels beneath the border and into Egyptian territory. After Mubarak fell and the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power in Egypt, crossing the Gaza border became easier.
At the same time, Egyptian authorities started to lose control of the Sinai Peninsula. The 23,000-square-mile desert region juts out into the Red Sea from the eastern banks of the Suez Canal. The Sinai is famous for its role in the Bible and its strategic location as a land bridge between Africa and Asia. It was invaded by Israel twice, once in 1956 during the Suez Crisis and again in 1967 during the Six Day War. Under the terms of the 1979 Camp David Accords, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt, and an international peacekeeping force including U.S. troops arrived to maintain the truce. Sinai is also home to nomadic and restive Bedouin tribes
long marginalized by Cairo. These tribes took advantage of the chaos triggered by the Egyptian Revolution by asserting their autonomy and demanding more economic support from the government and greater respect from government security forces. As the Sinai descended into lawlessness, extremists with links to al Qaeda began to see it as a safe haven.
In one of my first meetings with the new Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsi, I asked, “What are you going to do to prevent al Qaeda and other extremists from destabilizing Egypt and, in particular, the Sinai?” His response was “Why would they do that? We have an Islamist government now.” Expecting solidarity from terrorists was either quite naïve or shockingly sinister. “Because you will never be pure enough,” I explained. “I don’t care what your positions are. They will come after you. And you’ll have to protect your country and your government.” He would hear none of it.
By August 2012, the threat posed by the situation in the Sinai was undeniable. One Sunday evening, a group of some thirty-five armed and masked militants attacked an Egyptian Army outpost near the border with Israel and killed sixteen soldiers as they were sitting down to eat dinner. The extremists then stole an armored vehicle and a truck, loaded it with explosives, and headed toward Israel. The truck exploded as they barreled through the border fence at the Kerem Shalom crossing. Israeli air strikes then destroyed the armored vehicle. The confrontation lasted only about fifteen minutes, but it badly shook both Egypt and Israel. After the tragedy, with U.S. support, Egypt increased efforts to fight militants in Sinai, including with the use of air power. But the area remained highly unstable.
Then, in late October, two more events occurred in quick succession that demonstrated how truly complicated and unstable the situation had become.
On October 23, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, visited Gaza at the invitation of Hamas. It was the first time a head of state had gone to the isolated enclave since Hamas took control in 2007, and both sides played up the symbolism. The Emir drove in from Egypt in a lavish motorcade of about fifty black Mercedes-Benzes and armored Toyotas, and Hamas greeted him with all the pomp and circumstance it could muster. Ismail Haniya, the Hamas Prime Minister, declared that the Qatari visit marked the end of the “political and economic siege that was imposed on Gaza” and introduced his wife in her first public appearance. For his part, the Emir pledged $400 million in development aid, more than Gaza received from all other international donors combined. He was accompanied by his wife, Sheikha Moza, and his cousin Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, or HBJ as we called him, who served as Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.
For Haniya and Hamas, this was an opportunity to get out from behind the shadow of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, recognized by the international community as the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, and to show that their future was bright despite any estrangement from Syria and Iran. For Qatar, it was a chance to revel in a newfound regional influence and stake a claim as the Arab world’s chief backer of the Palestinian cause. For Israel, it was a source of growing concern. For the United States, which continued to view Hamas as a dangerous terrorist organization, Qatar was a conundrum that illustrated the complexity of dealing with the Middle East during this turbulent time.
Geographically Qatar looks like a small finger extending into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia. At just over 4,400 square miles, it’s less than half the size of Vermont, but it is blessed with extensive reserves of oil and natural gas and, per capita, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. There are only about a quarter of a million Qatari citizens, but many times that number of foreign workers are imported to keep the country running. Sheikh Hamad deposed his father to become Emir in 1995 and soon set about raising Qatar’s profile. Under his governance, the booming capital city of Doha came to rival Dubai and Abu Dhabi as regional hubs of trade and culture, and its satellite television network Al Jazeera became the most influential source of news in the Middle East and a platform for Qatar to influence the entire region.
Like its Gulf neighbors, Qatar had little in the way of democracy or respect for universal human rights, but it has maintained strong strategic and security ties with the United States, and it hosts a major U.S. Air Force installation. This balancing act was put to the test across the Gulf during the Arab Spring.
The Emir and HBJ maneuvered to take advantage of the regional upheaval and position Qatar as a champion of the revolutions. Their goal was to turn their small nation into a major power in the Middle East by backing the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists across the region. The other Gulf monarchies feared that such a course would invite instability at home, but the Qataris saw a chance to build influence with the new players emerging on the scene and to champion their conservative cultural views, along with distracting attention from their own lack of reform at home.
Using the soft power of Al Jazeera and their bottomless checkbook, the Emir and HBJ bankrolled Morsi in Egypt, funneled weapons to Islamist rebels in Libya and Syria, and built new ties to Hamas in Gaza. Qatari fighter jets also helped enforce the no-fly zone in Libya. Everywhere you turned in the Middle East in those days, you saw the hand of Qatar. It was an impressive diplomatic tour de force, and in some instances Qatar’s efforts aligned with our own. But other Arab nations and Israel saw Qatar’s support for Islamist forces and extremist elements as posing a growing threat. The Emir’s visit to Gaza crystallized the problem. (In 2013, with Islamists in retreat in Egypt and elsewhere, the Emir abdicated in favor of his son, and HBJ was replaced by a low-profile former Deputy Interior Minister. Relations among the Gulf states reached a nadir in March 2014, when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE withdrew their Ambassadors from Qatar.)
Within hours of the Emir’s visit to Gaza, explosions rocked a weapons factory in Khartoum, Sudan. Sudanese officials said that four warplanes had flown in from the east and bombed the factory, killing two people. They pointed the finger squarely at Israel. It was not the first time. Over the previous four years the Sudanese had accused Israel of conducting several air strikes against targets in their country. Just that September, a shipment of rockets and munitions bound for Gaza was destroyed south of Khartoum. The Israelis declined to comment about the factory explosion, but a senior Defense Ministry official noted that Sudan “is supported by Iran, and it serves as a route for the transfer, via Egyptian territory, of Iranian weapons to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”
Sudan certainly had a checkered history with terrorism. It harbored Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s, and in 1993, the State Department designated it a state sponsor of terrorism. Sudan also maintained close ties with both Iran and Hamas. Shortly after the explosion at the weapons factory, two Iranian warships visited Port Sudan. Hamas leader Khaled Meshal visited Khartoum a few weeks later.
Taken together, all of these regional factors—rocket fire from Gaza, instability in the Sinai, Qatari power plays, Iranian meddling, smuggling from Sudan—made for an intensely combustible situation in the fall of 2012. In November, the cauldron boiled over.
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On November 14, 2012, I was with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey in Perth, Australia, for annual consultations with our Australian allies in a conference center in Kings Park, overlooking the city and the Swan River. As our afternoon session was breaking up, Panetta got word that Israeli Defense Minister Barak was urgently trying to reach him. Panetta stepped into a kitchen area to take the secure call from Jerusalem. After lunch, he joined General Dempsey and me on a patio to share Barak’s report. I could tell from his face that things were about to get complicated. The Israeli military was about to launch a major air campaign against militants in Gaza. The bombing runs would start imminently.
From peaceful Perth, the prospect of another war in the Middle East felt a million miles away (actually about seven thousand), but this was deadly serious. I told Panetta and Dempsey that the Israeli respon
se was understandable. The Hamas rockets were becoming increasingly advanced and accurate, to the point of even threatening Tel Aviv, forty miles from the border. Residents there hadn’t faced air-raid warnings since the first Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles at Israel. Every country has the right to defend itself, and no government could be expected to accept such provocation. Still any escalation in violence was going to make the situation that much harder to contain, and no one wanted to see a repeat of the all-out war that raged only four years earlier.
The first major round of air strikes killed Ahmed Jabari, a terrorist accused of planning many attacks against Israelis over the years. Over the next two days people on both sides were killed. The front page of the New York Times on November 16 was dominated by dramatic side-by-side photographs of funerals in Gaza City and Jerusalem.
According to Israel, during that week more than 1,500 rockets were fired from Gaza. Six Israelis, four civilians and two soldiers, were killed, and more than two hundred were injured. Many Israeli families were forced to evacuate their homes in southern areas near Gaza as rockets continued to rain down from the sky. Hundreds of Palestinians were reportedly killed in the air campaign the Israeli military called Operation Pillar of Defense.
I received frequent updates from Ambassador Dan Shapiro and his team at our embassy in Tel Aviv and from our experts back in Washington. Deputy Secretary Bill Burns, who had served as the Department’s top Middle East official under Colin Powell, once again gathered information for me. Bill and I agreed that there was a limited window in which diplomacy might be able to head off further escalation of the conflict.
Hard Choices Page 60
