Tested by Zion (13 page)

These events transpired against the backdrop of ever clearer preparations for war in Iraq. The president sought both congressional authorization, which he obtained on October 10, and another UN Security Council resolution, adopted on November 8. Success in the November elections put the Senate back under Republican control, also strengthening Bush's hand. Iraq handed over a massive report on its alleged nuclear program in December, but the United States found that the report contained many errors and omissions and that Iraq was in “material breach” of its obligations under Security Council resolutions. The president's State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003, argued strongly that Iraq must and would be confronted: “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”

As war came closer, Tony Blair pressed harder for more action on a Middle East “peace process.” Blair later described his view in an interview:

Absolutely. Yes. I mean, I have always taken the view that although the Israel-Palestine issue is not the cause of the extremism, resolving it is a major part of helping with the broader strategy. And so particularly when we were going to have to do difficult things in Afghanistan, if we were going to have to do Iraq, our enemies would set this in the context of the West versus Islam; and the question is could we find a way of unifying the moderates in the cause of producing a different type of the Middle East. And to do that, I always thought Israel-Palestine was essential.
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It was evident by the end of 2002 that, barring a major concession by Saddam Hussein, we were headed for war in Iraq. So according to Blair's logic – and on this point he certainly had the full support of the State Department – progress in the Middle East was essential. For Powell, the mechanism for
the “peace process” was clear; it would be achieved through the Roadmap
and
his diplomacy with the EU, Russians, and the UN Secretary General. At an NSC meeting on December 18, 2002, he called the Roadmap a “pretty good product” that reinforced the president's June 24 speech and the vision it presented. Yet Bush did not seem persuaded that the Roadmap would work and worried that the sequencing was off: He had argued for security first, and that insistence was being watered down. It undermines the message on terrorism, he said, if we all appear to be rushing forward regardless of terrorist attacks and the lack of security reform on the Palestinian side. And he noted that the PA was still run by Arafat alone and did not represent the Palestinian people. We need to make sure that the principles in the June 24 speech are reinforced and not undermined, Bush said. Bush's remarks were yet another sign that the president and his secretary of state were not on the same wavelength.

Two days later, Bush met with the Quartet at the White House. We need to move forward, he told them. Arafat was a failed leader and working with him would fail as it had in the past. The argument that “there is nobody else” was wrong; Palestinian democracy would produce new leaders. The others worried about Sharon, but Bush said he had spoken with Sharon and
thought he would move forward – if the terrorism stopped, which was, again, why Bush had put security issues first. When Bush said he remained fully committed to establishing a Palestinian state, he was asked whether the 2005 timetable still stood. Not unless the terror stops, he answered. When Powell (interestingly, it was he and not the EU representatives or Kofi Annan who raised the issue) said the problem of Israeli settlement activity was sure to arise again soon, Bush shot him down and said that pushing the settlements issue at the wrong time would not yield anything. Anyway, Bush said, does anyone here believe that the terror would stop if Israeli settlement activity stopped? The key is to get a new Palestinian leadership that calls for peace and can deliver. Arafat is not that guy.

So, six months after the Bush speech of June 24, the year 2002 was ending with principles clearly stated and a strong desire for some forward movement – but little progress on the ground. The Roadmap text was finalized, though not yet published officially. The Quartet was in place and was now the main mechanism for coordinating the views of the Bush administration with those of the Europeans, the UN under Kofi Annan, and Russia. Yet Arafat remained in power and terrorist attacks continued, so the main demands of Bush's June 24 speech remained unmet. Perhaps the greatest progress had come on the Israeli side, where Prime Minister Sharon, the long-time leader of Israel's right wing and the head of Likud, its strongest right-wing party, had endorsed Bush's proposals. Like Bush, he had abandoned policies that flatly opposed Palestinian statehood and now accepted that goal – to be sure, under circumstances that would be difficult to reach. When the Israeli elections were over, the next task would be the one that had evaded the Americans and the Quartet: real Palestinian reform, of the sorts Bush had spoken about on June 24 and Sharon had demanded more belligerently on December 4.

I entered the scene in December 2002. I had been offered positions by both Powell and Rice in April 2001 and, having spent eight years at State in the Reagan administration, decided to take the White House job. The position was “Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organizations.” In the NSC hierarchy, under Rice came her deputy Steve Hadley, and then the various senior directors (for geographical areas such as Africa, the Middle East, or Europe or for subject areas such as economics, counterterrorism, human rights, or intelligence). As the senior director for the small directorate known as “Democ,” I handled the UN, foreign aid, and promotion of human rights and democracy.

In the Reagan State Department, I had been assistant secretary for human rights when George Shultz moved me to a regional slot – assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, in charge of Latin America. My history repeated itself at the NSC: In the fall of 2002, Rice moved me from a functional to a regional office, to be senior director for Near East and North African Affairs. Up to that point, the NSC staff members handling Israeli-Palestinian affairs had been from the CIA and had been Arabists, comfortable with the approach of State's Near East Bureau. By choosing me, Rice was choosing someone who had already revealed to her – with my private complaints to her in 2001 and 2002 about the way the NSC staff was handling Israel – my own views.

I was a Bush supporter, a Rice supporter, a “neocon,” and a strong proponent of the closest possible relations between the United States and Israel. I worked far more closely with Vice President Cheney's staff than with the State Department. I had strong personal ties with most of the major American Jewish organizations. Although I had not written much about the Middle East, the book chapters and short pieces I had published made my position clear. So in selecting me in the fall of 2002 to be the “Middle East guy” at her NSC, Rice was staking out a position: closer to Cheney and
Bush and
farther from Powell and State. As the president's views and the lack of enthusiasm for them at State became clear, Rice was choosing a staff member who would be completely loyal to her and to the president and who would promote his views with enthusiasm.

To me it seemed clear that the path to peace was not through Israeli concessions and quickly assembled American peace plans. Ever since the smashing Israeli victory in the 1967 Six Day War, such approaches had been tried and had always failed. On the contrary, a strong Israel was in my view a valuable American ally and far more likely to reach peace agreements with its Arab neighbors. It was for that reason that I had, in 1972, taken time away from law school to work on Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson's initial presidential campaign and then had left law practice to come to Washington in the spring of 1975 to join his staff as he geared up for his 1976 presidential run. As his biographer wrote, “It was Jackson who introduced into the debate the idea that ‘lasting peace in the Middle East lies in American support for a map of Israel
with secure and recognized borders whose defense can be assured by the Israelis themselves.’”
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Jackson led the fight for additional military aid to Israel and for the freedom of Soviet Jewry to emigrate there – the latter action earned him the scorn of Nixon and Kissinger but led the way to the emigration of a million Soviet Jews there and changed Israeli demography permanently. “Jackson saw Israel as a strategic bastion of the West,” as I well knew; indeed, he was a far tougher defender of Israel than his colleagues Sens. Jacob Javits and Abraham Ribicoff, both Jews, and tougher than many leaders in the Jewish community.
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This was the perspective I brought to the NSC. Peace seemed possible to me if and only if the Arab states finally gave up the effort to destroy Israel – either to destroy it physically through war or to destroy its Jewish character through the return of millions of Palestinian refugees and their families. If and when the Arabs were willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state and a legitimate, permanent neighbor, I knew that Israelis would make great sacrifices for peace. I believed they would leave most of the West Bank and Gaza as soon as it was safe to do so because I knew few Israelis who believed it was possible or sensible to continue ruling millions of Palestinians forever. The effect of years of war and terror had been, I thought, to undermine permanently the old hopes for a “New Middle East” where Israelis and Palestinians would live together in peace; instead, I thought they would live apart in peace. Yet for the Arab governments and the Palestinian leadership to give up 50 years of delegitimizing, rejecting, attacking, and terrorizing Israel required the staunchest possible American backing for the Jewish state. With America now cast as the sole superpower, it was possible that the Arab leaders would finally reconcile themselves to peace with Israel and in turn that Israel could safely withdraw from much of the Palestinian territories. Yet it seemed clear to me that pressure on Israel was not the way to get there; pressure on the Arabs to stop supporting terrorism was the first step. Peace would come through security, not vice versa.

When Ariel Sharon defeated Ehud Barak in Israel's February 2001 elections, there was widespread chagrin in Washington, but I did not share it. At the time I had written that

Israel continues to face mortal peril, surrounded by enemies who wish its destruction. When Ehud Barak reached out for peace through concessions and compromises so great they threatened the nation's security, they were rejected out of hand by the Palestinian Authority. It has become clear to the great majority of Israelis that their Arab neighbors – today, as in 1948, 1967, and 1973, the years of Israel's major wars – continue to want not peace but victory, not compromise but surrender, not a Jewish State but another Arab state in Israel. So Israelis have chosen a leader who all along knew, and said, that the road to peace lies through strength instead of weakness, and firmness rather than unilateral concessions.
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It also seemed clear to me that the Palestinian side was not ready for statehood, partly because of the crimes of Yasser Arafat. Arafat had created in Gaza and the West Bank a corrupt and violent satrapy that threatened Israel. There was no path to peace that led through a state he controlled and used as
a terrorist base and fount of anti-Semitic propaganda. Palestinians needed to build the institutions of statehood, much as the Zionists had: school by school, courtroom by courtroom, policeman by policeman, road by road, and election by election. There were no shortcuts, and those who apologized for Palestinian terrorism and Arafat's tyranny did the Palestinian people no favors. This highly educated population was capable of self-rule, but a state needed to be built – not awarded to Arafat so that he would simply create yet another Arab tyranny.

So I was an enthusiastic supporter of the new Bush approach as expressed in the June 24 speech and of his desire to move the Israelis forward – not through the policy of pressure and antagonism that George H. W. Bush and
Jim Baker had employed but through close cooperation and the building of confidence. I was wary about State's approach to the June 24 speech and expressed my concerns in a memo to Hadley soon after taking the Middle East portfolio. I worried that the Quartet and the Roadmap were not clear in requiring that Arafat be pushed aside and were thereby weakening the president's message. In fact, it seemed to me that every month Arafat stayed in power was a defeat for the president.

I was also an enthusiastic member of Condi's NSC staff, dazzled by her efficiency, lightning intelligence, and charm. Her way of treating everyone on the staff as intellectual equals while nevertheless asserting her own clear leadership brought out from all of us our best efforts – while maintaining the highest esprit de corps. We were all working 14 hours a day at least – I was up at 4:30 a.m. every morning and got to my desk at 6:00 a.m. – and this would have been intolerable had the mood at work been sour. Instead, it was wonderful because Condi knew how to motivate and care for a staff. She insisted that summer, for example, that every NSC staffer take two weeks’ vacation, saying that given the pace at the White House, we and our families needed it. Two consecutive weeks with no excuses; email my secretary your vacation dates, she said, and you'll hear from me if you are not in compliance. Despite the immense pressures on her and the paperwork load, her desk was always clean, and she always had time to meet with her senior directors – and to make them feel she had nothing important going on but to listen to them and seek their advice.

Sharon predictably won his election on January 29, 2003, defeating a weak Labor Party candidate. Two days later the King of Bahrain visited the president, who made it clear to the king that his own views had not changed. We have an opportunity to move the peace process forward, Bush said, so the Palestinians will not have to depend on one man who is a failure. We need to get that guy out of the way so we can develop a state.