Authors: Elliott Abrams
In the Berlin meeting with Rice and
her team, Qurie's answer to that question was, in effect, we don't. We can only unify the security forces under the prime minister after the Israeli withdrawal. Nothing can be done to change Arafat's role; he is the symbol of our independence movement. Right now he is under siege by the Israelis, so why should he cooperate anyway? Our political system is a strange one, and it cannot achieve what you want. Rice then returned to security issues: Could the PA handle Hamas and the other groups? The PA would absorb them, Qurie said, not confront them. Rice told him there would be no international force in Gaza, so the PA needed to face its responsibilities and show that terrorism would not be tolerated. We are not proposing a civil war, but you have to show that the armed struggle is over. Qurie replied by moving away from the topic of security again: What we need now, he said, are final status negotiations. This idea of building political institutions is fine, but it is not central. Our real business is preparing for final status talks; building institutions follows later.
To say that Rice and Qurie were talking past each other is a gross understatement; there was little common ground in that meeting. In essence, Qurie was saying, “Give us a state and then we'll see about reform” – the approach that had marked the Clinton administration. Those days were long gone in Washington, but apparently he had not noticed.
Rice rejected his approach and told him, Abu Ala'a, look around you. We're in
Berlin
.
Berlin!
You are telling me nothing can be accomplished until you negotiate final borders and have a state. Germany had no final borders until 1990 – but it built a prosperous democratic state. Rice suggested that final status talks were not in the cards right now, and anyway, talks had gone on forever and not produced anything. The disengagement plan could give the PA land to govern. If it reformed its institutions and governed that territory well, it would not be a great leap from there to final status. So she urged him to get started – prepare to govern Gaza and govern it well.
The session ended with no meeting of the minds – except on one aspect: elections. Everyone in the Palestinian party demanded full American support for elections, to rejuvenate the leadership and show that the Palestinians were ready for self-government. Rice responded with complete agreement and pledged U.S. support.
In June, shortly before the Sea Island summit, the Israeli cabinet approved (14 to 7) a version of the disengagement plan, but Sharon had been forced to compromise. There would have to be a separate vote on the dismantling of each settlement, meaning Sharon's political struggle would go on and on for months more. Worse yet for Sharon, two National Religious Party cabinet
members resigned their posts as soon as the cabinet approved disengagement; later, the entire party left Sharon's government, meaning he now had a minority coalition in the 120-member Knesset. For us in Washington, this turn of events had one reassuring side: Sharon really had needed the April 14 letter. His arguments about the necessity for strong American backing were not ploys designed merely to improve his political situation. We were working together to achieve the disengagement and move toward the vision the president had sketched out in June 2002.
President Bush hosted the G-8 summit from June 8 to 10 at Sea Island, Georgia, using the meeting to promote a new “Partnership for Progress and a Common Future with the Region of the Broader Middle East and North Africa.” The official Chair's Summary of the meetings began, “We met at Sea Island for our annual Summit to advance freedom by strengthening international cooperation to make the world both safer and better.” The entire effort was part of Bush's larger approach to the Broader Middle East and North Africa region, called BMENA for short, which as we defined it included every country from Morocco to Afghanistan. (Initially, we had called it the “Greater Middle East” until German foreign minister Joschka Fischer pleaded that in German, the term smacked of Nazi-era locutions.) The Sea Island declarations reflected Bush's promotion of democracy and institutional reform, which he had outlined in his National Endowment for Democracy speech in November 2003. The president was also proposing establishing a U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area by 2013. In addition, the G-8 backed a Democracy Assistance Dialogue bringing together governments and NGOs and a Forum for the Future in which “G-8 and regional Foreign, Economic, and other Ministers” would meet annually “in an ongoing discussion on reform, with business and civil society leaders participating in parallel dialogues.”
An odd mix of regional leaders attended the summit – from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Yemen – and the degree of enthusiasm from governments in the region and in Europe for the Sea Island declarations was equally mixed. The most common criticism was that nothing could be achieved in the Middle East unless and until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved. Zbigniew Brzezinski's reaction was typical of the criticism we had been getting all year: “Democracy right now is a slogan. Probably worse than that, it is a deceptive device to justify postponement in the peace process.”
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Critics also argued that this democracy initiative would end up like the Roadmap and the June 24, 2002, speech: It would fail because the Bush administration would not give it the attention and energy it needed. Needless to say, we in the White House saw such criticisms as reflecting hostility based partly on opposition to the war in Iraq and partly on a startling misreading of the Middle East situation. There had been no lack of attention and energy in the White House, but they were met by a successful effort by Arafat to block
any of the reforms that were essential for progress. The Israelis were not going to negotiate a peace agreement with Arafat, and we were not going to ask them to do so. Critics who ignored what Clinton had gone through, and then the
Karine A
incident and all the other proofs of Arafat's continuing support for terrorism, were not serious; they were substituting slogans for realistic efforts to move toward peace and Palestinian statehood. And like Brzezinski, they were, for the most part, totally uninterested in bringing about democracy in the Arab world.
Yet Bush's insistence after 9/11 on reform and on freedom – stated in speeches such as his address to the National Endowment for Democracy
the previous June (2003) and after the launching and funding of the Middle East Partnership Initiative
(MEPI) in 2002 – was eliciting reactions from NGOs and civic leaders gathered in various places in the region and outside. Both the “Sana'a Declaration
” made at Sana'a, Yemen, in January 2004 and the “Alexandria Statement
” in Alexandria, Egypt, in March demanded democracy, human rights, and free elections. The 2002
Arab Human Development Report
, published by the UN Development Program
in 2003 and written by teams of Arab intellectuals, had begun to challenge what it called a “freedom deficit” in the region:
There is a substantial lag between Arab countries and other regions in terms of participatory governance. The wave of democracy that transformed governance in most of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s has barely reached the Arab States. This freedom deficit undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development.
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So the declarations coming from Sea Island were not lone voices in the wilderness, even if many Arab rulers were not keen on hearing them. For Bush, the G-8 summit provided an occasion to advance his own view that reform in the region was essential; he would make this the theme of his Second Inaugural Address six months later. Ritual bows were made in the Sea Island documents to the traditional view that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was central: The Chair's Summary stated, “Our support for reform in the region will go hand in hand with our support for a just, comprehensive, and lasting settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” But the G-8 welcomed “the prospect of Israeli withdrawal from all Gaza settlements and from parts of the West Bank, following the Israeli Cabinet decision to endorse Prime Minister Sharon's initiative.” A statement on disengagement noted that the “G8 looks forward to the implementation of this decision in 2005.”
Both Sharon and Qurie were struggling with internal politics that summer of 2004. On July 12, Sharon asked the leader of the Labor Party, Shimon Peres, to join a coalition that would have a majority in the Knesset needed
to go forward with disengagement. That day, Hadley and
I were back in the region to meet with Sharon and Qurie. The latter told us what he had told Rice in Berlin: The Palestinian people want elections, and he was for them. He figured that the majority of the population was moderate and would vote for moderate candidates. Elections should be held, he thought, in January or February 2005. He expressed no worry about Hamas as a political rival; Fatah could beat them. Nor was he worried about an armed struggle between the PA and Hamas: Dahlan was preparing for one, and if it came, he would win. The Israelis came to the same conclusion: If there ever were a confrontation, defeat was possible, but the PA should win. In our meeting with Sharon, he explained his political problems. He was now presiding over a minority government, and he lacked a majority in his own party, Likud, either for disengagement or to bring Labor into the government. He urged us to be patient and assured us he was not deterred. That the political situation was very confused was an advantage, he said; it gave him more room to maneuver.
Shortly after our return home, on July 17, Qurie offered Arafat his resignation, a result of many of the same frustrations that Abbas had experienced. Arafat was refusing to cede any real power to the office of prime minister. Ten days later, on July 27, he withdrew the resignation when Arafat agreed that the prime minister would have some control of the security forces. It is unlikely that anyone in the PA, in the Government of Israel, or in Washington actually believed this would happen. For us at the White House, the same pattern appeared month after month: A beleaguered, dogged, determined Sharon plowed forward against tough opposition, while on the Palestinian side, Arafat blocked anything resembling progress and reform. There was danger of a stalemate on the Israeli side, but Sharon was beating those who tried to stop progress. On the Palestinian side, the stalemate was real. Qurie was in essence doing nothing, perhaps correctly gauging his strength against Arafat. But this meant that the disengagement might not have the impact we sought. Rice told a visitor that she had thought Gaza disengagement itself would shake up things well enough, be enough of a shock to the system; now that seemed dubious. I returned to the region in early August on a working vacation, and Palestinian officials told me we could not rely on Egypt to “pull our chestnuts out of the fire” in Gaza if things went wrong there. The Egyptians are pulling back, they explained. They are backing away because of controversy about the disengagement plan – criticism by Palestinians and opposition within Egypt. Gaza seems to them chaotic and they will not take it on, whatever they told you Americans. And they want to see who wins your November elections, anyway.
On August 18, we had further proof of the challenge Sharon faced: Likud, which voted in May against the disengagement plan in a party referendum, now voted against Sharon's intent to form a coalition with the Labor Party. Sharon needed Labor votes to get a majority in the Knesset for his plan, and that was exactly what Likud politicians wanted to keep from him. At the end of August, I urged Rice in a memo to spell out our agreement with Sharon on settlements
. It seemed to me this would help Sharon make his case for disengagement, which
was in part that Israel was giving up peripheral settlements
in order to keep the main blocks. We had agreed that Israel could build in settlements as long as there were neither new settlements nor expansion of settlement land areas. (Once again, it is worth noting that the fact that we had an agreement was clear to all.) Sharon recorded one victory in mid-September: On September 14, the Knesset approved the Gaza compensation bill, giving funds to settlers so they could relocate. And Sharon kept his steamroller moving: Six weeks later, on October 26, the Knesset gave preliminary approval (voting 67 to 45) to the entire disengagement plan. Every vote was a compromise and a battle, but somehow Sharon was finding the votes to keep moving forward.
Sharon's battle for votes was conducted against a background of continuing violence. On August 31, two suicide bombers, acting within minutes of each other, attacked buses in Beersheba, killing 16 people and wounding about 100. Hamas claimed responsibility. There were smaller attacks on September 8, 14, 22, 23, 24, and 30. As October began, Sharon ordered what became a 17-day offensive into Gaza, both in response to these attacks and to stop the rockets that were being fired into Israeli settlements. For Sharon, it was critical to prove that he would not be withdrawing from Gaza under fire – so he was determined that the firing would stop.
But a more significant development occurred at the end of October: On the 29th, Yasser Arafat was flown to Paris for medical treatment. Rumors were swirling as to what ailed him – cancer, AIDS, blood poisoning – and whether he would recover. Our role had been to assure that Israel would let him travel abroad for medical treatment, but the Israelis were too smart to get in the way of that. We had all been watching his health fade, but just how badly off he was remained a secret. Many sources of information were clearly biased and unreliable.
On November 2, President Bush was reelected by a wide margin. I had given no thought to what I would do if he lost and had no thoughts whatsoever of leaving if he won. Now the only question was whether to stay at the NSC or go with Condi Rice to State – as several friends and colleagues from the NSC were doing. I discussed the matter with Hadley, who was quickly (as expected) named her successor, and with Rice. We discussed jobs at State seriously, but Hadley persuaded me to stay at the White House with two powerful arguments. First, the president preferred that I stay; it was not helpful if the whole NSC decamped with Condi.