Tested by Zion (40 page)

Rice was also influenced by the personnel and mechanisms of the State Department itself. Like Powell, Rice had come to State with no background in the Middle East (her academic field had been Russia), though she had arrived with four years of experience as national security advisor. In those four years, however, she had spent hours each day with President Bush; now that influence was diminished as her day was spent among the career diplomats at State and the foreign officials she met there and when traveling. As she notes in her memoir, when he was secretary of state, George Shultz has made sure that more than half the regional assistant secretaries of state were political appointees loyal to him and to President Reagan; indeed, I had been one of those appointees. But Condi “wanted to make career appointments to those positions whenever possible.…In the final analysis, five of the six regional assistant secretaries came from the career ranks.”
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So the State Department officials who had spent careers in the region were the experts on whom she now relied – primarily David Welch and
several ambassadors in the field, in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and in Jerusalem, where our consul general was actually our
ambassador to the Palestinians. To put the point more sharply, her Middle East hand at the NSC had been me; now she was getting information and advice from officials whose entire careers had been spent in the Arab world. Now Rice's advice came from officials of the Near East bureau, at home and in the field.

Ironically, our closeness to the Israelis at this time created a huge disadvantage for them. We in the administration, in the White House and the State Department, were in constant contact with Israeli officials. Rice, Hadley, and I spoke with some combination of Olmert, Turbowitz, Tourgeman, Foreign Minister Livni, Defense Minister Barak, and many others almost daily. We were getting the Israeli view directly. But because we knew that their job was not only to inform us but also to spin us we discounted that view to some extent. If Israeli officials said, “Olmert must have
this
, and by Friday,” we wondered why they were saying so, what percentage of
this
he really needed, how precisely they were trying to move us. Missing was any evaluation from our man in the field, the U.S. ambassador, confirming the truth of the Israeli assertions and giving us his view that we should indeed take them very seriously.

Yet when it came to the Arabs, our ambassadors were key interlocutors, and their cables were read avidly. Whatever the comments of Arab officials being reported, their validation by an American officer made them far more compelling. On-the-ground reporting, even if duplicative to a large extent of facts we already knew, could confirm impressions or give more positive perspectives. The Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) bureau told the secretary what the Arabs thought, or too often what the Arabs wanted her to think they thought, and often passed on their views with an imprimatur of approval. Of course, sometimes the reporting cables would contradict the message the Arab officials wanted delivered, but this was still greatly advantageous to the Arabs on balance. What we were hearing from the Israelis was always discounted to some extent at State as an effort to spin us, because we were hearing it from them directly: The medium undercut the message. In contrast, on the Arab side, those messages from our ambassadors rightly influenced Rice; the imbalance existed because our system of direct contact with the Israelis meant there were few such messages and analyses from Embassy Tel Aviv. And given the number of Arab states, NEA officials in Washington were rarely equipped to provide what was missing: They had all served in Arab capitals, but few had ever served one day in Israel.

Shalom Tourgeman gave the Israeli view, which over time was one of increasing frustration with Rice and
her NEA advisors:

I think that person who is heading the State Department, from my experience his input on Middle Eastern issues is very little. This is my analysis. Because you have so many experts that are telling you, “We lived there; we know. We know what will be their reaction.” Take the Lebanon war, when she told us, “Look. The Arab world will go up in flames this Friday if you will not stop. I spoke with the Emirates and the Lebanese, with the Saudis.” Now, nothing happened; we got other impressions from them – because no one wanted us to stop the fighting in Lebanon. So this is what she got from
the ambassadors, and without any filters, and she continued, or forwarded, or threw the ball immediately to us. This is what she heard; this is what she's stating. Which was a mistake; I mean, take it, analyze it. See what are the pros and cons. See what the broader picture of the war is; see what really matters.
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Nor was there much leavening from noncareer appointees when it came to this issue: Rice chose as her deputy secretary Robert Zoellick, whose main interests lay outside the Middle East and who played little role in policy making for the region. When he left in July 2006, he was followed eventually (February 2007) by John Negroponte, a career foreign service officer who similarly focused elsewhere. Whatever biases might inhere in NEA officers, career diplomats in general had one obvious
deformation professionelle
: They believed in diplomacy and conferences and meetings, even when an outsider might wonder whether the moment was right. As Eliot Cohen put it, “At the end of any administration more and more of the career people come to the fore. She had very good relationships with those folks – and her high opinion of them was reciprocated. They really liked her and the ethos at the top was a kind of professional diplomat ethos.”
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If Rice had any inclination to a big international conference on the Middle East, she was certainly going to get nothing but reinforcement from the career service. They remembered the Madrid Conference
of 1991 and the Camp David negotiations of 2000 as highlights of American diplomacy, not as failed efforts at Israeli-Palestinian peace.

As we returned home from Israel on July 30, Rice told us what she was thinking. We gathered in her cabin in the plane, an 8 x 15 foot space where her State Department staff and I sat on and around the sofa, spilling onto the floor. First, get the Security Council resolution passed and get the combat to stop. Get the Lebanese Army to deploy south, or at least start the motions. Get some additional forces in there. Tell the Israelis that as soon as the Lebanese Army begins to move, they must simply stop. Organize Russian and French and UK support for our new text. Tomorrow was July 31, a Thursday. We could vote on Monday, August 4, the Lebanese deploy on Wednesday the 6th, and the Israelis stop on the 7th. They will have had the 10 days Olmert wanted. In fact, things took one week longer, but Rice organized this diplomacy in her mind and with her team – and then told us her thinking about what would come next.

People are lost now in the Middle East and we need to act, she said; we need to make a big proposal. We need to think about a comprehensive Middle East settlement. Maybe the president should propose it in his UN General Assembly speech. The pieces are all there – from Gaza disengagement to convergence and some of the Palestinian proposals; she said she was agnostic about whether to try for an Israeli-Syria settlement at the same time or to pressure the Syrians by leaving them out for a while. Maybe we couldn't solve everything between
the Israelis and Palestinians, maybe we couldn't solve Jerusalem, but we could describe the borders, say there would be some land swaps, say there would be no right of return, and call for establishing a Palestinian state now, with provisional borders. The Arabs were all worried about Iran, so maybe we could get them to support this – strongly. The sequence would be a big speech by the president and then an international conference. We would invite the key Arab states, the Europeans, and Russia. After the speech and the conference, we would produce a framework for diplomatic action. That would be the legacy we'd leave; we blew up the Middle East and now we need to show how we are going to resolve all these problems. It has to be ambitious. We'll shove the Quartet aside and bring on our Arab partners; leaving them out was Clinton's mistake and we won't repeat it. The only condition we impose on the Palestinians is that they accept Israel.

This was the outline of what became the Annapolis Conference 15 months later. I was opposed to it immediately and remained opposed throughout the period when Condi tried to persuade the president to buy in – which he finally did only in July 2007. There in her cabin I argued – softly – that this new Palestinian state would be a terrorist state, a Hamas state; who would keep order there? What had happened to all the preconditions the president had mentioned in his June 24, 2002, speech and his April 14, 2004, letter to Sharon? And as to the Golan, how could we possibly include it and reward Assad, who was Iran's ally? At the least, must not a Syrian shift away from Iran be a precondition for any movement on the Golan? During the Second Lebanon War, I had thought Condi was shifting away from the line the president had taken (though I also knew she talked with him constantly, far more often than I did, and might be reflecting a change in his view). But that shift might have reflected the intense pressures she was under as the war dragged on week after week and Israel failed to achieve the kind of military victory that would have been needed to secure all its diplomatic goals. I now had that feeling again. What had happened that justified such a great change in U.S. policy toward the Palestinians?

A week later, before the Lebanon resolution was even passed in the Security Council, Condi gathered her advisors in her apartment for a “skull” session on the Middle East. As usual, I was the only person there who was
not
in her employ at the State Department. During this August 6 meeting, she outlined what I described to Hadley in a reporting memo as an extremely expansive view of what the president should say in his UN General Assembly speech in September. Moreover, this was not just musing; David Welch had prepared a paper, which was handed around. One quick read showed me that all democracy and human rights issues were now to be skipped over; let the Palestinians handle all that once they get statehood, the paper suggested. And what about maintaining security in the West Bank? Put a U.S. National Guard division in there, Welch was suggesting. This statement was taken seriously, though the wisdom of setting such an American target in front of Hamas eluded me entirely – and the domestic politics involved would, I thought, kill such a proposal in
seconds. Was it possible that Rice had discussed that with the president, I wondered. But there was more: The UN speech should announce that we were calling a major international conference, to be held in Williamsburg. But it would not need to negotiate borders for the Palestinian state: Those would be set by the president in his UN speech. When Condi explained that she had just had dinner with Brent Scowcroft and also spoken with Jim Baker, asking them about how they organized the 1991 Madrid Conference
, there was no doubt left in my mind. Whatever this approach was, it was not the policy that President Bush had outlined in his 2002 speech and his April 14, 2004, letter to Sharon. Scowcroft and Baker had dealt uncomplainingly with Arafat and had never had the slightest sympathy for the president's focus on democracy – or, for that matter, his deep appreciation for Israel.

Condi addressed this concern: She claimed there was no great policy change. The only real change since the April 14 letter, she said, is that there we said “fix the internal parts of the Palestinian state first, then do the peace negotiation”; now we would be saying to “do them in parallel.” We can't wait forever, she said; we need to get the Palestinian state now. As I told Hadley in my report, she would in the end move forward, even if the political and security conditions were not there. My memo suggested that this would abandon the president's insistence that he would never create a terrorist state. Rice's plan was also Clintonian in its timing: a desperate effort as the administration entered its final two years.

Behind this remarkable change in Rice's approach were, I thought, the Second Lebanon War and her apparent loss of faith in the Israelis’ ability to handle their own affairs. But she was also adopting a new – or perhaps more accurately, a very old – view of the relationship between the Israeli-Palestinian issue and other Middle East matters. Once she had said that we cannot want peace more than the parties did, and they would need to be in the lead. Now she was arguing that our national security interests required a peace settlement, whatever the views and interests of the parties. Moreover, it seemed to me this was buying the view – long a staple of the State Department and especially the NEA outlook – that our relationship with Israel was undermining all our interests in the region. Condi's long-time colleague and friend Philip Zelikow, whom she had named counselor at the State Department, spelled out this approach in a September speech about “the task of building security in the broader Middle East,” which concluded “by discussing Israel and its neighbors”:

The significance of the Arab-Israeli dispute across these problems is, I think, obvious to all of you. What I would want to emphasize is, if you see the threats in a way something like the way I’ve just described them, think then about what is the coalition you need to amass in order to combat those threats. Who are the key members of that coalition? You can imagine the United States, key European allies, the state of Israel, and the Arab moderates – Arabs who seek a peaceful future. You could call it the coalition of the builders, not just a coalition of the willing. The coalition of the builders as opposed to the coalition of the destroyers.

What would bind that coalition and help keep them together is a sense that the Arab-Israeli issues are being addressed, that they see a common determination to sustain an active policy that tries to deal with the problems of Israel and the Palestinians.…

For the Arab moderates and for the Europeans, some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is just a sine qua non for their ability to cooperate actively with the United States on a lot of other things that we care about. We can rail against that belief; we can find it completely justifiable, but it's fact. That means an active policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute is an essential ingredient to forging a coalition that deals with the most dangerous problems.
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