Tested by Zion (57 page)

I was now telling the president, whenever we discussed the situation or whenever I reported on a trip we had made to Jerusalem, that time had run out. On September 15, the president met with Tony Blair, with whom he had kept up a running dialogue over Middle East peace through video conferences between the White House and Number 10 Downing Street and through notes Blair would intermittently send. Blair had left office in July 2007 but had remained involved as the new Quartet envoy, spending perhaps one week per month in Jerusalem. Now he told the president there would be no deal in 2008. For one thing, he said, Livni had no incentive at all to get anything done during the campaign period; she would not want any deal done until she was prime minister. So Blair urged that more attention be paid in the coming months to conditions on the ground in the West Bank, in essence, helping Fayyad move forward on the economy and on political and security reforms. When the president asked about Gen. Jones's security efforts, Blair was pragmatic: All his work should be geared to Palestinian life on the ground now, not a grand security plan. Building Palestinian capabilities is key. We should push ahead and not put all our eggs into the basket of diplomacy. Look, he concluded, reality on the ground will shape an agreement, not vice versa. I agree with that, the president replied.

Oh boy, I thought. “Reality on the ground will shape an agreement, not vice versa.” Blair had summed up the error of our policy quite neatly. As he had put it, all our eggs were in the basket of diplomacy. If the president did agree with that assessment, I had to wonder why he had allowed that situation to occur; no satisfactory theory was ever put forward except his desire to allow Condi to lead in this policy area – and the fact that Olmert was pushing in the same direction as his own troubles mounted. Again I recalled the times I had told the president I did not think Condi would be able to get an agreement, despite the optimism she projected to him. Well, he had said several times, I know you think that, but Olmert thinks it's possible too and he's the prime minister of Israel. With both Rice and Olmert saying it was doable and wanting to continue
on the negotiations path, my grim forecasts did not carry the day. That did not matter, but having put too many “eggs in the basket of diplomacy” did because it meant that we had not done all we could to bring progress on the ground.

With an Israeli prime minister anxious for a peace agreement, it would have been wrong for the president or the United States to express only doubts and never enthusiasm. And, in fact, Olmert got extraordinary support from the United States, even when his own situation in Israeli politics was eroding fast. My goal had not been to sow doubts but to suggest what Blair was saying: Reality on the ground must shape the diplomacy. The safety net for negotiations should be not words but real change on the ground in the West Bank. We needed to pay as much or more attention to jobs and roads and police as to conferences. We did not.

And for that I blamed Hadley, at least in part. Some of the criticism of his tenure as national security advisor claimed he would never engage in real fights, but that was wrong. The development of the surge in Iraq proved it wrong, for there he had tenaciously fought against strong opposition in the Pentagon. But there was one exception: He would not fight Condi. Their relationship was too close and his deference to her too great. On the issue of Middle East policy, this meant that he would counsel her, but when her mind was made up, he would go along with her. I had never seen him say to the president, “Condi is wrong and you must stop her,” but that was not surprising: That kind of remark should be made in a one-on-one meeting only. I had the impression, however, that he would never say this even in private, viewing it as disloyal to Condi. Of course, there were many things going on among the president, Rice, and Hadley that I did not see, meetings I did not attend, phone calls I was not on. But my impression was not idiosyncratic because everyone in the White House shared it: Steve would not fight Condi.

For the president, that was a loss because it meant that he was not getting the alternative views to which every president is entitled – and should demand. At least after Rumsfeld was gone, Rice was clearly the leading figure on foreign policy matters; she did not face what she had in the first term, where she was not only contending with Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld but also in their eyes held a position subordinate to theirs. Especially in 2007 and 2008, after Rumsfeld's departure, with Cheney's effectiveness hurt due to the departure of his invaluable top aide Scooter Libby and, of course, with her own former deputy at the top of the NSC, Rice had achieved almost complete supremacy on foreign policy issues. The president occasionally expressed annoyance with one action or another taken by State or by Rice; I was present once when he was informed by Chancellor Merkel of some decision Rice had taken without first seeking his approval. He then angrily called Rice to say the decision was his, and he had not made up his mind. But he appeared fundamentally satisfied
by the system in place, one in which too many decisions were in my view made at the Principals’ level rather than being brought to him.

His satisfaction with this system was odd because President Bush was extremely decisive. He enjoyed making decisions and did not delay facing them. So the system he put in place, or allowed to be created, remains a mystery to me: one where options were most often debated among Principals who ironed out disagreements and reached a consensus that was then reported to the president for his approval, rather than one in which disagreements were fully exposed and debated before him. Peter Rodman summed it up in
Presidential Command
:

Like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush presents the paradox of a leader capable of great decisiveness but who set up or tolerated a system that impeded his exercise of it.…At Principals or Deputies meetings, Rice and
her deputy Stephen Hadley repeatedly conveyed the President's injunction to reconcile disagreements, to “merge” or “blend” or “bridge” competing proposals, to split the differences, to come up with compromises.
¹

On Middle East policy, in any event, formal Principals meetings or NSC meetings (with the president present) were almost never held. By my own count, there were three such Principals meetings in the entire second term and no NSC meetings. Policy making was handled less formally, in meetings held in Rice's conference room or Hadley's office, and discussions with the president were equally informal: held before or after phone calls with leaders in the region or visits from them, standing around the Oval Office. It was hard to make an organized argument in such a setting, but sitting down would not have made a difference. The president was letting Olmert and
Rice see what they could do in the few remaining months. Bush may have shared my skepticism or at least had his own optimism tempered by it, but he was going to let Condi run with the ball.

Olmert's official “resignation” came on September 21, after Livni won the leadership of Kadima. She now had 42 days to form a government, or new elections would be held. This formal “resignation” meant Olmert was now a caretaker heading an interim government, a status that further reduced the legitimacy of any last-minute efforts on his part to broker a far-reaching peace deal.

Yet he kept on trying. His chief of staff Yoram Turbowitz later speculated about what drove him during this time:

Olmert was highly confident that he had a good chance of striking a deal with Abu Mazen. They had numerous meetings, most of which were one on one, and Olmert had a feeling that they could reach an understanding. For Olmert as with any politician there were a variety of motivations, but Olmert believed there was a historic opportunity to bring an end to the conflict. He thought we were running out of time for the two-state solution and he would be able to make a real mark in the history of Jewish people.
He genuinely believed the Israeli public would overwhelmingly endorse a reasonable settlement. He knew he would not run for prime minister again and he was not confident who his successor would be and if he would continue forward with the peace process.

Oddly enough, Abu Mazen avoided the opportunity Olmert offered him, and did not seriously respond to the suggestion put forward. Abu Mazen, and his team, only wanted the offer in writing. At the time the feeling was that the request to receive the offer in writing was merely a Palestinian wish to record the offer, so that it will serve as a point of departure for future negotiations. Olmert was right in not giving it to them in writing.

The reason for Abu Mazen's refusal to reach an agreement will probably remain a mystery. One may say he never wanted to strike a deal, as he was interested in the process that served his “regime's” interests. Another may say, that at the relevant time there was a perception that both parties did not have enough time to conclude a timely legitimate deal. It may well have been the case that if Olmert was firm on his seat for a while longer, an agreement may have been accomplished. It will probably remain unresolved forever.
²

As Israeli politicians maneuvered for power, we went off to our eighth and last UN General Assembly
. I had first attended the UN General Assembly in 1981 at the start of the Reagan administration, accompanying Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to see Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Now, 27 years later, this was presumably my last, a fact leading to little sadness on my part. The unreal world of the UN, where Israel had long been under vicious assault, held no attraction. This was the place that had voted that “Zionism is a form of racism” in 1975 and where president after president had had to veto unbalanced and unfair resolutions about the Middle East. If the UN had done any good in the region, it was hard to discern because whatever positive efforts one could find were outweighed by activities that simply made peace and justice harder to attain.

The president met again with Abbas in New York and took an entirely realistic tone, perhaps moved by the announcement Olmert had made so recently. There was no deal coming, he told Abbas; he knew that. But they should keep negotiating anyway, he said, to keep hope alive and hand something positive over to the new administration. Abbas did not argue with this; he said he thought Olmert was serious about the negotiations but lacked now in the credibility to pull them off. He then told us something remarkable: that many people in the Israeli government were encouraging him to break off with Olmert. We had heard this rumor – that people purporting to represent Livni had urged the Palestinians to stop now and to wait for her to become prime minister before negotiating again – but were not sure whether to believe it, and now Abbas was confirming it. On reflection, this was not all that shocking: Why would Livni want Olmert to lock her into conditions and promises she did not support or could not meet?

The president did not think Olmert could negotiate an agreement in the time left to him and told Abbas he also worried that any deal Olmert negotiated would be dead simply because he was its sponsor. The goal, he said, was
to get things set so the next Israeli government will be ready to negotiate. Erekat replied that this probably suggested continuing to meet with Olmert to keep the ball rolling, but he said they just weren't sure about this approach. Olmert wanted to keep on negotiating, but other Israelis were saying it wasn't appropriate to negotiate with a caretaker. The Palestinians had a dilemma. I offered my own opinion: Don't conclude a deal with Olmert because any such deal is going to be rejected in Israel. Hadley agreed: Keep meeting and working, but do not expect to reach a final deal. We will keep saying we are making a push for a deal by the end of the year, to keep hope alive, but let's be realistic. The president agreed and said he would push even at the last minute if he thought a deal possible – but it did not seem to be. So the question would be whether the next Israeli leader and Abbas would be ready to make some very hard decisions. Will Livni be able to deliver? She has been a negotiator; soon she will be prime minister and that is a different role.

Of course, Livni never did become prime minister, though that outcome seemed very likely back in September 2008. At the meeting, it was agreed to keep things on track: The Palestinians would keep on talking with the Israelis right to the end, and the president would try to hand things off to his successor without a loss of momentum.

In a meeting the next day with Secretary Rice, Abbas told us he would deal with Olmert until the very day he left office although – he repeated – many Israelis are telling us not to. Rice urged that negotiations
continue. We know what we want, she said: an agreement this year, or one early next year, that we can hand off. We know you have made more progress than people know. Keep trying to nail things down, she urged them. The final big decisions will have to await a new prime minister, but this work should go on. We won't start again at zero and the work is not wasted. We all know what's in the security paper and it can be written in 15 minutes.

It was reasonable to keep teams at work, I thought, but it was simply wrong that a security paper could be written in 15 minutes and not at all clear it could be written in 15 days or 15 weeks. It was not clear what Condi meant by “final big decisions,” but she appeared to think something could still be signed before January 20. After all, if Livni got a coalition put together fast and became prime minister in October, that still left almost three months. That was the theory. And the negotiations did continue: In the middle of October, Abbas came to Jerusalem and to the sukkah at Olmert's residence, and they continued to talk about the terms of a possible deal. On October 24, the NATO Secretary General visited the White House, and the president told him privately that they were likely to get a peace deal by the end of December. This could only have come from Condi and seemed to me completely unrealistic – and also now becoming dangerous. The discredited Olmert, now
officially an interim leader, should not be egged on to sign a last-minute deal with Abbas. But the president's optimism waxed and waned; on November 13, he told the Saudi king that he thought a deal would have been reached if Olmert had not been caught up in the scandals and forced to resign. Obama had been elected on November 4, and this was the last meeting the president and King Abdallah would have. He regretted leaving office without an agreement in place, the president told the king, suggesting that either Condi's own optimism had diminished or that he no longer believed what he was hearing from her.