Tested by Zion (8 page)

An official close to Powell described the event similarly:

In the spring of 2002 things turn rough because the Israelis move into the Muqata and they bottle up Arafat. He's [Powell's] getting tired of going over there knowing that he really has nothing in his caboose, nothing in his sheath. So he goes over there at the president's request. It's March and he doesn't want to go over there, but the president had suddenly realized he cannot ignore this stuff. The Israelis have cut off the power, they've cut off the water…the lights, everything, and Arafat's sitting in the dark with candles and AK-47s. And so we have a meeting in the Sit Room and the president says, “You know, I’ve got to do something and I think Colin has to go over and try to break this open.” And we're walking out and the president says to Powell, “I really need you to do this. It's going to be hard, and I know that you're going to get beat up, but your credibility and your standing is such that you can afford to lose a little,” which is right. And Powell replied, “I understand, Mr. President. That's the job.”
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Powell began his Middle East visit on April 7, making several stops along the way in Europe and Morocco; at the stop in Madrid, he formed the “Quartet” (the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the UN Secretary General)
that was to play a continuing role in Middle East negotiations. A State Department official explained,

He did create the Quartet. And the real reason for this is he wanted to show international backing for this trip he was taking. Secondly he was being driven nuts by every European foreign minister coming out with his own plan every day, especially Joschka Fischer. Every three days he had another German plan, or Igor Ivanov had a plan, and if he had a plan, Germany had to have a plan. And then the Brits were always saying, “We have to have a plan.” But getting the EU as one entity relieved them of having to come up with plans all the time, so the Quartet served that purpose.
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Powell may have united the EU, but divisions in Washington were, in his view, not only clear but becoming nasty. A source very close to Powell described the scene from his perspective: “There was nobody behind him in the White House and as soon as the plane lifts off from Andrews Air Force Base, the NSC, the Vice President's Office, and everybody else in the White House was stabbing him in the back.” Powell met Sharon on April 12 and was to see Arafat the following day. When another suicide bombing at a Jerusalem bus stop killed six, Powell did not cancel the meeting but merely postponed it by one day and met Arafat on April 14. A State Department official who traveled with Powell described how Powell spent his time in the region:

He went into the region, he went to the Muqata a couple of times, he spent a lot of time with Sharon. It was miserable because he knew that we're not going to have any breakthroughs here. We're able to break open Arafat and
get him some running room from the Israelis; they kind of backed off. But he kept getting these rudder checks from Washington to make sure he didn't do anything. Just solve the problem, but don't do anything. You can talk about settlement freezes because that's our policy, but the president will not say anything along those lines. So he was in that terrible position where he was presenting what is official U.S. policy with the knowledge that the U.S. government would not support what he was saying was official U.S. policy, and they all knew it. And so after a while he got tired of it because he was being unfair to the process and he was being used by his own government. So he said to Arafat in their last meeting, “You've got to give me something. I can't keep coming back here. Nobody will see you in my government. I’m it. I am it.” He saw Arafat twice in that three-day period. In the last meeting he said, “Goodbye if you don't give me something to work with other than your rhetoric…you can't make statements that don't turn out to be true, you don't follow up on. If you don't give me something that I can take back and show real progress with, and not just another statement, then this is probably our last meeting.” And Arafat said, “You're a general, I’m a general; I will obey.” It was all crapola. Nothing really changed.

Arafat was playing the same games that had kept him at the top of Palestinian politics for decades and won him all those visits to the White House. But he had either not read or not taken seriously the rest of Bush's speech of April 4 dispatching Powell to the region to try and stop the violence. Rice, Rumsfeld,
and others in the administration were beginning to focus on a new idea: that new Palestinian leadership was the key to moving forward.

In fact, Bush's speech had contained something that was new – a direct attack on Arafat. Finally, the frustrations that Bill Clinton had voiced in the Oval Office on January 20, 2001, were being expressed publicly and by the president himself:

This can be a time for hope. But it calls for leadership, not for terror. Since September the 11th, I’ve delivered this message: everyone must choose; you're either with the civilized world, or you're with the terrorists. All in the Middle East also must choose and must move decisively in word and deed against terrorist acts.

The Chairman of the Palestinian Authority has not consistently opposed or confronted terrorists. At Oslo and elsewhere, Chairman Arafat renounced terror as an instrument of his cause, and he agreed to control it. He's not done so.

The situation in which he finds himself today is largely of his own making. He's missed his opportunities, and thereby betrayed the hopes of the people he's supposed to lead.

I call on the Palestinian people, the Palestinian Authority and our friends in the Arab world to join us in delivering a clear message to terrorists: blowing yourself up does not help the Palestinian cause. To the contrary, suicide bombing missions could well blow up the best and only hope for a Palestinian state.

No nation can pick and choose its terrorist friends. I call on the Palestinian Authority and all governments in the region to do everything in their power to stop terrorist activities, to disrupt terrorist financing, and to stop inciting violence by glorifying terror in state-owned media, or telling suicide bombers they are martyrs. They're not martyrs. They're murderers. And they undermine the cause of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian people deserve peace and an opportunity to better their lives.…They deserve a government that respects human rights and a government that focuses on their needs – education and health care – rather than feeding their resentments.
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The speech put Arafat and
his leadership style – corruption, one-man rule, lack of any real political institutions, terrorism – front and center. Yet the debate over how much effort Bush should put into the Middle East continued inside the administration. Cheney and
Powell faced off at a Principals Committee
meeting on April 18, after Powell's return. Cheney was “kind of a hard realist oriented towards the security of Israel” and thought “the peace process was unlikely to have results.”
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When Cheney told Powell, “Don't get completely consumed with Arab-Israeli issues,” Powell replied, “You're dreaming if you don't think the Arab-Israeli conflict is central to the region – central to whatever we want to do in Iraq. Don't underestimate the centrality of this crisis.” The argument that “if you want to do anything in Iraq, you need an Israeli-Palestinian peace process” would be heard again and again. Rice told her colleagues it was time for a new look at all the “fundamental assumptions of ours that may no longer be right” given 9/11 and changes in the region.
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Powell agreed that it was time to rethink his approach: After his April trip, a close aide said, “He came back and that's when we decided we had to shut
this off and that's when we started writing the June 24th speech. So we started working in that direction, because he wasn't about to go back over there just to be stiffed by both sides. He felt he was losing whatever he had left. The Quartet was around and we met from time to time, but it was nothing more than keeping a plate spinning; it wasn't progress.”
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While at the White House on April 18, Powell reported to the Oval Office to tell Bush about his trip. After the briefing, Bush and
Powell faced the press, and while cameras whirred, Bush took a notably pro-Israel stance. “Israel started withdrawing quickly after our call from smaller cities on the West Bank. History will show that they've responded,” Bush said. “And as the prime minister said, he gave me a timetable and he's met the timetable.” And Bush went further: “I do believe Ariel Sharon is a man of peace.” This comment infuriated the Palestinian leadership, but they were not alone in reacting negatively: According to White House scuttlebutt, the president's father, George H. W. Bush, who seldom called him on policy matters, telephoned to complain vociferously about the president's choice of words. Nor was the former president alone: Rice “fully agreed at the time that the President had made a mistake” and “done long term damage to our relations in the Arab world,” and Powell felt that even more strongly.
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Yet Bush himself was not sorry: “The President's view – and it worked in some cases and didn't work in some cases – was very much, I’m going to show public faith in leaders so I can call them to account in private. He told me that after he said that about Sharon, he told him, ‘You better live up to that.You know I’m going out on limb for you; you better live up to that.’”
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One week later came an intervention more consequential than that of George H. W. Bush: The Saudis became involved once again. Crown Prince Abdallah came to the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, loaded for bear. President Bush's public remarks about the visit suggested a placid conversation: “One of the really positive things out of this meeting was the fact that the Crown Prince and I established a strong personal bond.…I made it clear to him that I expected Israel to withdraw, just like I’ve made it clear to Israel. And we expect them to be finished. He knows my position. He also knows that I will work for peace; I will bring parties along.” Bush also noted that “Saudi Arabia made it clear that they will not use oil as a weapon,” but he emphasized the personal side of the visit: “I had the honor of showing him my ranch. He's a man who's got a farm and he understands the land, and I really took great delight in being able to drive him around in a pickup truck and showing him the trees and my favorite spots. And we saw a wild turkey, which was good. But we had a very good discussion, and I’m honored he came to visit.”

However, the visit had been anything but cordial: it was better described as a “spectacular showdown.”
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Abdallah bridled at the humiliation – for all Arabs, he said – of Israeli tanks surrounding an Arab leader in his capital and had demanded that Bush pick up the telephone and instruct Sharon to pull back his tanks and allow Arafat to move freely. He rejected Bush's explanation that this was impossible, that the United States did not have the ability to order the Israelis around this way; he was not mollified when Bush instructed Rice
to call Sharon's chief of staff and discuss Arafat's situation and the president's desire to end the stand-off at the Muqata. The Crown Prince told Bush that the treatment of Arafat would affect U.S.-Saudi relations and made a direct threat: If nothing happened, he would publicly say that he had tried to do something to help the Palestinians, by going to Saudi Arabia's closest friend and ally, which is the United States, but the president of the United States was unable to help. As one member of the president's party recalled it,

He [Abdallah] was pretty strong in his views. He almost took it personally. He imagined any other Arab leader somehow surrounded and nobody is able to help; he just thought that this is totally unacceptable. I remember Abdallah was showing the president all kinds of pictures and images of Palestinian children affected by Israeli fire. And I remember the President also saying on the other side you also have very similar pictures and there are victims from every side; one side will not have a monopoly on pain and suffering.

Abdallah and
his party began making preparations to leave, and the meeting would have ended with U.S.-Saudi relations in crisis; as the president later wrote, “America's pivotal relationship with Saudi Arabia was about to be seriously ruptured.”
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Bush called a break and said he would like to show Abdallah around the ranch. He drove the Crown Prince in his pickup truck, and after several minutes of driving toward one end of the ranch, a wild turkey crossed the path. As Bush tells the story,

We reached a remote part of the property. A lone hen turkey was standing in the road. I stopped the truck. The bird stayed put. “What is that?” the crown prince asked. I told him it was a turkey.…Suddenly I felt the crown prince's hand grab my arm. “My brother,” he said, “it is a sign from Allah. This is a good omen.” I’ve never fully understood the significance of the bird, but I felt the tension begin to melt.
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The mood changed instantly, the meeting resumed, and from that point on the relationship between the two men was cordial and indeed trusting. No doubt it helped that within days, on April 28, the Israeli cabinet did decide to move the tanks back and free Arafat; Abdallah presumably saw an American hand at work in that decision. Bush immediately issued a statement commending the Israelis and demanding that Arafat “now seize this opportunity to act decisively in word and in deed against terror directed at Israeli citizens.”

Relations with both Sharon, momentarily rough after the president's “enough is enough” comments, and with Abdallah were on an even keel by the end of April, and the demands for Arafat to fight terror had been clear since the April 4 speech. But now what? How would the United States move forward? How would progress toward a Palestinian state be possible? When Ariel Sharon visited Washington on May 7, he said discussion of a Palestinian state was “premature” and instead focused on the need to stop terror, Israel's desire for peace, and “the need for reform in the Palestinian Authority.” Bush
recalled that “we had a good discussion about how to move forward” and reiterated his demands of Arafat: political reform, an end to terror, and unification of Palestinian security forces into one command structure (not the dozen or so separate fiefdoms Arafat had created). He also repeated his attack on the Palestinian leader: “I’ll reiterate; I have been disappointed in Chairman Arafat. I think he's let the Palestinian people down. I think he's had an opportunity to lead to peace and he hasn't done so.” No doubt intelligence and newspaper reports about Arafat's wealth – in 2003,
Forbes
estimated it as “at least $300 million”
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and others suggested figures several times as high – also helped turn opinion against Arafat in Washington. But the lack of real progress in the region was dramatized when Sharon had to cut short his visit and rush home: A suicide bomber had detonated explosives in a Tel Aviv club, killing 15 Israelis and wounding more than 50.