Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (66 page)

I then went to Abu Dhabi, where I met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. “MBZ,” as we referred to him, is one of the smartest, canniest people I have ever met, very soft-spoken and given to long pauses in conversation. His thoughtful insights on the other Gulf states and on Iran were always useful. We met with a larger group for a few minutes, and then the two of us went outside on his patio to meet privately for an hour or so. We talked about the change in Obama’s Iranian strategy from engagement to pressure, making sanctions more effective (a lot of Iranian business was done in the UAE), and about additional missile defense and other military capabilities for the Emirates.

Any sale of relatively sophisticated weapons—especially combat aircraft and missiles—to an Arab state met with opposition in Israel. In the case of the big arms deal I had just concluded with King Abdullah, the Israelis were especially exercised. And it came at a bad time in the relationship. The administration had leaned heavily on Netanyahu in the summer of 2009 to impose a ten-month freeze on building new settlements on the West Bank, as an inducement to get the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Meanwhile construction continued on settlements in
East Jerusalem, which the Israelis consider their sovereign territory. As a result, the Palestinians refused to negotiate. In March 2010—just as I was talking with King Abdullah—the Israelis announced they would continue to build settlements in East Jerusalem, an open slap at the administration, made all the more insulting because Biden was visiting Israel at the time. Secretary Clinton presented an ultimatum to Israel soon thereafter, demanding among other things a freeze on all settlement construction. This led to a notoriously acrimonious meeting between Obama and Netanyahu at the White House on March 26, during which the president bowed out to have dinner with his family, leaving Bibi cooling his heels downstairs.

As these tensions boiled, on April 27, Barak came to see me about the Saudi arms sale. As had become standard practice between us, I greeted his limousine curbside at the Pentagon, escorted him and his delegation up the stairs to my formal dining room, and then I walked him straight through the door to my office, where we met alone, leaving our delegations to chitchat for most of the allotted meeting time. As part of our relationship with Israel, the United States had long pledged that no arms sales to Arab states would undermine Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME). Barak felt the sale to Saudi Arabia compromised their QME. I told him I thought Israel and Saudi Arabia now had a common enemy—Iran—and that Israel should welcome enhanced Saudi capabilities. I also pointed out that not once in all of Israel’s wars had Saudi Arabia fired a shot. I urged that if Israel couldn’t see Saudi Arabia as a potential ally against Iran, he should at least tactically concede that its hostility to Iran was in Israel’s interest. Pragmatically, I warned that if the Saudis could not buy advanced combat aircraft from us, they would surely buy them from the French or Russians, and the Israelis could be damned sure those countries wouldn’t give a second thought to Israel’s “qualitative military edge.”

We agreed to set up a joint U.S.-Israeli working group to ensure that Israel’s QME was not diminished by the F-15 sale to Saudi Arabia and to identify enhanced capabilities we could provide to Israel to satisfy that goal. I reassured Barak that, as I had promised two years earlier to Prime Minister Olmert, we would sell Israel the same model F-35 Joint Strike Fighter we were going to provide our NATO allies. Barak returned to Washington in late June to review progress of the working group and
seemed generally satisfied that Israeli interests would be protected by the measures we were considering.

Netanyahu took another view. I met with him at Blair House, the guesthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue that the president uses to host foreign leaders, on July 7. I told him I had my marching orders from the president, and that General Cartwright would lead a senior U.S. team to Israel the following week to talk about military cooperation and needs and to get “specifics about what you need and just how fast you want it.” I told Netanyahu we intended to notify Congress soon about the F-15 sale to Saudi Arabia, that we had addressed the QME issues with his defense experts, and that “it would be helpful for Israel to say that there had been an unprecedented effort to take into account Israel’s concerns, and that they did not object to the sale.” When he complained about the number of F-15s the Saudis would be buying or upgrading, I pointedly asked him, “When did Saudi Arabia ever attack Israel? How long would those planes continue to work without U.S. support? You need to talk to Ehud [Barak] about what we have done to address your concerns!” When Netanyahu asked how to explain to Israelis such a large arms deal with the Saudis, I used the line that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He replied acidly, “In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my ‘frenemy.’ ”

“What about a counterbalancing investment in our military?” he asked me. “How do we compensate on the Israeli side?” Exasperated, I shot back that no U.S. administration had done more, in concrete ways, for Israel’s strategic defense than Obama’s, and I listed the various missile and rocket defense programs we were providing or helping to fund, together with stationing an Aegis-class warship with missile defense capabilities in the eastern Mediterranean. Further compensation? “You are already getting air and missile defense cooperation in addition to the F-35. There have been conversations on all of this. This is not new. There has been enormous work done to address your QME. Talk to your defense minister!” I was furious after the meeting and directed Flournoy to call Barak and chew him out for not adequately briefing Bibi on all that we had done to address Israel’s concerns. Barak talked to Netanyahu, and by the end of July, Bibi had agreed not to object to the Saudi arms sale—in exchange for more military equipment, including twenty additional F-35s.

Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, populated by various groups
and countries that are not only its sworn enemies but committed to its total destruction. It has fought four wars against those neighbors, three of them—in 1948, 1967, and 1973—for its very survival. While a few governments, including Egypt’s and Jordan’s, have found it in their interest to make peace with Israel, the Arab populace—including in those two countries—is more hostile toward Israel than their governments are. I believe Israel’s strategic situation is worsening, its own actions contributing to its isolation. The Israelis’ assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai in January 2010, however morally justified, was strategically stupid because the incompetently run operation was quickly discovered and Israel fingered as responsible, thus costing Israel the quiet cooperation of the UAE on security matters. Similarly, the Israeli attack on May 31, 2010, on a Turkish ship carrying confrontational activists to Gaza and the resulting deaths of eight Turks on board, together with Israel’s subsequent unyielding response, resulted in a break with Turkey, which had quietly developed a good military-to-military relationship with Israel. These incidents, and others like them, may have been tactically desirable and even necessary but had negative strategic consequences. As Israel’s neighbors acquire ever more sophisticated weapons and their publics become ever more hostile, I, as a very strong friend and supporter of Israel, believe Jerusalem needs to think anew about its strategic environment. That would require developing stronger relationships with governments that, while not allies, share Israel’s concerns in the region, including those about Iran and the growing political influence of Islamists in the wake of the Arab Spring. (Netanyahu would finally apologize for the Turkish deaths in 2013, opening the way to restoring ties with the Turks.) Given a Palestinian birthrate that far outpaces that of Israeli Jews, and the political trends in the region, time is not on Israel’s side.

M
ISSILE
D
EFENSE
A
GAINST
I
RAN

The United States began working on defenses against ballistic missiles in the 1960s. Stringent limits were imposed on the development and deployment of missile defenses in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty we signed with the Soviet Union. Even so, the missile defense endeavor received a huge boost in 1983 with President Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), intended conceptually to provide a
“shield” for the United States against an all-out Soviet attack. Generally speaking, in the years after Reagan’s SDI (or “Star Wars”) speech, most Republicans supported virtually all missile defense programs and most Democrats opposed them as both unworkable and far too costly. In 2002, as we’ve seen, President Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the 1972 treaty, thereby removing any restrictions on our development and deployment of missile defenses. By the time I became secretary of defense, most members of Congress had come around—with widely varying levels of enthusiasm—to support deploying a very limited capability intended to defend against an accidental launch or a handful of missiles fired by a “rogue” state such as North Korea or Iran. Few in either party supported efforts to field a system large or advanced enough to protect against a mass strike from the nuclear arsenals of either Russia or China, an effort that would have been at once technologically challenging, staggeringly expensive, and strategically destabilizing.

At the end of 2008, our strategic missile defenses consisted of twenty-three ground-based interceptors (GBIs) deployed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and four more at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. By the end of FY2010, thirty such interceptors were planned to be in place. Those associated with the program had reasonable confidence that the missiles could accomplish the limited mission of knocking down one or a few missiles aimed at the United States. When I became secretary of defense, the president delegated to me, as he had to Secretary Rumsfeld, the authority to launch these interceptors against incoming missiles if there was no time to get his approval.

This was the situation when I recommended to Bush, a few days after I took office, that we approach the Poles and Czechs about cohosting a “third” GBI site on their soil—radar in the Czech Republic and ten ground-based interceptors in Poland. Both countries had shown interest in hosting elements of the missile defense system. Our primary purpose in this initiative was to better defend the United States (and limited areas of Europe) against Iranian ballistic missiles, whose threat was growing.

As I wrote earlier, by the end of 2008 it looked increasingly certain that Czech political opposition to the radar would prevent its construction there. Poland had agreed to host the interceptors immediately following the Russian invasion of Georgia after stalling for more than a year, but their growing demands for U.S. security guarantees beyond our NATO commitment, as well as other disagreements, brought the negotiations
to a halt. By the time Obama took office, it was pretty clear that our initiative was going nowhere politically in either Poland or the Czech Republic, and that even if it was somehow to proceed, political wrangling would delay its initial operating capability by many years.

A technically feasible alternative approach to missile defense in Europe surfaced in mid-2009 in the Pentagon (not, as later alleged, in the White House). A new intelligence estimate of the Iranian missile program published in February 2009 caused us in Defense to rethink our priorities. The assessment said the long-range Iranian missile threat had not matured as anticipated, but the threat from Iranian short- and medium-range missiles, which could strike our troops and facilities in Europe and the Middle East, had developed more rapidly than expected and had become the Iranian government’s priority. The Iranians were now thought to be capable of nearly simultaneous launches of between fifty and seventy of these shorter-range missiles at a time. These conclusions raised serious questions about our existing strategy, which had been developed primarily to provide improved defenses for the U.S. homeland—not Europe—against long-range Iranian missiles launched one or two at a time. But the Iranians no longer seemed focused on building an ICBM, at least in the near term. And ten interceptors in Poland could at best defend against only a handful of Iranian missiles. The site would easily be overwhelmed by a salvo launch of dozens of shorter-range missiles.

In the spring of 2009 General Cartwright briefed me on technological advances made during the previous two years with the sea-based Standard Missile 3s (SM-3) and the possibility of using them as a missile defense alternative to the ground-based interceptors. New, more capable versions of the SM-3, originally designed to defend our ships against hostile aircraft and shorter-range ballistic missiles, were being deployed on a growing number of U.S. warships and had been used successfully to destroy that falling U.S. satellite during the Bush administration. These new SM-3 variants were still in development, but there had been eight successful tests, and they were considered to be at least as capable against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles as GBIs and could be fully operational years earlier. The SM-3, due to the significantly lower cost than GBIs, could be produced and deployed in large numbers.

There had also been technological advances in airborne, space-based,
and ground-based sensors that considerably outperformed the fixed-site radar originally intended for the Czech Republic. These new sensors not only would allow our system to be integrated with partner countries’ warning systems, but also could make better use of radars already operating across the globe, including updated Cold War–era installations. Cartwright, former commander of Strategic Command, was a strong and early advocate for a new approach, which was affirmed by the early findings of the Pentagon-led Ballistic Missile Defense Review, begun in March 2009.

Based on all available information, the U.S. national security leadership, military and civilian, concluded that our priorities should be to work with allies and partners to strengthen regional deterrence architectures; to pursue a “phased adaptive,” or evolutionary, approach to missile defense within each region, tailored to the threats and circumstances unique to that region; and because global demand for missile defense assets over the following decade might exceed supply, to make them mobile so they could be shifted from region to region as circumstances required.