Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (33 page)

We discussed common challenges facing Muslims and the need to coordinate our efforts. We each play a leadership role in our branch of Islam, and we spoke about the problem of the takfiris, extremists who denounce as infidels those who don’t follow their rigid interpretation of Islam. Although our two countries had not been close, we had a common interest in combating the takfiris, who have been inciting sectarian strife throughout the Muslim world.

After the meeting with Khamenei ended, I returned to Amman, hoping that this visit would mark the start of improved relations between Jordan and Iran, not least around a common approach to the growing problems in Iraq. Relations did not improve, however. Differences in our positions on regional politics and the peace process, as well as Iran’s interference in the affairs of the Arab countries, would prevent that from happening.

Since the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August 2005, Iran has been at the top of the agenda in many Western capitals. But it is too easy to blame a people for the actions of their government when in fact the two are quite separate. Iran is a great nation with a tremendous historical heritage and a remarkably educated and sophisticated population. Most Iranians feel no hatred toward America and the West and would like to see a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

It is common in the West to portray the Iranian government as a single structure, with all elements following the same rationale and motivation for action. But the truth is that the Iranian political structure is complex and opaque, even to those of us in the region. The only certain truth about the Iranian government is that anybody who tries to give a simple explanation is certain to be wrong.

Rather than a monolith, Iran is a mosaic, formed of numerous interlocking political elements. There are those who are deeply religious, and whose motivation toward iconic Islamic causes, such as the liberation of Jerusalem from Israeli occupation, is sincere and deeply felt. But there are others who, acting out of political motives, adopt the banner of Jerusalem merely as a rallying cry for their own illegitimate purposes, exploiting the legitimate frustrations of young Arabs over continued occupation. Many people in Iran and the rest of the region are tired of this manipulation.

 

A few days after my visit to Tehran, I met with President Bush at Camp David. We drove out to the president’s famous weekend retreat high in the mountains of northern Maryland on September 18, 2003. Outside the windows of the wooden lodge, the heavens darkened as Hurricane Isabel thundered inland from the Atlantic Ocean. I asked the president why, despite repeated promises that the money would stop, Chalabi was still being paid $350,000 a month by the U.S. Defense Department.

Bush, dressed casually in a gray jacket and light blue shirt without a tie, was furious. He leaned across the wooden table and said, “You can piss on Chalabi.” Members of my delegation were not exactly sure what the president meant, but they dutifully wrote down his comment in their notes of the meeting. There was an uncomfortable silence from the president’s advisers, as his mood matched the skies outside.

We then began to discuss Israel and Palestine. Although this was the same spot where Barak and Arafat had come so close to an agreement only three years earlier, peace seemed farther away than ever. The road map, a concept that Jordan had put forward the previous year to provide a set of specific steps toward peace, now seemed to be in disarray.

But Bush continued to blame Arafat for the deadlock in the peace process. “The road map is darn specific!” he said, raising his voice. “Palestinians failed the first test. Arafat does not want peace.”

Demonstrating that Sharon’s campaign to link Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians to the wider American “war on terror” had in large part succeeded, the president said he was still in a war frame of mind and that part of this war on terror is in the Palestinian territories. Stressing his view that Arafat was unable or unwilling to make peace, the president made it clear he believed that Arafat was a failed leader and said he would no longer deal with him. He would spend political capital on winners, not losers, he said. Then, angry at Arafat’s inability to control Palestinian violence, he added, “What we asked of him is doable, and he did not do it!”

The U.S. administration seemed to have a very one-sided view of the situation. Bush was sincere, but appeared not to have been receiving the best, or most impartial, advice. I tried to give him a more comprehensive view of the situation. I defended Arafat and told him that Arafat was the leader of the Palestinian people. You may or may not like him, I said, but he is viewed by the Palestinian people as their legitimate representative.

Shifting gears, Bush asked about my recent trip to Iran. I told him that it had been positive, and relayed the Iranian offer to hand over the Al Qaeda prisoners they were holding and to embark on a wider, more comprehensive discussion on their nuclear program and on cooperation in Afghanistan and Iraq. He told me his staff would follow up. I never heard any more about the matter, but I know that custody of the Al Qaeda members, including a number of senior leaders, was never transferred.

Although we made good progress on several issues, I emerged from Camp David convinced that the peace process would not be moved forward this time around.

 

A few months later the Iranians would receive some welcome news from Baghdad regarding their old enemy, Saddam Hussein. On December 13, 2003, Saddam was captured by U.S. forces at a farmhouse near Tikrit, around one hundred miles north of Baghdad. The next day satellite news stations showed pictures of a bearded, disheveled Saddam and his underground hiding place. It was a surreal moment. Many Arabs felt let down, almost humiliated, by the way Saddam had capitulated so meekly. Even those who really hated him had expected him to face his enemies with courage and determination and to go out fighting, like his sons Uday and Qusay, who had been killed in July 2003 in a shootout with U.S. troops in Mosul, in northern Iraq. But when he was captured without a fight, his mythical, fearsome image was damaged.

I remember talking to the king of Saudi Arabia that day, and we were both shocked to see this man, who had been one of the most powerful leaders in the Middle East, hiding underground in a hole. It was humbling. Saddam Hussein had been a powerful Sunni Arab leader who had stood up to both the United States and Israel, and by doing so he had gained popularity throughout the region. I had met him in Baghdad with my father when he was at the height of his power. To see him diminished, with gray unkempt hair, blinking on television, was sobering. Those across the region who had looked to him as a modern-day Salaheddin felt badly let down.

But Saddam’s capture did not bring an end to Iraq’s troubles. For the most part, things continued to deteriorate. Some of the strife was caused by historic tensions and hatreds that had been brutally suppressed by Saddam’s regime. But some of the problems that drove the insurgency were entirely of America’s own making.

In late April 2004, the American television news program
60 Minutes
revealed that American troops had abused Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military prison. The graphic images of hooded and shackled prisoners caused an uproar inside Iraq and across the region. On May 5, President Bush gave an interview to the Middle Eastern television station Al Arabiya in an effort to control the damage. “I want to tell the people of the Middle East that the practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent, and they don’t represent America,” he said.

The next day, May 6, I arrived in the United States for a previously scheduled visit to the White House, and the controversy was raging. Although the president had decried the actions at Abu Ghraib, the Arab world noted that he did not apologize for them. Bush took the meeting, accompanied by Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, his secretary of defense. After some pleasantries, he turned to me and said, “I’m really upset about Abu Ghraib. What do you think?”

Although we had our differences over policy, President Bush and I had by that point formed a strong personal rapport, which allowed me to speak candidly when needed. Some in the Middle East may be surprised to hear this, but in person he is quite different from the caricature painted by the media. He is a very sincere person who strongly believed that what he was doing was right. I think he was badly misled by some of his advisers, however. I knew he would want to hear the truth from me, even if it would upset some of his staff.

“Mr. President,” I said, “you’re the leader of the strongest and most powerful nation in the world. I think it is very easy from a position of strength to apologize, and I think an apology from you, because you are the president of the United States, would go a long way.”

The president looked at me and scowled for a second, and then he said, “You’re right.” He turned to Condi and Rumsfeld and said, “I’m going to listen to my friend here.” I guessed that some of his senior staff had been telling him not to make a public apology out of fear that it would make him seem weak. But there is also strength in humility.

After the meeting, we went outside the White House to the Rose Garden for a press conference. We stood side by side at podiums in the early afternoon sun as the president said:

After the press conference I went to the State Department to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell. We discussed Abu Ghraib again, and Powell said the pictures hurt the image of the United States all over the world, and even at home. He said these images created a major problem that the president knew he needed to deal with and do more about than just appear on Arab networks. This implicit criticism was only the most visible sign of the infighting that had begun to break out in the Bush administration.

On one side were the neocons—Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Elliott Abrams—and on the other the moderates, led by Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Although I typically would not meet with Wolfowitz and the others in person, my senior staff in Washington, who did, told me that they were dogmatic and inflexible. Like many politicians who are ideologically driven, they had little time for compromises. If you are dealing with a pragmatic decision-maker, there is scope for give-and-take. But if you are dealing with an ideologue, it can be very hard to find common ground.

My staff said Feith and Abrams were impossible to deal with. The minute they walked into the room there was a feeling that this would be yet another awful meeting. They acted as if they were superior to everyone else. They had a plan, and they would see it implemented—no matter what.

The next month, after a year in existence, the much-hated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was finally dissolved, and Bremer handed over power to an Iraqi government headed by Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi Shia politician, in anticipation of national elections scheduled for January 2005. Allawi was a strong leader who had a chance to succeed in Iraq. Educated, worldly, and well rounded, he believed in a unified Iraq, but because some people in Washington were still backing Ahmad Chalabi, he did not get the undivided support of the American government.

 

The know-it-all attitude among some in Washington was perfectly illustrated during a visit I made to the United States in September of the following year. While in New York to attend the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting, I was invited to a dinner given by Lally Weymouth, a senior editor at
Newsweek
magazine and the daughter of the late Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
. One of the other guests, as I recall it, a female American news anchor, asked whether I thought women’s rights were better or worse in Iraq since the war. “They’re ten times worse,” I said. “When you had a secular regime under Saddam, men and women were pretty much equal.” Liz Cheney, the vice president’s daughter, who was also present, leaned over to Bassem Awadallah, my chief of the Royal Court, and told him that I should not say those kinds of things in public. She had a smile on her face, so he was not sure how serious she was.

The next day Bassem received an unexpected follow-up call from Liz Cheney, saying that she had discussed my comment with Paul Wolfowitz, who had recently become president of the World Bank, and they had both agreed that I should not be expressing such opinions. When Bassem told me about the conversation, I suggested that he tell Wolfowitz to get stuffed. What I had said over dinner was true. I was shocked that some members of the administration and their supporters seemed to feel that there could be no dissent on Iraq—and that in America, a country that prides itself on opinionated self-expression, they would try to muzzle inconvenient news.

I had been warned by others in Washington, including a prominent journalist who had covered the Middle East for years, to tread with caution. “You’ve got to be really careful with some in this administration, because they’re vindictive,” he told me.

Thankfully, there were still some people in D.C. who were more interested in results than ideology and petty politics. One was William Burns, the assistant secretary of state responsible for the Middle East. A fluent Arabic speaker, Bill had once been the U.S. ambassador to Jordan. At that time I was still in the army, and Rania and I had invited him and his wife to our home for dinner. A kind, softspoken, and gentle man, Bill is everything that you would want from a diplomat: worldly, nuanced, knowledgeable, and extremely intelligent. We have remained good friends ever since. Another person I came to know well was George Tenet, the CIA director. George had worked closely on the peace process, and subsequently developed a plan for a cease-fire and security arrangements between the Israelis and Palestinians. He was later used as a scapegoat for some American policy failings, but I always found him considerate of our views and as dedicated to finding an equitable resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli issue as anyone in Washington.