Tested by Zion (4 page)

And meanwhile the violence escalated: on June 1, a popular discotheque in Tel Aviv called the “Dolphinarium” was bombed, killing 21 and injuring 132 Israelis, most of them young people. Nine weeks later, on August 9, a bomb exploded in the Sbarro pizzeria at one of the busiest corners in Jerusalem, killing 15 Israelis and wounding 130. Yet these major attacks alone do not give an accurate sense of the terrorism Israelis faced during the intifada. The series of attacks in the single month of May 2001 give a better picture, and they occurred before the campaign of suicide bombings of buses in Israeli cities began to take a higher toll. There were attacks by terrorists on May 1, May 8, May 9 (two 14-year-old boys stoned to death), May 10, May 15, May 18 (bomb in a shopping mall killed 5, wounded more than 100), May 23, May 25 (65 wounded by a car bomb), May 27 (30 wounded by two car bombs), May 29, May 30 (8 wounded by a car bomb outside a school), and May 31.
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And this does not count attacks prevented by successful police work.

The Bush administration was correct in concluding that ending this violence should be its main objective. No diplomatic progress would ever be possible while it continued. Stopping the terrorism was clearly the top priority for Ariel Sharon as well, but that did not mean he and the Americans saw eye to eye. Sharon doubted that the Americans truly understood the nature of this beast or shared his view that terrorism needed to be
fought
with the toughest military means available. The State Department's endless repetition of the old formula that the “cycle of violence must end” suggested to the Israelis that the administration was drawing no moral distinction between the terrorists and the Israeli police and soldiers trying to stop them.

On the Arab side, there were equally serious doubts as the new administration's early weeks turned into months and Israeli-Palestinian violence continued. The predicted “leaning” toward the Arab side was nowhere to be seen, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) efforts to crush the intifada meant that Palestinian blood was also flowing. There were fears that Israel would assassinate Yasser Arafat, and day after day IDF attacks flattened Palestinian official buildings and kept the PA leadership, including Arafat, under siege in their headquarters in the Muqata in Ramallah.

In late June, Sharon adopted a new line: There must be “seven days of quiet” before he would negotiate a ceasefire agreement with the Palestinians. If there were seven straight days in which the PA acted against terror and no acts of terror were committed, Israel would engage again, in accordance with the Tenet and Mitchell plans, in negotiations with the Palestinians and would undertake some unspecified confidence-building measures as well. Despite U.S. pressure, Sharon kept to this line until March 2002.

Enter the Saudis, who were viewed by other Arabs as having special influence on and access (via their long-time ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar) to the White House. That perception proved correct, as Bruce Riedel explained:

In this saga, the party that is probably most important in affecting the president's mind is the Saudis. As in any new administration, there is a rush to get your head of state over here, to get a better reception than whomever he regards as his rival head of state. The only player who categorically refused to come was [Crown Prince] Abdallah,
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and there was – I wouldn't say panic – but there was deep distress and we then resorted to a series of attempts to see if we couldn't get him on board: a handwritten note [to the Crown Prince from the president].…I thought it had a chance…it didn't work; a phone call from Bush senior which was not my idea…did not work. It was frankly pathetic listening to the father say, “He's my son, you can really trust him,” and the Crown Prince basically saying, “Nuh-uh…forget it.” And he's basically saying, “No, I’m not coming,” because you're not doing enough on the Palestinians. Much confusion: Is this really why? Is there something else? Have they taken affront over something we've done? But the Saudis – the Crown Prince and then through surrogates like Bandar and Prince Turki, who comes on a “private visit” – make very clear, “This is the problem. We need to see some movement. Seeking a ceasefire is not enough. Give us some vision of where you want to go.” There's a lot of this “vision,” references to vision. “We don't want you to repeat the mistakes of the past, but we need to be able to say that you know where you're going and that we're all going to the same place.”
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One may well question why so much attention was paid to Saudi views. For one thing, the Saudi view was not idiosyncratic and did represent an Arab consensus. The Jordanian, Egyptian, Saudi, and other ambassadors in Washington remained in close touch with each other, and it was not wrong to see the Saudi view as the broader Arab perspective. For another, the Saudis spoke up, perhaps because unlike many of the other Arab regimes, they were not recipients of U.S. foreign aid. They were not worried about offending the administration or Congress and seeing the budget cut as a result. On the contrary, the Saudis were a supplier of foreign aid to many Arab regimes, which gave them considerable clout in Arab League circles. Finally, since the Gulf War in 1991, U.S.-Saudi relations had remained close, and the kingdom was the world's largest supplier of oil. On balance, then, it was not surprising that a strong Saudi message was going to be heard carefully.

In the Arab view, the Bush administration was doing nothing in the Middle East and certainly was not restraining Sharon's use of military force against the Palestinians. On June 29, after a trip to Asia and the Middle East, Powell met with Abdallah at the swanky George V Hotel in Paris. Riedel described the event:

This meeting is very dramatic. They have turned one of the conference rooms of the hotel into the equivalent of a Saudi Diwan [the ruler's executive council] with the chairs all lined up, all around the room, nothing in the center. And at the beginning of the
meeting the Crown Prince hands Powell a stack of photographs which are pretty grisly, pretty grisly stuff. And he then goes on and says, “You have been a soldier, you are a diplomat now; how can you possibly tolerate such suffering? These are
your
weapons, and this is
your
ally, and they are doing…” He got pretty close to the edge of tears. I don't think this was for effect; I think he was really worked up. And Powell got pretty worked up too: “Hey, I didn't make this mess. You can't blame all of this on the United States of America and you certainly can't blame it all on me,” at which point there was an “OK, let's not personalize this anymore” and step back a little bit.
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In the summer of 2001, the Saudis canceled a high-level defense meeting with little notice, telegraphing again that they would not let this issue drop. Prince Bandar was invited to the White House first for meetings with Condi Rice and
then for a session with the president, and was asked in essence, “What gives? What do you want?” Bandar's reply was that the Crown Prince wanted some assurance that the president was involved with the Israeli-Palestinian issue and would pursue a peace agreement. The Saudis did not seek an immediate negotiation but rather a sense of shared objectives. “I would say that by August of 2001,” Riedel recalled, “there is a sense of crisis in the U.S.-Saudi relationship and it revolves around the issue of doing something on the Palestinians.”
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The Crown Prince then rocked the White House with a letter, held in absolute secrecy in that summer of 2001 and still secret today, that put U.S.-Saudi relations in the balance. Marwan Muasher, then the Jordanian ambassador to the United States, remembered it being described as a “very stern letter.”
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The letter's message, as recalled by the vice president's Middle East advisor, was “this is all intolerable, this violence, these massacres against the Palestinians, we can't sit by.…There already was a Saudi threat of some kind of fundamental reevaluation of the relationship unless America committed to doing something serious to stop the violence.”
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The administration took the message seriously, given the context: Abdallah's refusal to schedule a visit, his emotional session with Powell, the firing of Turki as intelligence chief, the cancellation of a defense meeting, and the conversations with Bandar. Riedel and
William J. Burns, previously Ambassador to Jordan and then coming on as the new assistant secretary of state for the Near East and Powell's top advisor for the region, developed the administration's response: The president would reply to the Crown Prince, endorsing establishment of a Palestinian state as an American policy goal.

In later years, this objective would come to seem a natural part of Bush's democracy initiatives in the region: He often cited the development of democratic states in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine as the key to creating a modern Middle East. Indeed, the development of a Palestinian state with new leaders – without Arafat – became a central part of his new approach: Statehood would be the Palestinians’ reward for ridding themselves of a corrupt leadership, ending terrorism, and becoming capable of self-government. Yet that regional approach only developed later in 2002, and in the summer of 2001 the policy was simpler to describe: Responding to Saudi pressure, the United States would endorse Palestinian statehood.

This endorsement of Palestinian statehood was a new policy. The Camp David Accords signed during the Carter administration included no such reference. The Reagan administration had opposed statehood as “an outcome unacceptable to the United States” and favored a Palestinian association with Jordan.
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President Reagan had, in his September 1, 1982, speech about the Middle East, made that plain: “Peace cannot be achieved by the formation of an independent Palestinian state.…So, the United States will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.…[I]t is the firm view of the United States that self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan offers the best chance for a durable, just, and lasting peace.”

The George H. W. Bush administration had pursued a policy of ambiguity on the issue of Palestinian statehood throughout the Madrid talks. Although the Clinton administration had embraced Palestinian statehood at the Camp David talks in 2000 and these talks often focused on what the new state's borders might be, the two-state solution never became the formal policy of the United States. Clinton's key negotiator on these issues, Dennis Ross, acknowledges in his memoir that President Bush's letter to Crown Prince Abdallah in the summer of 2001 “establish[ed] for the first time that the U.S. policy henceforth would be to support a two-state solution.”
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It is not clear whether President Bush was told what a significant departure in U.S. policy this new position would be; according to some accounts, the president said several years later that he had not then known that no president had ever taken this line before. From later discussions, it seems more likely that the State Department played down the novelty in an effort to get the new approach approved – and the Saudis mollified. Riedel later argued that the two-state solution was obviously American policy under Clinton even if it was never formally stated and was not going to cause trouble with Sharon because he had also previously endorsed it – a claim that was inaccurate because Sharon's acceptance of Palestinian statehood came only in 2003. Even more striking is what the United States got, in concrete terms, in return for adopting this new policy: nothing. By describing support for Palestinian statehood as nothing new, those who pushed this new policy on the president were not only giving him an inaccurate picture of what American policy had been. They were also denying him the chance to demand concessions – from the Palestinians, the Saudis, or the Arab League – in exchange for adopting it. Yet because the Saudi letter and the Bush reply were held so closely, a full debate on these matters was never allowed. Most of the Cheney staff in particular were kept out of the loop, and they complained to Cheney that, even if the new policy was correct, to have adopted it in response to Saudi threats and to have demanded nothing for it beyond a withdrawal of those threats were policy mistakes. Even though Cheney and
his top staffer, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, were in Wyoming on vacation during the key weeks, the vice president's office did inquire whether
this endorsement of Palestinian statehood was not a significant policy change that could be sold to the Arabs for great value. No, came the response from Washington: It was nothing new.

A reply to Abdallah was drafted. Bandar was summoned back to the White House, as Riedel described:

It is now late August/early September. And the meeting takes place on the Truman Balcony. The waiter brought drinks out and everything, and I thought, “That's a little odd, but OK. This was a teetotalling country, Saudi Arabia, but OK.” And Bandar read the letter and was quite a happy man, in fact immediately leading me to think, Did we put something in the letter that was too good? But I think that Bandar had read his boss and knew his boss was looking for something like this. This substantially changed the mood for the moment in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
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How would the new policy of supporting Palestinian statehood be announced? The logical time and place were just weeks away: President Bush's forthcoming address to the United Nations General Assembly – always a dramatic moment for a new president. Drafts of that speech contained the key words, although discussion continued of whether the announcement might better be made separately in a speech devoted to the Middle East. The dramatic announcement of the new policy at the UN seemed on track as the final drafts were prepared early on September 11, for the president's talk scheduled on the morning of September 12. Then the first plane hit the World Trade Center.