Throughout the summer and fall, the Clinton administration feverishly pursued an agreement, but Camp David failed. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat maintained until his death that the deal was not a good one and that he had told the Clinton administration that he would have been “a dead man” for accepting it. Barak returned home to vicious criticism and certain defeat in the elections.
On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon decided to visit the Temple Mount, thereby asserting Israeli sovereignty over the holiest of Jewish places. Since the Six-Day War, the Israeli government had essentially barred practicing Jews from visiting the area. Both the Dome of the Rock (also known as Qubbat al-Sakhra) and Al-Aqsa Mosque are on the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock, from which the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven on a winged horse, is one of the holiest places of Islam. Some Jews, in turn, believe that it was built in the seventh century to defile the site of the ruins of the first and second temples of ancient Israel.
I had seen those places up close the summer before. As I walked through Jerusalem, I reflected that the world’s great religions don’t come together in the Holy City; they clash there, with Israeli soldiers securing the Dome of the Rock on top of the Temple Mount near the wailing wall—the Dome of the Rock having been built in a way to demonstrate dominion over the whole of the Old City—and various Christian sects squabbling about space in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I found Jerusalem enchanting but disturbing, a place where man’s desire to use God for dominance over other human beings was very much on display.
In any case, Yasir Arafat, perhaps to cover his failings at Camp David, used Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount as a pretext and essentially condoned a return to the violence that the Palestinians had renounced in the Oslo Accords of 1993. The “second intifada” began with a rapid succession of attacks on Israelis: an Islamic Jihad suicide bomb attack on October 26; a car bombing on November 2; a school bus bombing on November 20; a car bombing on November 22; a suicide bombing on December 22; a car bombing on January 1; and the kidnapping and shooting of two Israelis in Tulkarm in the West Bank on January 23. Not surprisingly, Ariel Sharon defeated Ehud Barak for the position of prime minister on February 6, 2001. Sharon called for complete Israeli control of a unified Jerusalem and no negotiation until the Palestinians ceased their violence. A few days later, on February 14, Israel imposed a complete blockade on the Palestinian territories in response to the killing of eight soldiers and a civilian by a Palestinian bus driver.
It became fashionable during the Bush team’s eight years in office to say that we did not come to power committed to the peace process and that we should have pursued the understandings at Camp David. It simply flies in the face of reality to believe that there was any room for negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis in 2001 or for some time afterward. Yasir Arafat had demonstrated that he would not or could not make peace. Ariel Sharon came to power to defeat the Palestinian resistance, not to negotiate.
That was the situation we inherited. I do not blame the Clinton administration for trying, but later, when we tried to reinvigorate the peace process, Arabs, Palestinians, and Israelis alike communicated the same message: don’t let Camp David happen again!
WHEN WE took office, our goal was simply to calm the region. Still, a subtle split began to emerge within the administration. The President was determined that we would support Israel’s right to defend itself. He believed that the constant attacks on Israeli civilians were intolerable for any democratic leader. He and I were both sympathetic to Sharon’s view that peace with the Palestinians could not be achieved as long as their leadership wished to keep one foot in terrorism and the other in corruption.
The President and I began to discuss a different approach to the conflict, one that relied much more on fundamental change among Palestinians as the key to peace. Israel could not be expected to accept a deal while under attack or to agree to the establishment of a terrorist-led state next door. Though we remained committed to a peace process, we wanted to focus much more on what the nature of the Palestinian state would be. The President was disgusted with Yasir Arafat, whom he saw, accurately, as a terrorist and a crook.
The State Department had a much more traditional view that the United States would need to be even-handed in order to bring peace. Israel was occupying Palestinian lands and building settlements, and even in the face of violence, the peace process needed to be pursued. Yasir Arafat was, with all his failings, the leader of the Palestinian people and the key to any future peace.
Throughout the summer, it fell to Colin Powell to quell the fires burning in the Middle East. Each day he faced the press and the Arabs who wanted the United States to rein in Israel. Every day Ari Fleischer would come by my office and discuss press guidance. After a while he would say, “I know. Terrorism must stop. Israel has a right to defend itself, and we urge restraint so that innocent people don’t die.”
“Right,” I would answer.
In the midst of the maelstrom, Colin decided to accept an invitation to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most pro-Israeli of the many interest groups, on March 19. The press billed the address as the first statement of U.S. policy on the Middle East. Though the speech essentially said nothing controversial or new, it was welcomed internationally since at least it affirmed our commitment to the peace process. We had decided to associate ourselves with the Mitchell Plan, named for former Senator George Mitchell, who’d been appointed in the last days of the Clinton administration to address the exploding violence. The Mitchell Plan called for a step-by-step set of commitments that each side would take, culminating in the restarting of peace negotiations.
But neither side was ready for even those modest interventions. When, on March 28, a Hamas suicide bomber killed two teenagers at a school bus stop, Sharon acted. Israeli helicopter gunships attacked Gaza and Ramallah (the governmental center of the Palestinian Authority). The gunship attack led to a wave of reprisals and counterattacks. To add fuel to the fire, the Israeli Housing Ministry announced plans to build more than seven hundred new homes for Jewish settlers near Qalqilya and Jerusalem. Such announcements were a constant problem throughout our years in office. Sometimes they were made despite the fact that construction was not to begin for years. Often they were a reiteration of old commitments in order to satisfy some coalition constituency at a particular point in time. But they were always disruptive and provocative, reminding the world of Israel’s controversial settlement activity. And in the context of the violence of 2001, the announcement was even more toxic. Palestinians and Israelis were at war.
Those early events would shape our Middle East policy fundamentally, but in the spring and summer of 2001, I just wanted to avoid all-out conflagration in the region. The differences in the administration between the decidedly pro-Israel bent of the White House and the State Department’s more traditional pro-Arab view percolated beneath the surface.
I know that Colin believed that we should resolve the differences in the administration and get the President to chart a course for our Middle East policy. I was sympathetic to him because he was on the front line every day. State and the White House were not on the same page, and everyone in the region—and in Washington—knew it. But I did not think that it was the time to try and resolve underlying tensions in the administration about the issue. I talked to the President every day, and I knew where he stood. The constant violence against Israeli civilians and Arafat’s prevarication and unwillingness to break with terrorism led the President to tilt toward Tel Aviv. I think I convinced Colin that any attempt to chart a new course in 2001 was likely to result in an outcome that would be so pro-Israeli as to inflame an already bad situation.
So throughout the summer we struggled with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as we would for the next eight years. But for the most part, the spring was relatively calm. My life in Washington settled into a busy but predictable pattern. My Aunt Gee and my friend Louis Olav
e helped me move into my permanent home in the Watergate complex and I found occasions to enjoy Washington. On Sundays I would get into my car and drive to visit my friend Mary Bush or go to the shopping center, usually the Galleria in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In the days before 9/11 I was driven to work, so I always looked forward to getting into my car and heading out on my own on the weekends.
Most of all, I enjoyed living next door to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I often took in concerts with friends, such as fellow White House staffer Harriet Miers and my adopted family, Steve and Ann Hadley and their daughters, Kate and Caroline.
On Good Friday of that first year, I joined the Hadleys for a performance of the Brahms German Requiem. Afterward, I walked home alone. The weather was warm, almost balmy. There was no security detail. Just me. I remember thinking how lucky I was to live next door to the Kennedy Center and that I would be able to enjoy many calm nights like this. After September 11, 2001, there would never be another one.
5
VLADIMIR PUTIN
IN 2001 IT WAS still the case that nothing in international politics was as newsworthy as the first meeting between the new president of the United States and the president of Russia. To a certain extent this was a holdover from the days of U.S.-Soviet summits, when the President and the general secretary of the Communist Party would meet. Kennedy-Khrushchev, Nixon-Brezhnev, Carter-Brezhnev, Reagan-Gorbachev, and the last one, Bush-Gorbachev: the very recounting of the names brings back vividly the drama associated with those encounters. At that time the meetings were valued, in part, for the signal that the conflict between the superpowers was under control. Since Moscow and Washington were talking, they could not possibly be contemplating nuclear war. Yet even without the tensions of the Cold War, the meetings retained their salience. And the President’s first encounter with Vladimir Putin was highly anticipated.
The meeting was to be held in Slovenia prior to the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. It was intended to allow the two men to get acquainted and to address, face-to-face for the first time, the issue of missile defense. One of Governor Bush’s key campaign initiatives, laid out in a speech at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, in September 1999, was to transform U.S. military forces, both conventional and nuclear. The conventional side of military transformation was largely driven by the belief that the United States should exploit its technological sophistication to build more agile, lethal, and readily deployable forces. The Cold War was over, but the U.S. military still looked as if it were waiting to engage Soviet forces across the north German plain. The then governor called for its modernization by leveraging innovations in stealth, precision weaponry, and information gathering and analysis. He said that as president he would direct the secretary of defense to improve the integration of the military and intelligence communities to enhance the military’s special operations forces and long-strike capabilities. He also pledged to commit $20 billion to the research and development of new military technologies to replace outdated weapons programs.
A problem arose when we were asked what military systems we would actually cancel, a discussion bound to anger constituents in some states. We settled on the hapless Crusader, a much-maligned artillery system, and moved on to more fertile ground, such as advocating for greater readiness and for improvements in military housing. Don Rumsfeld would eventually embark on a campaign to fundamentally restructure U.S. conventional forces.
The nuclear side of the equation represented an even more dramatic break. The arcane nuclear strategy of the Cold War rested on the premise that the Soviet Union and the United States had to be vulnerable to each other to prevent nuclear war. “Mutually assured destruction” would deny the advantage in a conflict to both sides; it would not be possible to launch a first strike with offensive forces and then protect against a counterattack with missile defenses given the sheer size of the arsenals. Each side had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads adding up to tens of thousands of times the force of the bombs that had destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, making it difficult to see how either country could have survived in any event. Nonetheless, the two sides entered into a web of arms control agreements aimed at maintaining this equilibrium, including the Anti–Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, which limited defenses to negligible levels.
In 1983 Ronald Reagan challenged the premise of this strategy. He couldn’t understand why defenses were bad and proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), aimed at making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” But among the high priests of arms control, SDI was a threat to strategic stability.
Even those who weren’t wedded to the mutually assured destruction theology found the prospects for the success of Reagan’s approach fairly dim. The U.S. defenses would have to literally knock down thousands of nuclear warheads. The science, they said, did not work, and even if it did, if even a few missiles leaked through, the destruction would be devastating. Reagan nevertheless pursued the initiative, which resulted in important breakthroughs in command and control that ironically improved U.S. conventional war-fighting capabilities. But the dream of a national shield to protect the United States from Soviet nuclear weapons died with the end of the Cold War. Reagan and Gorbachev went on to sign important arms control agreements, and the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty remained intact. The same approach—new agreements and maintenance of the treaty—remained true for George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
For George W. Bush, however, the landscape had changed dramatically and brought a new set of urgent challenges and a reason to remake nuclear strategy. It had always been difficult to imagine a nuclear exchange between Moscow and Washington. The “bolt out of the blue,” where one side launched an unprovoked attack, would have been suicidal. The slightly more plausible scenario was a nuclear exchange rising out of a conventional conflict in the center of Europe. After all, throughout the Cold War the most highly trained forces of the two alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, had faced off across the line that divided Germany. The Soviet and U.S. militaries were thus prepared for the eventuality of a nuclear clash, and every president (and general secretary) had to be ready to think the unthinkable. I spent a good deal of my early career doing precisely that and served in 1986–1987 as a staff officer in the Nuclear and Chemical Division (NUCHEM, pronounced “nuke ’em”) of the Joint Staff.
By 2001 this nightmare scenario was no longer imaginable. The Soviet Union had collapsed and the Red Army was out of Europe, withdrawn deep into Russian territory. Germany was unified, and the frontline states—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—were members of NATO. There was no Warsaw Pact. What possible scenario existed for nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia, which were no longer even enemies?
That question led President Bush to propose radical reductions in nuclear arsenals without the extensive and laborious negotiations of the Cold War period. The President was prepared to unilaterally reduce U.S.-deployed warheads to a reasonable level and let the Russians simply follow suit. That was to be accompanied by a revision to the ABM Treaty or, better still, mutual abrogation, allowing the development of small-scale defenses to be used against the growing and very real missile threat from rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran.
That was too much for the national security establishment. Prior to the meeting with Putin, the hottest topic in Washington seemed to be whether to preserve the thirty-year-old ABM Treaty from an era long past. The arms control debates of years gone by were suddenly reborn in Moscow, Washington, and Europe. The discussion centered on “strategic stability,” but I’ve come to believe that that was not the real issue for the Russians.
I do not mean to suggest that Moscow, particularly the Russian general staff, was unconcerned about the military balance. But in a larger sense, an end to arms control as we had come to know it also meant an end to the equality between the Kremlin and the White House that it had come to symbolize. The Russians liked the big, years-long negotiations, which then pro
duced treaty signings and grand summits. The arms control regimes, dating back to the Nixon administration, had been accompanied by the Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a document that had essentially written the rules of the road for the two superpowers to “manage” international affairs.
Russia, the Soviet successor state, was a great power but not a superpower in the Cold War sense of the term. Only in terms of nuclear weapons was Russia by any stretch of the imagination equal to the United States. The Russian national security elite said all of the right things about cooperation in the post–Cold War era and even acted that way much of the time. But deep inside there was a nostalgia for the time when Moscow had stood astride the international system, challenging Washington and its allies with an alternative view of how human history would evolve. Arms control and the ABM Treaty were integral to that reality and thus talismans against decline.
It was against this backdrop that we arrived at the sixteenth-century castle of Brdo outside Ljubljana, Slovenia, quite a bit earlier than the Russian delegation did. George W. Bush had a well-deserved reputation for being on time, even early, for meetings. In fact, I once told the President that he would be able to end his term six months sooner because he was so early for every engagement.
When the protocol chief announced that the Russians had arrived, the President walked out of the room and into the courtyard in order to meet them halfway. As Putin started toward him, I was struck by his physical bearing. He was not very tall, maybe five feet, eight inches, but had broad shoulders and an athlete’s gait. He seemed a bit shy, even nervous. When I shook his hand and gave the customary Russian greeting, “Ochen priyatno” (Good to meet you), it suddenly occurred to me that we had met before.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 8