The year began with a crisis in Europe, underscoring the geopolitics of oil and gas. I realized early in my time in Washington that any New Year’s celebration would be brief and involve no travel. Usually I went with my cousin and her husband and a few friends to the “pops” concert at the Kennedy Center, followed by dinner and dancing back at my apartment until very late—say, 1:00 A.M.
As I prepared to leave for the concert, I got word that Vladimir Putin was planning to announce that Russia would cut off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine the next morning. That would not just harm Ukraine but disrupt the supply of gas to Europe. I recalled a conversation between President Bush and German Chancellor Schroeder a few years earlier. Told that the German government was dismantling its remaining nuclear capability, the President had been incredulous, noting that Germany would be even more dependent on Russian gas. Schroeder had not been concerned, calling Russia a “reliable partner.” We were all stunned when just a few days after leaving office he became board chairman of a pipeline project connecting Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea. Now the implications of Germany’s dependence on Moscow were clear.
The next day Putin made his announcement, claiming that there were no politics involved, only economics that required Ukraine to finally pay the market price for gas. When I said publicly that Russia was using oil and gas as a weapon, reminding vulnerable states that they shouldn’t challenge Moscow, the Kremlin fumed. That led to an angry retort from Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who accused me of hypocrisy. “You’re always talking about the free market,” he said, “but when we apply those principles to your friends [meaning democratic Ukraine], you aren’t so principled.” I answered that I had no problem with the free market but that Ukraine needed time to adjust. “And Sergei,” I countered, “the next time you want to make an economic argument, don’t send your President out on New Year’s morning to announce the cutoff.”
One would have thought this episode to be enough to spur the Europeans to develop a common energy policy to lessen their dependence on Moscow. But there were simply too many conflicting interests. France was already largely shielded, as it derived 80 percent of its generating power from nuclear energy. The northern-Scandinavian tier was self-sufficient, as was Great Britain. But the East Europeans, who were completely hostage, dependent on Russian pipelines for their supplies, didn’t carry a loud enough voice within the European Union. And there were jurisdictional issues between the European Commission, which handled trade policy, and the individual states, which held the reins on economic and energy issues. Trying to seal all those fissures in the cause of making Europe less dependent on Russian energy transportation networks was almost impossible.
Later, I would appoint a senior official, Boyden Gray, who had previously been our ambassador to the EU, to promote a common strategic energy policy with our allies. It was fiendishly difficult but needed: the geopolitics of oil and gas would increasingly warp diplomacy, revealing the timidity of the Europeans—particularly the Germans—toward Moscow. The Kremlin had fired a warning shot that the color revolutions were vulnerable to pressure by playing the “energy card.” And we didn’t really have a good response.
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LATE IN THE DAY on January 4, I was sitting at my desk in the inner office, reviewing some of the cables concerning Moscow’s gas cutoff. My dark-paneled office was undeniably gloomy in the winter, with little light penetrating the “security” windows meant to protect me. There had been a flurry of phone calls that day from panicked European foreign ministers, particularly in the Baltics and Hungary, who feared escalating pressure from the Kremlin. I was tired and thought I might just go home early and finish my reading in the comfort of my den.
Suddenly my eye caught a cable news bulletin saying something about Ariel Sharon. Before I could sort it out, Brian Gunderson came in, saying that Dubi Weisglass needed to speak with me urgently. “The prime minister has had a devastating stroke,” Dubi started before pausing to gather himself. “I’m on the way to the hospital, but I don’t think it looks very good.” Sharon had experienced a neurological episode about a month before but had made a considerable recovery. I was about to ask if the two health crises were related but realized that Dubi was just trying to get through the call. He was deeply emotional. Sharon was not just the prime minister but Dubi’s closest friend.
I simply said, “I’ll pray for him.”
“Thanks,” he answered. I heard the phone click. Sharon had given me an antique Torah for my birthday the year before. I walked over and picked it up. I said a brief prayer for Sharon and for Israel. Then I called the President. “My God, I hope he survives,” I said.
“I know,” he answered. “I guess all we can do is pray.”
Somehow I felt that only the President and probably Steve felt as I did at that moment. We’d come to see Sharon as crucial to peace, a view that would have been unthinkable in the dark days of 2001, when he had ordered Israeli forces to crush the second Palestinian intifada. He was a member of Israel’s warrior generation that had secured the state against Arab armies. As such, he had the credibility to make peace with the Palestinians by dividing the land. After all, who could question Ariel Sharon’s commitment to Israel’s security?
A few months before, I’d come to understand the importance of the generational divide in Israel. Attending the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, I’d been surprised by Sharon’s remarks. Rabin and Sharon were hardly cut from the same political cloth; one was associated with peace, the other with war. So when Sharon called him a “brother whom I loved,” it was stunning. In fact, they were “brothers” who had in their own way helped to secure the Jewish democratic state of Israel. Their generation was disappearing and with it the moral authority to make hard decisions about Israel’s future.
Only months before his stroke, Sharon had decided to split the Likud party and form Kadima, a party that came to be identified with finalizing Israel’s borders. There would be many disagreements within Israel about what those contours would be, but Sharon had shifted the political ground so that most Israelis accepted the “two-state solution.” The withdrawal from Gaza had been only the first step. I was confident and so was the President that Sharon was willing to take the remaining ones toward the establishment of Palestine.
The next day Dubi called to say that the prime minister would probably not recover. I closed my eyes for a moment. My mind flashed back to standing with the rotund Sharon, tending his sheep. I recalled his words to me. He’d called a few days before the end of the year to discuss the aftermath of the Gaza withdrawal. “How are your sheep?” I’d asked.
“Missing you,” he’d answered. Then he had repeated his earlier invitation, “Come back in the fall—here to the farm. We need to talk about the future.” When I opened my eyes, I was surprised that they were filled with tears.
The Israeli Knesset met in emergency session the next day and named Ehud Olmert the acting prime minister. I called Olmert to offer condolences and a promise to stand by Israel as it made the difficult choices that lay ahead. It wasn’t the time to talk about what those choices might be, but Olmert immediately reminded me that Sharon had sent him to the United States the year before to outline plans for further “separation” from the Palestinians. I didn’t like the sound of that term but thought that it could be shaped to mean a negotiated solution—not a unilateral one—to the Palestinian question. We agreed to talk about it all another day.
In fact, our next conversation would be just four days later to discuss the upcoming Palestinian legislative elections. The Israelis were nervous and so were we about Fatah’s ability to carry them out. Olmert expressed concern that the Palestinians might “again” delay the timetable.
A few weeks before the end of the prior year, NSC and State Department officials, including Elliott Abrams from the NSC and David Welch, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, had gathered in my conference room, along with John Hannah from
the vice president’s office. Steve Hadley and I had begun organizing Middle East strategy sessions that brought the relevant folks together, the goal being to bridge any divide between the White House and Foggy Bottom on the fast-moving events in the Middle East.
On this day, the subject was the upcoming elections. Should we encourage Abbas to postpone the vote? Would Fatah win? There was some concern that the Palestinian people might punish Fatah for the deep and unaddressed corruption of the party—though Abbas himself was not implicated. After open debate back and forth, Elliott said what we were all thinking. “Fatah isn’t going to be in better shape six months from now.” We agreed that we should encourage Abbas to keep to the timetable. There was no indication that he wanted to delay the vote in any case. And the Israelis were on board to help with movement and access issues—even in troublesome Gaza—so that the poll would be free and fair as possible.
I relate this story in some detail because a myth has survived that Abbas and the Israelis resisted U.S. pressure to go through with the elections. That simply isn’t true. Everyone—Olmert, Abbas, and the U.S. government—was in agreement that the elections should proceed. In retrospect, we should have insisted that every party disarm as a condition for participating in the vote. Arms needed to be held only by the security institutions of the governing body—in this case the Palestinian Authority. We’d proposed this idea to the Quartet at a meeting in November, and all had agreed, even the Russians. I’d asked David and Elliott to call Abbas just to let him know what we were about to say. He demurred, saying that such a statement would be seen as an effort to exclude Hamas. Only the participation of all Palestinians would make the election legitimate, he argued. So everyone was on the same page: the elections should proceed, and Hamas should participate. But failure is an orphan, and when the results were announced, the finger-pointing began.
The morning of the January 25 legislative elections, I attended the President’s Daily Briefing at the White House. The intelligence that morning concerning the polling was unremarkable. Fatah would win a narrow victory, though the decision to split tickets in some localities made several candidates vulnerable. I checked in periodically with our diplomats in Jerusalem and Ramallah throughout the day. As I was preparing to go home, Liz Cheney, the deputy assistant secretary, came in to my office. Liz, the Vice President’s daughter, was a fierce proponent of the Freedom Agenda and sometimes disruptive (helpfully, from my point of view) to the status quo preferences of the department.
“Some of our people on the ground think Hamas is doing better than expected,” she said.
“Well, that isn’t good,” I answered and returned to tidying up the day’s chores before heading home. The Operations Center gave me a final report just before I went to bed. All was as we expected; Fatah was going to squeak by.
The next morning, I put on my gym clothes and went to exercise, flipping on the local news as I always did. As WRC-TV News 4’s Barbara Harrison reported on the latest murder in the District the night before, I caught sight of the runner on the screen. “Fatah officials resign from Palestinian Authority in wake of Hamas victory,” it said. That isn’t right, I thought, pumping a little faster on the elliptical. My heart was suddenly beating harder—but not from exercise. Again the runner—“Fatah officials resign in wake of Hamas victory.” I decided I’d better call the department. “Who won the Palestinian election last night?” I asked the operations officer.
“Hamas,” he answered.
“What?” My mind started racing. It would have been good if someone had called to let me know that, I thought. I was a bit disoriented and asked, inexplicably, to speak to our ambassador in Lebanon, confusing him momentarily with our consul general in Jerusalem. The ambassador was a little taken aback at my question about the Palestinian elections but reported that Lebanese officials were in shock. Eventually reaching both the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Dick Jones, and our consul general, Jake Walles (the senior official who dealt with Palestinian affairs), I got confirmation that, not surprisingly, there was confusion and chaos in the region too. I asked the operations center to set up a phone call with Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who was in an emergency Cabinet meeting. She would be available in about two hours. It was going to be a long day. There were twenty minutes left in my exercise routine. I decided to finish and take a moment to clear my mind.
When I arrived at the office, I immediately called President Bush. He was calm, having always thought Fatah vulnerable due to its corruption. “What do you think we should do now?” he asked.
“The elections were free and fair,” I said.
“So we’ll have to accept the result,” he responded.
I told him that I’d be in touch with the Israelis, our Arab allies, and the Europeans. There was a little time before we’d have to say something. In fact, I was scheduled to deliver a message by videoconference to the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos very shortly. We agreed that I should restate the U.S. principles, including our refusal to deal with Hamas until it renounced terrorism. A few minutes later I agreed to some language with Steve Hadley and ran it by David Welch and Sean McCormack.
I reached Tzipi Livni. She was worried and sounded a little shell-shocked. “This is a disaster. The world can’t recognize Hamas as legitimate.” The good thing about Tzipi is that she is a problem solver and we’d developed a relationship of trust. I read the statement to her that we’d prepared and said that it would hold things in place until we could confer with our allies. She hung up to return to the emergency Cabinet session. Israel seemed suddenly isolated and vulnerable, even to me. How could the Palestinian people have elected a group of terrorists devoted to the destruction of the state of Israel?
In fact, the Palestinian people had elected politicians whom they thought less corrupt and more capable than those of Fatah. Hamas had said little about “resistance” in the campaign, focusing instead on its good social works and piety. Indeed, the group maintained a network of orphanages, clinics, and schools, particularly in Gaza. Poor Palestinians welcomed those services, and many identified Hamas with alms.
Still, by all accounts, the Hamas leadership had expected to do well but hadn’t expected to win; it was an outcome engendered by Fatah’s ineptitude, especially the mistaken electoral strategy of allowing multiple candidates for seats they contested. The Palestinian Authority had also failed to campaign effectively. Jim Wilkinson had gone to Ramallah to advise Abbas on how to mount a vigorous defense of his leadership—even helping the PA to construct a proper press facility so that the still-popular Abbas could communicate with his people. But Abbas refused to campaign, wanting to stay above the fray. Fatah’s mistakes handed the election to Hamas. The Middle East had just sustained a significant shock. It was now my job to find a new equilibrium for our policy so that we could push ahead toward Middle East peace.
First we had to accept the outcome of the election: it had been free and fair, even if we didn’t like the victor. But it was one thing to acknowledge that Hamas had won and quite another to accept its program. We had a choice: as long as the terrorist organization refused to renounce violence and accept the agreements that the PLO under Arafat had made with Israel, we did not have to give it international legitimacy or foreign assistance. Yet we wanted to continue to assist the Palestinian Authority. Since Hamas had won legislative elections, Abbas, who’d been elected president in his own right the year before, was in fact the executive authority in Palestine and the address for foreign aid. A few days after the elections, he formed a caretaker government under Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Alaa, who was well known to us since he was a veteran negotiator in the peace process. As President, Abbas would be responsible for the overall direction of the Palestinian Authority and had the mandate to negotiate on his people’s behalf. Qurei would oversee the daily functions of governing. Hamas controlled the legislature but would, for the time being, have no responsibility for either negotiations or the government.
The United States could thereby continue to support the Palestinian Authority, which had renounced violence, pledged adherence to existing agreements with Israel, and affirmed the right of Israel to exist. At our urging, Abbas made a statement reaffirming those pledges to that effect. Now we could make a distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
I called a few key legislators and promised that no money would ever go to the terrorist organization. Representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Gary Ackerman of New York, and my venerable friend Tom Lantos of California were always helpful touchstones in making sure we could sustain congressional support. As a safety valve, the President withheld aid for a time until we were certain that we had a secure conduit to the PA that Hamas couldn’t access.
It was critical, though, to make the policy multilateral, since European aid to the Palestinians was significantly greater than that of the United States. I asked my colleagues in the Middle East Quartet—the UN, the European Union (represented at the time by Austria), and Russia—to meet on the margins of a scheduled meeting on Afghanistan in London, three days after the elections. The Europeans also classified Hamas as a terrorist organization, and thus the argument to them was simple: you can’t fund terrorists.
But Russia had a different policy, recognizing Hamas as a legitimate actor in Palestinian politics and maintaining contact with its leadership in Damascus. Sergei Lavrov and I argued vociferously that night about what the election meant. But he understood that the Israelis would sit on the sidelines and refuse to negotiate if they were forced to accept Hamas as a part of the Palestinian political landscape. The isolation of Hamas was a bitter pill for Moscow but a sacrifice worth making to keep the peace process alive. In general, the Russians were helpful partners concerning the Palestinian-Israeli issue. The end of the Cold War had led to thawed relations—even good relations—between Moscow and Tel Aviv, sustained by the one million Russian Jews who also held Israeli citizenship. Russia agreed to a unified position, and the Quartet stated that future aid to the Palestinian Authority would be weighed against its commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel’s right to exist, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations. That was a direct shot at Hamas.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 50