The resolution of the problem allowed Chris Hill to make a trip to North Korea, the first by an official in the Bush administration since Jim Kelly’s star-crossed visit in 2002. And it allowed me to meet my North Korean counterpart on the margins of an ASEAN forum in July 2008, along with the other foreign ministers of the Six-Party Talks. In the brief encounter, the hapless and nervous official said virtually nothing. But it was a photo-op that moved the process forward—slightly.
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IMPROVING THE DAILY LIVES OF PALESTINIANS
I RETURNED TO THE Middle East as promised in late March for talks with Abbas and Olmert. The atmosphere was tense, particularly since the Palestinians had acted on the basis of the Mecca agreement and actually established their “unity government.” Since the Israelis weren’t prepared to sit down with Abbas, I engaged the two sides in “parallel talks,” shuttling between them.
The time wasn’t right to make progress on the core issues, but I did think that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit in the everyday interaction between the parties. When the press talks about “the peace process,” it focuses on borders, security, Jerusalem, refugees, water rights—matters that must be resolved to end the conflict. But there are other complex problems concerning the daily lives of the Palestinians and security for the Israeli people.
The goal of the first phase of the Road Map is to give the Palestinian people as normal a life as possible while respecting Israeli security concerns. Anyone who’d traveled in the Occupied Territories saw long lines of Palestinians at roadblocks set up by the Israel Defense Forces. Sometimes it could take as much as six hours for a Palestinian family to travel a few miles, since individual family members are regularly searched and questioned in an effort to prevent terrorists from moving freely. There had been terrible stories of women in labor who had lost their newborns while waiting for the ambulance to be searched. The movement of goods—agricultural products, for instance—was difficult too, sometimes taking so long that the produce spoiled along the side of the road. And there were a few direct routes that Palestinians simply were not permitted to take, which sometimes turned short trips into daylong slogs.
I spent endless hours working with the Israelis to remove as many of these roadblocks as possible. I became used to negotiating the lifting of important obstacles one by one. Since no Israeli defense minister wanted to wake up one day to find that a terrorist had crossed through a recently lifted border check, the process was arduous and frustrating.
The other major on-the-ground issue was facilitating the training of Palestinian security forces so that they could take responsibility for more of the territory where their people lived. When Palestinians were able to provide security, the population didn’t have to live in the shadow of the IDF—and there was thus far less friction between the two peoples. But the Israelis weren’t going to turn over territory to security forces that might ignore or, worse, facilitate terrorism, and I knew it would be a nonstarter to ask Congress to fund these forces under the unity government. The key was to train Palestinians who were competent and trusted to do the job (so that Israelis didn’t have to), but to show that Hamas had no role.
Fortunately, both the Israelis and the Palestinians trusted the Americans to help them achieve these goals. And the IDF trusted the U.S. military in particular. So after becoming secretary I asked Don to assign a three-star general to work on the problems of security, movement, and access. The first general chosen was William “Kip” Ward, an outstanding army officer who laid the foundation for the training of the Palestinians. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton succeeded Ward and labored at these tasks for five years. He masterfully built trust between the rapidly improving Palestinian security forces and the Israelis. He banged heads with the Israeli Defense Ministry practically every day to get roadblocks removed and towns turned over to the Palestinians. And he hammered on Abbas and his people to root out corruption and incompetence in their police forces.
When Keith could go no further, he called me. I would then call Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Salam Fayyad, or Mahmoud Abbas and fuss about the lack of progress. On some trips to the Middle East I would insist on seeing Barak and Fayyad together so that, with me present, they could accuse each other face to face of failure to carry out obligations. “Get this solved before I come back,” I’d say, feeling a little bit like a parent.
The painstaking work rarely made headlines, but it made a difference. One of Barak’s key aides paid me a great compliment when he said, after we left office, that he missed Sergeant Dayton and Corporal Rice. That was indeed the level of our work. But it would pay off as we looked to foster negotiations on the final-status issues. It was getting harder for the Israelis to claim that the Palestinians weren’t fighting terror—and harder for them to claim that they had no partner for peace.
Despite the tensions concerning the unity government, the March trip did result in an agreement that Olmert and Abbas would meet weekly. The next day on March 28, after four busy days in the region, the Arab League reaffirmed the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which was welcome news. Unfortunately, the good words were undone by the Saudi king’s sudden rant at the same Arab League meeting in which he called the U.S. presence in Iraq illegal, stating that in Iraq “the bloodshed is continuing under an illegal foreign occupation and detestable sectarianism.” The outburst left the Saudis scrambling to reassure us that the king’s frustration did not mean that he wanted us out of Iraq. “Really?” I said to the Saudi ambassador. “You could have fooled me.” Sometimes the hypocrisy of the Arabs was more than I could take.
We didn’t comment publicly, but it was one of the many examples of Arab leaders saying one thing in private and the near-opposite in public. I believed that on some level their hypocrisy grew from an absence of accountability. It was not a product of being Arab, of course, but rather of being autocrats. Lacking in popular legitimacy, many of the Arabs felt the need to grandstand and play off populist passions. That they often had to throw the United States under the bus to do so rarely stopped them.
In this case King Abdullah’s comments could not have been more ill timed. Domestic pressures were rising with both houses of Congress expressing discontent with the Iraq mission. Back in February, the House of Representatives had passed a resolution repudiating the surge—seventeen Republicans breaking ranks and joining the 246–182 majority. On March 23 the House adopted a spending bill with a timetable for withdrawal, and four days later the Senate put forward a bill with a nonbinding withdrawal timetable, setting a goal of withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by March 31, 2008.
We desperately needed something to go right, but things just got worse. On April 12 a suicide bomber killed eight in an attack on the Iraqi Parliament, which was located in the supposedly safe Green Zone. Four days later, six members of the Iraqi Cabinet resigned on Muqtada al-Sadr’s orders. I had the sickening feeling that the surge had come too late.
In the middle of these difficult days, George Tenet, who’d headed the CIA during the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and during the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, released his memoirs. Suddenly George, who’d told the 9/11 Commission that I’d “gotten it” when he had “warned” of an impending attack, was saying that I’d ignored his clear signals. What clear signals? I thought. Back when CBS discovered the August 6 memo that supposedly warned of an attack, you didn’t even remember it. You’d told me you’d been somewhere on a beach in New Jersey that day. To counter George’s revisionist narrative, I went on the Sunday-morning shows and dutifully recounted what we’d done in the run-up to 9/11, reminding people of what George had said at the time. It was hard to get very worked up about it, though. I was confronting too many real problems around the world to worry about a retrospective blame game. Iraq would have been enough. But there was also the task of rescuing the Middle East peace process; we needed an answer to a growing humanitarian crisis in Sudan; and out of the blue we were in a war of words with Moscow about missi
le defense and conventional forces limitations in Europe. Was the Kremlin trying to resurrect the Cold War?
Relations with Moscow Sour
OUR RELATIONS with Moscow had been somewhat testy for a number of months. The Kremlin had complained about our decision to place missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, making clear that the offense was linked to the status of the two as former members of the Soviet bloc. “Put your interceptors in Turkey,” Sergei Lavrov had said at the time.
Now we were moving toward implementing agreements with our allies. The Czech and Polish foreign ministers came to Washington, and it was no secret that we were moving ahead.
We tried not to make it a zero-sum game, continually insisting that the systems that we were contemplating were no threat to Moscow’s deterrent and reiterating an offer to Moscow for partnership in the area of missile defense. Bob Gates and I made the case in an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, suggesting that the NATO-Russia Council would be an excellent forum for cooperation in this area.
Still, the Russians bristled, and I was prepared for fireworks when Sergei Lavrov paid a visit to NATO headquarters. I had no idea, however, just how incredible the encounter would be.
It was always satisfying to see the Russians come to NATO and sit there among members that included a unified Germany, the three Baltic states, and seven former members of the Warsaw Pact. We’d advocated strongly for the incorporation of the East Europeans into the Alliance, and they’d been the staunchest defenders of the Freedom Agenda throughout the world, including in the Middle East. But the East Europeans never let the Russians forget that they’d lost the Cold War, and they sometimes treated the Russians in a manner that bordered on ridicule, which made me uncomfortable.
At that particular session, however, the Russians deserved what they got. Just before the NATO ministerial meeting, I learned that Putin had declared a suspension of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. In a speech to the Russian Parliament, he derided what he perceived to be an unequal treaty that disadvantaged the Russian Federation. Indeed, the Russians hated the agreement, which called for limiting the number and location of troops in Europe. It had been negotiated at the end of the Cold War, at a moment of supreme weakness for the dying Soviet Union. They had a good point about the need to further revise a treaty that, despite having undergone some changes in the 1990s, was originally written to balance the forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The latter had, of course, ceased to exist, and some of its members had been incorporated into the former.
Sergei Lavrov had come to Oslo, Norway, to rally support against our plans for missile defense. It was an old game that the Russians were playing, splitting the allies from the United States by playing on the fears of the Europeans, particularly the Germans, of conflict with the Kremlin. But Putin’s announcement had soured sentiment toward Russia. When Lavrov launched into his remarks—which were vaguely threatening about missile defense and dismissive of Russian obligations under CFE—he lost any hope of winning support. Minister after minister excoriated Russia for Putin’s announcement and supported the idea of missile defense. Those who had reservations about our plans to put components in Eastern Europe kept their opinions to themselves. The Czech minister of foreign affairs, Karel Schwarzenberg, said only one thing: “Pshaw—fine thing to come here after threatening to abrogate a treaty commitment.” It was a wonderful moment of confrontation between a Czech who was plenty old enough to remember 1968 and a Russian who did too.
Lavrov had also come to lobby for cooperation between NATO and something called the Collective Security Treaty Organization. He brought slides explaining the CSTO—a pitiful attempt to re-create a Warsaw Pact–like structure. Its members were Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and later Uzbekistan—all states comprising the stub of the old Soviet Union. I felt bad for him at that moment.
Finally, Sergei (who just wanted to get out of the room) concluded his comments. He couldn’t resist one final shot: “I’ve heard the arguments about missile defense—the same argument, just in different languages.” He promised to seek areas of cooperation, but it was pretty clear that he didn’t really mean it.
It would have been totally satisfying were it not for the fact that we really did need to work with Moscow on a problem of growing urgency. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia had resulted in the establishment of six independent countries: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia (or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—more about that later). But there was one piece that remained unresolved: Kosovo. Kosovo was an impoverished and ethnically charged enclave of Serbia that had been brutally cleansed by Slobodan Milošević’s armies. Kosovar Albanians, who make up more than 90 percent of the population, clamored to secede from Serbia, but Serbia would not countenance independence. Indeed, one of the most famous and most remembered battles in Serbia’s history was the loss of Kosovo to the Ottoman Turks in 1389.
Much of the world had accepted that Kosovo would secede and become independent. But Russia, long an ally of Serbia, was not prepared to do so. The Kosovars wanted their independence and were ready to take it by force if it was not granted to them. We had to find a diplomatic solution and Moscow stood in the way. The charged atmosphere of the Oslo ministerial meeting did nothing to improve the chances for cooperation on this dangerous problem. In May I went to Moscow on a mission to improve at least the tone of the relationship. Putin and I had a direct conversation in which we both acknowledged responsibility for the pall over U.S.-Russian relations.
A couple of weeks after that I met Sergei Lavrov at the G8 ministerial in Potsdam, Germany. Frank-Walter Steinmeier was so proud of the beautiful restoration of Cecilienhof Palace, where the Potsdam Conference had been held in 1945 as World War II was drawing to a close. The flags of the victors were displayed in the corners of the conference room—the Stars and Stripes of the United States; the Union Jack of Great Britain; and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union—here in the unified Germany. Amazing, I thought. What would Truman think? What would Stalin think? The sentiment of the moment was suddenly disrupted by the comment of my unpredictable friend, the Japanese foreign minister, Taro Aso. “But for a few turns in the war, it could have been the flags of Germany, Italy, and Japan,” he blurted out. Okay, I thought. Time to move on.
Sergei and I used the occasion to spar over Kosovo and missile defense despite the promises of Moscow weeks before to find areas of agreement even when our policies did not coincide. The Europeans tried as usual to mediate—unsuccessfully. The scene that day was a harbinger of what was to come: an increasingly difficult relationship with the Kremlin for the next eighteen months, until the end of the Bush years.
Relations thawed briefly when the President invited Putin to the Bush family home at Walker’s Point in early July, hoping to appropriate some of the warmth that the Russians felt for George H. W. Bush, whose respectful diplomacy at the end of the Cold War was greatly appreciated in Moscow.
After the Presidents Bush took Putin fishing—Putin caught the only fish—President George W. Bush and Putin settled back at the house for the meeting, and President George H. W. Bush went off to prepare dinner. Sitting in the same pastel chintz living room where I’d first talked with the then governor about foreign policy, the Russian and U.S. presidents relaxed and talked openly and candidly about the problems in the U.S.-Russia relationship. Looking past them, one could see through the window an extraordinary view of the Atlantic Ocean.
Putin was as tough on Iran as I’d ever heard him, making very clear that he had no love for Ayatollah Khamenei or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But he said that Russia had to deliver on the fuel shipments to the Bushehr reactor that had been held up for months. “Our companies will start to lose money because of the contract,” he explained calmly. The President asked only that the Russians make no announcement without full coordination with us. Putin agreed and kept his word. It was one incident but emblematic of
the relatively good cooperation on Iran—far better than the public perception.
The two men then turned to missile defense, agreeing to find a way to cooperate. I believe now that there was some miscommunication between them but I didn’t catch it at the time. The President was trying to make clear that he wouldn’t reverse the decision to place sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin was offering alternate sites. Yet we were encouraged by Putin’s reference during the press conference that afternoon to missile defense as an area of “strategic partnership” and his proposal that we continue the conversation in the forum of the NATO-Russia Council. The President and Putin agreed to have Bob Gates and me follow up with a visit to Moscow. The next day, Lavrov and I issued a joint statement reaffirming our desire for a post-START treaty. George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin did have good chemistry, and on this occasion it helped to calm the waters—temporarily—of our increasingly choppy relationship. After a dinner of lobster and swordfish (not the fish that Putin had caught) the Russians left and everyone felt better.
…
IN SOME MATTERS we worked very effectively with Moscow. This was certainly the case in the Middle East, where Sergei’s support in the Quartet of our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue was unwavering. In fact, the Middle East Quartet was a very effective mechanism for coordinating policy toward all aspects of the peace process.
The prospects for forward movement were once again on the rise. Predictably, Hamas and Fatah were not able to live in harmony under the Mecca agreement. The isolation of Gaza had exposed the weakness of the Hamas-led government. As a Palestinian friend told me, “It just showed that they aren’t the great resistance movement—they’re just a bunch of politicians who can’t make the sewer system work either.”
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 69