Our stake in reversing the drift toward more violence, rebuilding American credibility, refocusing attention on the possibilities of a political process, and getting as far as we can over the next seven weeks toward a framework agreement is self-evident. What is less obvious is how to get from here to there. One option is to follow Barak’s lead. That may serve what he sees to be his tactical interests at this point. But it’s hard to see how it serves ours. A second option is to see if we can extract from the Palestinians a clearer sense of how far they’re prepared to go right now, and then use that to craft an approach to Barak. But it’s unlikely that Arafat will level with us at this point; and while recent Egyptian and Jordanian efforts with the Palestinians have been helpful, it’s not at all clear that they will produce a workable starting point.
That leaves it to us to lay out the hard truths—for all parties—that must underpin any enduring political solution. As we have tried to emphasize in our two previous telegrams, that will require the political will to stand up for what we have fought so hard for over the past eight years, and a readiness to declare the independence of our policy.16
The central recommendation we made was to “articulate a ‘Clinton Vision’ for the peace process.” We argued that “we have a unique but wasting opportunity to take advantage of a remarkable asset: the personal reputation and demonstrated commitment of President Clinton. He has built up substantial personal credit with the parties over the years, and now is the time to use it. He can sketch a vision of what he believes a comprehensive peace will require of all parties—Palestinians, Israelis, and Arab states alike. He will have to be willing to say things to each party that they will not want to hear, but that is the definition of a balanced and credible approach.”
Neither the White House nor the State Department probably needed our cable to convince them to produce what became the “Clinton Parameters”—a groundbreaking American proposal for a comprehensive two-state solution that was presented to the parties in late December and made public the following month, shortly before President Clinton left office. It was too late, however, with Clinton’s term ending and the parties drifting further apart. Violence quickly consumed nearly a decade of political progress.
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KING ABDULLAH, LIKE the rest of us, was worried about the stalemate in diplomacy and the worsening of Palestinian-Israeli violence. In a long conversation one afternoon in January 2001, he told me, “I’m generally an optimistic person, but now I’m worried. This region is drifting in a scary direction. People are getting angrier, and I don’t have any good answers.”17 I didn’t have much reassurance to offer. In a cable a couple months later, I reported more troubling indicators: “The mood amongst Jordanians is increasingly angry and disaffected—a mixture of intense frustration over rising violence across the Jordan River, fury at American policies that are seen to be not just unbalanced but aggressively anti-Arab, and discontent with the meager practical results of economic reform.”18
After nearly three years as ambassador, I was worried too—not about Abdullah’s leadership, but about the pressures that Jordan faced, and the inevitable uncertainties about the new administration’s policies. These uncertainties took on particular significance for me when President Bush’s new secretary of state, Colin Powell, called me a week or so after he was named to ask if I would serve as assistant secretary for near eastern affairs.
I had never worked for anyone I respected more than Powell, and I was thrilled by what his leadership would bring to American foreign policy. I had similar respect for Rich Armitage, who had been nominated as deputy secretary of state. I was confident in my knowledge of the region, and familiar with the main policy issues; I was far less confident in my ability to rise to the leadership and management challenge of heading one of the department’s largest bureaus. I was just as unsure about the new administration’s Middle East policy and feared we were sailing into even more treacherous waters in that troubled part of the world.
It was hard to say no to Colin Powell, however, or to a request to serve in such a critical post at such a critical time. I quickly accepted, asking only that we stay in Jordan until as close to the end of the school year as possible (which, given the vagaries of the Senate confirmation process, was a probability anyway), and that I be able to choose my deputies in the NEA front office.
I had learned over the years that the key to success in any demanding job is to surround yourself with people who are smarter and more experienced than you are. That’s exactly what I did in NEA, working the phones hard from Amman in early 2001 to enlist three of the most capable Arabists I knew, all of whom were serving, like me, as ambassadors in the field. Jim Larocco, ambassador in Kuwait, agreed to come back to Washington as principal deputy assistant secretary. David Satterfield, our ambassador in Beirut, with whom I had worked many years before as lowly staff assistants for Dick Murphy, also readily agreed. Ryan Crocker, leading our embassy in Damascus, was the toughest sell. One of the best officers I had ever known, Ryan far preferred the dangers and challenges of the Middle East to the petty intrigues and bureaucratic machinations of Washington. He eventually relented, calling me from Damascus one afternoon, after I had nearly given up. “I’ll join you at the Alamo,” he said in his usual laconic way.
I was confirmed by the Senate in April, and began my new job immediately. The king and queen invited Lisa and me to Aqaba for the weekend, just before we left. It had been a remarkable three years, and I told the king how glad I was to have had the chance to work with him, and how much Jordan would always mean to me and my family.
“Neither of us expected all the things that have been thrown at us,” he said. “I’m proud of what we’ve done together. You should be too.”
5
Age of Terror: The Inversion of Force and Diplomacy
IT WAS JUST after midnight on a cold February morning in 2005, at a tent encampment in the Libyan desert. My route had been as circuitous and eccentric as the man I was coming to see. I flew into Tripoli on a U.S. military aircraft, landing at Mitiga airfield, formerly Wheelus Air Base, the largest overseas U.S. Air Force installation in the 1960s. An officious protocol officer drove us across the tarmac where one of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s jets was parked. We quickly boarded the Libyan aircraft. Its décor was a bedraggled version of 1970s chic, with worn lime-green shag carpeting and swivel chairs that had long since ceased swiveling. For security reasons, the Libyans refused to specify our destination. We flew east along the Mediterranean coast to another military airfield, near Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. There, we were hustled into a convoy of Land Rovers and driven south at breakneck speed for two hours through desert scrub and successive rings of Libyan security.
We finally slowed at the entrance to a small wadi, where Qaddafi sat in spartan splendor. His cavernous camouflage tent was unadorned save for a few white plastic lawn chairs, a sleeping mat, a small television, and a single light bulb hanging from the top of the tent. I was ushered in, and Qaddafi rose to greet me, wrapped against the nighttime chill in robes and a headscarf that covered most of his face. His attire was less flamboyant than in a previous encounter, when he wore a pajama-like outfit with a shirt featuring pictures of fellow African strongmen. Whenever he engaged in his disconcerting habit of pausing for two or three minutes in conversational midstream to stare at the ceiling, presumably to collect his thoughts, I would mentally try to name all the dictators so proudly displayed on his pajama top.
On this occasion, Qaddafi’s mood and message meandered. We were nearing the end of a long and tortuous path to normalized relations, the product of many years of diplomacy—some covert, some overt—across administrations of both parties. Qaddafi complained mildly about the pace of change, but made clear that there would be no turning back from Libya’s commitments to compensate victims of the Lockerbie bombing, renounce terrorism, and abandon its nuclear and chemical weapons progra
ms. He bristled when I raised human rights concerns, and had not the slightest inclination to open up his profoundly weird and repressive system of “popular rule.” He was unapologetic about his brutality, convinced that there could be no political order in his fractious society without it. In all the hours I spent with him and his lieutenants over four years, I never once forgot the blood on their hands. One of the 259 innocent victims on the Pan Am 103 flight bombed by Libyan operatives was my friend Matthew Gannon, a CIA officer with whom I had served in Amman in the early 1980s.1 He had been on his way from Beirut to the States to spend Christmas with his wife and two young daughters. His loss had left me shaken.
Qaddafi rambled across the region in that early-morning discussion, offering views on people and problems that were, as I reported back to Washington, “a combination of the eerily insightful and the just plain eerie.” Rarely making eye contact, speaking in a monotone, he limited his gestures to an occasional wave to a bodyguard stationed just outside the tent to refill our tea glasses. As in our previous conversations, Qaddafi went on at length about the Israel-Palestine issue, convinced that a two-state solution was receding, and a one-state “Isratine” inevitable. He predicted the fragmentation of Saudi Arabia into four separate states, reflecting his dim view of the House of Saud, and worried aloud that Iraq, already in the throes of sectarian conflict after the 2003 American invasion, was becoming “a breeding ground and magnet for extremists from around the Islamic world.”2 He got that out without a trace of irony—momentarily oblivious to Libya’s long history as a terrorist haven.
I nevertheless came away hopeful. For thirty-five years, Qaddafi had tried to seize center stage with despicable acts and surreal performance art. Now he was starved to be taken seriously by the United States and others in the West. Neither the weirdness nor the ugliness and intractability of his own political system was going away, but maybe his attention seeking would evolve in less destabilizing ways.
At that moment in early 2005, the Libyan experience proved that diplomacy could accomplish significant changes in the behavior of difficult regimes. Of course it had to be backed up by other forms of leverage—many years of U.S. and multilateral sanctions; a solid international consensus, codified in UN Security Council resolutions; and the credible threat of force. It also mattered that we set consistent and achievable benchmarks for the negotiations on Lockerbie, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), delivered on our end of the deal, and over a period of years built up a fair amount of trust. Regime change was never the goal, and the Libyan leadership gradually developed a self-interest in changing behavior. It saw little benefit in winding up on the wrong side of the post–9/11 divide, and we provided a difficult but navigable pathway to a form of practical redemption.
Sitting there in that drafty desert tent, I was acutely aware that diplomacy with Libya was a model that paled in significance with the other model we had created during those same years—the shoot-first, dabble-in-diplomacy-later approach we took in Iraq. Shaped by post–9/11 apprehension and assertiveness, determination to preempt threats, and hubris and overreliance on force, we blundered our way into a war and its ugly aftermath. That inversion of force and diplomacy left scars that would long endure—for the region and for America’s role in the world.
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AS I PREPARED to leave Amman and return to Washington in the spring of 2001, a colleague warned that we’d be trying to grope our way through a wider Middle East that “really is the land of bad policy options.” It was hard to argue with him.
I had watched with mounting concern as the violence of the Second Intifada worsened. Ariel Sharon’s election victory over Ehud Barak in February 2001 signaled unmistakably that Israel’s consuming focus would be on restoring order and security through force, not negotiations. Yasser Arafat remained risk-averse and duplicitous, maneuvering to stay atop an angry sea of Palestinians under occupation. Sharon and Arafat seemed locked in a stubborn war of attrition, each convinced that he could outlast the other, mutual enablers in a contest with no end in sight. In my Senate confirmation hearing in April, I tried to paint an honest picture: “Too many Israelis and Palestinians now feel less secure, less hopeful, and less certain that peace is possible. The result is an angry and disillusioned mood, much of it directed, fairly or unfairly, against the United States. Many Arabs think we don’t care about their concerns; worse, many think we’re actively hostile to them.”3
Across the region, the deeper dysfunction of Arab societies and the autocrats who sat atop them was impossible to ignore. As the landmark Arab Human Development Reports would soon make clear, Arabs were falling further behind many other regions of the world. The combined GDP of all Arab countries, comprising a population of some three hundred million, was less than that of Spain, which had roughly one-tenth the number of people. Half of all Arabs were under the age of twenty, creating huge pressures that neither educational systems nor job markets could absorb, and only 2 percent had access to the Internet.
Amid this regional tumult, a new generation of leaders was emerging. Like King Abdullah of Jordan, new monarchs in Morocco and Bahrain were experimenting with economic and political openness. Even Bashar al-Assad briefly opened the window to a “Damascus Spring,” with younger technocrats forming short-lived discussion groups to explore reform. The older generation was instinctively much more cautious. In the Gulf, there were abundant anxieties about risks from both Iraq and Iran, despite the reelection in June 2001 of Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president in Tehran. Hosni Mubarak, moored deeply in the status quo in Egypt, saw little reason for optimism in a region with so many unnerving changes afoot.
The view from Washington, as George W. Bush assembled his administration, was similarly cautious in the first half of 2001. President Bush’s national security team was familiar, experienced, and tested. It seemed at the outset nearly as impressive as his father’s, with Dick Cheney as vice president, Colin Powell as secretary of state, and Don Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. George Tenet stayed on as director of the CIA, and Condoleezza Rice became the national security advisor. Rice had captured succinctly the self-consciously realistic approach of the new administration in a Foreign Affairs article during the 2000 election campaign: In a Bush administration, there would be no more nation-building, no more overuse of the U.S. military as an instrument of humanitarian intervention, no more soft-headed multilateralism. The perceived fixation of the Clinton administration on the Middle East peace process would be a thing of the past. Rice was blunt about the use of force in general. The American military, she wrote, “is a special instrument. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.” On Saddam, she was equally clear: “The first line of defense should be deterrence—if he does acquire WMD, his weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.” Restraint and realism seemed to be the dominant guideposts, just as they were for Bush 41.
Colin Powell brought strong leadership to the State Department, and for all my misgivings about the Middle East at that moment and the challenges of my new role, I was genuinely excited to be working for him again. He and Rich Armitage were a formidable team, close friends and keenly attuned to the importance of building morale in the Department, modernizing its 1980s-era technology, and dragging American diplomacy into the twenty-first century. Powell enjoyed walking around the building, poking his head into offices, and offering passing employees a ride up in his private elevator. When President Bush visited the State Department for the first time to get a briefing for an early meeting with his Mexican counterpart, Powell had two junior desk officers sit across from the president and handle the presentation. That kind of empowerment set the tone throughout the department. Armitage worked hard to de-layer the institution and push responsibility downward wherever he could. He was always accessible, with a no-nonse
nse style leavened by an irreverent sense of humor. If you were summoned to his office after six in the evening, Motown tunes would be blaring down the august seventh floor corridor, and scotch would be served to ease the tensions of the day.
Powell and Armitage helped make it a good time to lead a regional bureau. They expected initiative, creativity, and loyalty, and didn’t mind thoughtful disagreement. They emphasized the importance of leaders taking care of their people, and had little patience for martinets or senior officers who admired the problem rather than trying to solve it. I tried as best I could to help create that same atmosphere in NEA.
NEA was arguably the most challenging, if not the biggest, of the regional bureaus. With about forty-five hundred staff spread over Washington and some two dozen embassies and consulates in the region, I was constantly preoccupied with security threats, policy dilemmas, or management problems of one stripe or another.
Sworn in to my new post at the beginning of May 2001, I set out to visit each of the sixteen countries in which we then had embassies. Over the next four years, I spent about half my time on the road. In a region as idiosyncratic and autocratic as the Middle East, modern communications technology was still no substitute for building personal relationships and face-to-face interactions.
My first trip was to Israel and the West Bank. Our aim was to orchestrate a cease-fire and stop the violence that had erupted nearly a year earlier. I joined George Tenet on a couple of those efforts, as he worked to persuade Palestinian and Israeli security officials to cooperate. “The situation we confront is bleak,” I wrote at the time. “Arafat and Sharon are locked into a death dance in which each is looking to best or get rid of the other.”4 Prime Minister Sharon was courteous but unyielding in his determination to hit back hard against Palestinian violence, and to isolate and undermine Arafat, whom he was convinced was not only turning a blind eye to terrorist attacks but tacitly encouraging them. Arafat was just as dug in, manipulating violence for his own purposes and determined not to yield in the face of disproportionate Israeli force. On one visit, I arrived in Tel Aviv a few hours after a vicious suicide attack on a beachfront nightclub, in which twenty-one Israelis had been killed, most of them teenagers. I stopped by the site to lay flowers that morning, as Israeli emergency personnel were still searching for body parts and identifying the victims.
The Back Channel Page 16