The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  Trips to the region by Cheney and Powell followed in March and April, respectively. They offered a graphic illustration of the administration’s parallel policy universes. Cheney’s purpose was largely to test the waters on Iraq. He came away convinced that there was enough regional support for decisive action against Saddam, and that there was no point in investing much in the Palestinian issue in the meantime. Powell’s purpose, by contrast, was to create some sense of possibility on the Israeli-Palestinian front, calm the situation on the ground as well as regional anger, and harness the energies of other international players before they set off on their own high-profile peace initiatives.

  Powell’s conversations in Arab capitals, and with Sharon and Arafat in particular, were a slog. As he put it to me late one evening over the rum and Cokes that he occasionally enjoyed, “This is the closest thing to a diplomatic root canal I’ve ever experienced.” Saudi crown prince Abdullah had helped produce a promising initiative at the Arab League summit in Beirut at the end of March, which offered a vision of peace and normalization with the wider Arab world if Israel and the Palestinians reached a two-state solution. A terrorist attack in Netanya the week before the Beirut summit, in which thirty Israeli civilians were murdered at a Passover dinner, cast a huge cloud over Powell’s efforts. Nevertheless, he managed to get the key players to agree to the possibility of a regional conference to discuss ways of ending the violence and getting back to a political process. We had kept the White House carefully informed about this effort during the trip, which only amplified Powell’s ire when he was overruled, and informed in a series of calls with Washington late one night in Jerusalem at the end of his trip that he could not announce this publicly the next day, as we had planned. In the minds of many in the administration, the time to launch such an effort would be after the presumed transformative impact of Saddam’s fall, not before.

  I had rarely seen Powell so angry. I was sitting with him in his hotel suite, long past midnight, as he finished a White House call. He slammed the phone down, his jaw clenched and eyes flashing, and said, “Goddamn it. They never stop undercutting me. Don’t they understand that we’re just trying to prevent a bad situation from getting worse?” At his last stop in Cairo the next day, he asked me to stay in the region and keep trying to dampen tensions. “I’ve burned up my heat shield,” he said. “Do the best you can.”

  I kept at it for most of the rest of April, with each depressing meeting or event flowing seamlessly into the next. After a string of bloody terrorist attacks, the mood in Israel was edgy. Israel had begun Operation Defensive Shield in late March, after the Netanya massacre, and was reasserting direct Israeli security control in areas ceded to the Palestinians under the Oslo Accords. Arafat himself was under a form of house arrest, bottled up in the presidential compound in Ramallah.

  Prime Minister Sharon was invariably courteous in our discussions, but immovable. He had little appetite for what he often saw to be American naïveté, and operated on the conviction that the best diplomacy came when your adversary was pinned firmly to the floor. (He would always greet me by saying, “You’re mostly welcome”—which my U.S. embassy colleagues would ascribe to his imperfect English, but that I always suspected reflected his ambivalence about my arrival.) Much as he used an intricate network of chutes to corral and direct the cattle at his beloved ranch in the Negev, Sharon was a master at keeping people focused on security and away from longer-term political issues. Arafat made it easy for him.

  The Palestinian leader seemed strangely at home under siege in Ramallah—secure in his victimhood and eerily self-assured about his ability to wriggle out of yet another predicament. The scene around his sandbagged office building in the small presidential compound, the Muqatta, was stark, with vehicles in the surrounding area turned into rusting metal pancakes by Israeli tanks, and Israel Defense Forces snipers visible in the windows of nearby structures. Inside, corridors were lit by candles, black-clad security guards grasped their weapons, and twenty-something volunteer “human shields” from Europe and America crowded the hallway, a few surreptitiously handing me notes asking for help to return home. “Please call my mother and tell her I’m ok,” one read, with a name and number neatly printed below. Arafat would sit beaming when you entered his makeshift meeting room, his machine pistol prominently displayed on the table in front of him for all—especially the cameras—to see. His aides and bodyguards would smile nervously, not quite as relaxed as Arafat about where all this was headed.

  Salam Fayyad, the immensely decent Palestinian minister of finance, was trapped in the Muqatta for days at a time. He later told me a story that captured perfectly Arafat’s hyperpersonalized approach to governing the Palestinian Authority. There was only one functioning air conditioner in the presidential office building in those months, in a room in which Arafat and several other senior PA officials worked and slept. Ever the micromanager, the Palestinian president would turn the air conditioner off at night, despite the heat and increasingly gamey smell of too many men with too little opportunity to wash. He slept while clutching the AC’s remote control, one of the few remaining totems of his authority. One night, egged on by his colleagues, Fayyad pried the remote out of the sleeping grip of Arafat and turned the air-conditioning back on. With tongue in cheek, he concluded the story by drawing a larger lesson: “You really can devolve power if you assert yourself.”

  As Arafat and Sharon continued their zero-sum contest, the costs for people on both sides continued to rise. From the Dolphinarium Club in Tel Aviv to the Park Hotel in Netanya to the terrible bus bombing in Hadera, Palestinian suicide attacks took an awful human toll. The human tragedy on the other side was equally painful to watch. During that late April trip, I went with United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) officials to visit the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. It was one of the grimmest scenes I ever witnessed.

  Ambushed by Palestinian extremists in the narrow alleyways of the camp, IDF units had laid waste to most of it, leaving 40 percent of the camp, an area roughly the size of five football fields, flattened into rubble. The IDF had withdrawn the day before, and the stench of decomposing bodies was overpowering. Survivors were digging with shovels, picks, and their bare hands, looking for bodies of relatives. The vacant expressions on the faces of the camp’s children went straight through me. There was unexploded ordnance all around, and during our visit a local Palestinian physician trying to tend to the wounded was badly injured by an accidental detonation. The UNRWA medical clinic, the only such facility in the camp, was vandalized. The refrigerator containing vaccines was shot up, spoiling the medicine inside. Miraculously, a fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy was pulled alive from the rubble that afternoon, after being trapped for nearly two days.

  It was the images of Palestinian suffering that animated Saudi crown prince Abdullah when he visited President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on April 25. The crown prince showed Bush a binder of photos of Palestinian victims, and at one point threatened to leave Crawford early if the United States wasn’t prepared to act more vigorously. Taken aback by Abdullah’s vehemence, the president made clear that we’d weigh in with the Israelis to prevent them from expelling or killing Arafat, and would look for ways to make our broader concerns clear. Even the staunchest proponents of giving priority to taking down Saddam and “parking” the Palestinian issue began to realize that winning the acquiescence of key Arab partners for action against Iraq would require some semblance of diplomatic commitment on the Israeli-Palestinian front. Two months later, the result was the president’s June 24 speech in the Rose Garden.

  In American foreign policy, there are two kinds of major speeches: frameworks for action, and substitutes for action. The June 24 address was mostly the latter, an effort to deflect Arab and European pressures for active American diplomacy and buy time for the near-term priority of action against Saddam. Reflecting the untreated schizophrenia
in the policy process, it was really two speeches, with only a thin connection between them. In the first part, the president laid out the transformative notion that the path to Palestinian statehood could only come through the removal of Arafat, serious democratic reform of the Palestinian Authority, and a cessation of violence. The second part laid out, in much more general terms, what might be possible for Palestinians at the end of the rainbow: a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel. The clear implication was sequential, putting the onus squarely on the Palestinians to carry out unilateral regime change before there could be any progress toward a two-state solution.

  The bureaucratic infighting over the drafting of the speech was ugly. While Condi Rice was a prime proponent of a presidential address, Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld opposed the idea, which they saw as both an unnecessary diversion from the Iraq campaign and an undeserved reward for Palestinians. Powell and I made the argument that the second half of the speech had to be strengthened, spelling out in more detail what a state might look like and what responsibilities the Israelis would have along the way, especially regarding the cessation of settlement construction. That, we maintained, would be essential to get a serious hearing from Palestinians who understood the need for reform. The early White House drafts, however, were heavily weighted toward the front end of the speech. I didn’t mince words with Powell. “Mr. Secretary,” I wrote in a note in early June, “I have to be honest with you: this draft is junk. It contains no real sense of endgame. It vastly overestimates the attractiveness of a ‘provisional state’ for Palestinians….Its tone is patronizing and preachy. No one—not even you—could sell this in the region.”20

  The Sharon government played an active role in the editing process, emphasizing Palestinian obligations as the precondition for eventual final status negotiations, and resisting anything more than an extremely light touch in sketching the possible contours of the outcome. Dov Weisglass, a senior advisor to Sharon, led a delegation to the White House in mid-June and suggested in one meeting that “the Palestinians are fed up with Arafat and just waiting for the Americans to give a signal that he’s finished.” I countered that “the one thing Palestinians are more fed up with than Arafat is the occupation….If you want to marginalize and manipulate Arafat, give the Palestinians a real political horizon. The Prime Minister has not given Palestinians a whiff of hope for ending occupation, nor any kind of compelling political plan. If he had done so, we might be having a different conversation.”21 The reaction not only from Weisglass but also from most of the Americans in the room was polite but utterly dismissive.

  By about the twentieth draft, we began to make a little headway, but it was a hard and unsatisfying debate. In one memorable conference call to review yet another draft, two of my senior colleagues from the Pentagon and the vice president’s office tried to argue that there had to be parity in any reference to cessation of settlement activity in the West Bank, and that we should call on both Israelis and Palestinians to stop construction activity during negotiations. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, the two halves of the speech hung uneasily together, with just enough in the latter part to give some slight credibility to the first. The reaction from the Sharon government was effusive. As one noted Israeli columnist wrote the next day, “The Likud Central Committee could not have written a speech like that.” Arab reaction was swift and negative. Rice called me to ask what I was hearing from regional leaders, and I tested my capacity for understatement by replying that “it’s pretty rough.”

  While the White House had hoped that the speech would tamp down international clamor for American diplomatic action, it predictably invited the question of how the administration intended to operationalize the president’s vision. On June 25, I told Powell that “our most immediate challenge is the absence of a practical roadmap in the speech to end violence, transform Palestinian leadership, and restore hope.”22 In July, the Jordanian, Egyptian, and Saudi foreign ministers came to Washington to make a similar argument. Powell engineered a meeting for them with the president in hopes that they could help reinforce the case we were trying to make. Bush acknowledged the need for follow-up, but remained wary of investing much American capital. His view was that the speech had put the ball squarely in the court of the Palestinians and Arabs, and now they needed to act. Marwan Muasher, the gifted and energetic Jordanian foreign minister, pressed the president gently in this meeting and then during an August visit by King Abdullah to put together a plan to implement the June 24 vision. He pushed for a “roadmap” that would include benchmarks, timelines, mutual obligations, and a monitoring group to measure performance. The president eventually accepted the argument. In the Oval Office with King Abdullah in August, Bush motioned to me and told the king that “Bill can work with Marwan on this.” That was the beginning of the Roadmap initiative, which became a classic illustration of how motion can imitate movement in diplomacy.

  The Roadmap never suffered for lack of effort at State or among our Quartet partners: the UN, EU, and Russia. Its fatal flaw was lack of commitment and political will—in Jerusalem and Ramallah, as well as in Washington. The White House’s priorities were elsewhere, and outside State there was no interest in the exercise. Doug Feith later called it “just a halftime show,” occupying the space between the June 24 speech and the invasion of Iraq and “whatever serious diplomacy was going to be after the Iraq action.”23 To those of us in the halftime marching band crisscrossing the region in late 2002 and early 2003, that was not a very edifying image, but Feith certainly captured our irrelevance.

  The Roadmap laid out three phases, with parallel Palestinian and Israeli actions in each, aimed ultimately at a two-state solution. We floated early drafts with the Israelis and Palestinians in the fall of 2002. Weisglass objected vehemently to the lack of strict sequencing in the Roadmap, insistent on postponing Israeli steps until the Palestinians had acted decisively on reform and ending violence. The Palestinians pushed for both sides to take steps in parallel. Meanwhile, reform began to gain some momentum, with the Palestinians producing a provisional constitution and Salam Fayyad accomplishing near miracles on budget transparency.

  In the spring of 2003, Mahmoud Abbas was appointed prime minister, a first step toward devolving power away from Arafat. Long an advocate of negotiations but generally risk-averse and without any independent political base, Abbas at least offered the possibility of easing Arafat off center stage and opening up diplomatic opportunities with the Israelis. Taking advantage of this step, and the early if short-lived success of the invasion of Iraq, the White House finally assented to public release of the Roadmap at the end of April. The Palestinians grudgingly went along. The Israelis offered highly conditioned acceptance, with fourteen reservations aimed at ensuring strict sequencing within each phase of the Roadmap and the deferral of significant Israeli concessions or responsibilities. It was not an auspicious start, but there was nevertheless finally a small opening, which would require real American diplomatic muscle and willpower to explore, and a readiness to press both sides persistently on some uncomfortable issues. The White House’s limited appetite for peacemaking soon became clear, especially as the debacle in Iraq unfolded.

  I accompanied Powell on a trip to the region in early May, and returned later in the month with Elliott Abrams, the senior Middle East advisor on the NSC staff. Our main goal was to prepare the way for two summits. The first was hosted by President Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh at the beginning of June, and brought together a number of international and regional leaders to highlight a common front against terrorism. The second was hosted by King Abdullah in Aqaba immediately afterward, and included Sharon and Abbas. Its focus was launching the Roadmap process. Both events were long on ceremony and short on practical follow-through, although the president did have an admirably direct conversation with Sharon in Aqaba about curbing settlement activity and stepping up to Israel’
s responsibilities under the Roadmap. Bush was equally blunt with Abbas. A U.S. monitoring mission was set up, but by late summer a tenuous cease-fire in the West Bank and Gaza collapsed. Abbas resigned shortly thereafter, disillusioned both by American detachment and Arafat’s refusal to empower him.

  Late in the fall, Sharon told Abrams privately that he was considering a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. It was a step that appealed to Sharon. Demographically, it removed from Israeli control and responsibility a large Palestinian population. Strategically, it offered a way for Israel to regain the initiative, keep the Roadmap in the glove compartment, divest itself of the troublesome Gazans, tighten its hold on the West Bank, and deflect any pressure for wider territorial concessions. As Weisglass put it in an interview in 2004, “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde….It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the President’s formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period.”24 Bush announced formal U.S. support for Gaza disengagement during an April 2004 visit by Sharon, adding public statements essentially endorsing Israel’s positions on Palestinian refugees and on the permanent retention by Israel of the large settlement blocs along the 1948 Green Line. Both positions were generally consistent with the parameters that Bill Clinton had offered the Israelis and Palestinians in 2000, but Bush’s reaffirmation directly to the Israelis, in the absence of any active negotiation, was notable, unnecessary, and poorly received by the Arabs.

  With the already severely stricken Roadmap overdosed on Weisglass’s formaldehyde, and the White House content to follow Sharon’s lead on Gaza disengagement, there was little inclination to seize the last opportunity that arose in the administration’s first term—the sudden death of Yasser Arafat in November, just a few days after President Bush’s reelection. I was dispatched as the senior American representative to Arafat’s official funeral in Cairo, a gesture of respect from the White House for Palestinians, if not for the Palestinian leader himself. It was a chaotic scene. At one point, I found myself in a receiving line just behind the leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who looked only marginally more worried about being seen near me than I was about being seen near him.