In hindsight, it’s hard to see how we could have gotten much traction on the Israeli-Palestinian issue once the White House had set Saddam’s overthrow as its overriding regional objective. Arafat’s default position had become inertia, riding the wave of Intifada violence rather than trying to tame it, content to drift in hopes that outside events might once again change his luck. Sharon had no interest in serious territorial compromise, and happily took advantage of Arafat’s evasiveness. When a few modest openings emerged, such as Abbas’s selection as prime minister in 2003 and then Arafat’s death in 2004, the United States was too preoccupied with Iraq and too uninterested in the kind of hands-on role that Bush thought Clinton had fallen into. Purely as a diplomatic device, the Roadmap helped create the appearance of seriousness, preserved some sense of political possibility, and avoided stray international peace initiatives. In the end, however, it reflected a general post–9/11 habit of viewing diplomacy as an afterthought—as the halftime show, not the main event.
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THERE WERE EXCEPTIONS, however, to the general pattern of dismissiveness toward diplomacy. Libya was one of them. Dealing with Qaddafi in this period was complicated, but certainly more heartening than the bitter failure of Iraq and the endless frustrations of dealing with Palestinians and Israelis. Diplomacy worked in Libya with painstaking effort over several administrations, producing a resolution of the Lockerbie terrorist attack, and Libya’s abandonment of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. It worked because we applied American and international leverage methodically to change Qaddafi’s calculus and sharpen his self-interest in changing his behavior so he could preserve his regime. And it worked because we had far more running room for diplomacy in the Bush administration on this issue than we did on Iraq or the peace process.
The stage had been set over the previous decade, by the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations. In 1991, the United States and the United Kingdom formally indicted two Libyan intelligence agents in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, and made a set of five demands, which remained consistent over the next dozen years: The Libyans had to surrender the suspects for trial; accept responsibility for the actions of Libyan officials involved in the bombing; disclose all it knew of the bombing and allow full access to witnesses and evidence; pay appropriate compensation; and commit itself to cease all forms of terrorist action and assistance to terrorist groups. Fulfillment of all five demands would result in the lifting of the multilateral sanctions that had been imposed by the UN Security Council after Lockerbie.
When Qaddafi met the first demand and turned over the two suspects for trial in 1999, the Clinton administration opened direct, secret talks with the Libyans, led by Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk, in cooperation with the British. Indyk made clear that the lifting of U.S. national sanctions, built up since the Reagan-era conflicts with Qaddafi, would depend upon Libya giving up its nuclear and chemical weapons programs, which U.S. intelligence had been following closely since the 1970s.
When I resumed the secret channel in London in October 2001, I was careful to reiterate the main lines of the positions conveyed earlier by Indyk, including on WMD. Over the course of the next two years, in roughly a dozen meetings in London, Rome, and other locations, we made considerable progress. There were several reasons for this. First, Qaddafi was feeling the pressure of concerted U.S. and international sanctions. The energy sector was starved for investment, and the country’s infrastructure was in shambles. Unemployment ran at 30 percent, and inflation at nearly 50 percent. Qaddafi worried about his restive population, and in 1998 had sent troops to Benghazi to put down an Islamist rebellion.
Second, we established a reliable diplomatic channel with serious Libyan counterparts, well connected to Qaddafi. As had been the case in the talks with Indyk, Musa Kusa, one of Qaddafi’s closest aides, led the Libyan delegation. Tall, thin, and poker-faced, Kusa had studied sociology at Michigan State in the late 1970s, before returning to Libya and a series of senior intelligence jobs—a line of work far removed from his academic stint in America. Kusa was accompanied by two senior Libyan diplomats, Abdelati Obeidi and Abdel Rahman Shalgham. From that first meeting in the fall of 2001, I found Kusa and his colleagues to be cautious but capable, committed to making progress, if always nervous about hidden agendas from us and the whims of their mercurial boss. We offered him a “script” in that initial discussion, which laid out exactly what we expected from the Libyans, and what we were prepared to do in return. We spent hours and hours in tangled debate over subsequent months, in bilateral sessions as well as trilateral discussions with the British. Slowly we began to reach understandings on language and how to verify commitments—and we also began to build up trust and personal rapport.
Third, we could rely on excellent intelligence coordination with our CIA and MI6 colleagues. We tracked systematically Libya’s gradual disengagement from the business of terrorism, from the high-profile expulsion of the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal to the lower-key severing of financial and training links to other groups. We also tracked the much less promising evidence of persistent Libyan efforts to expand their chemical and nuclear weapons programs, which featured contacts with former Soviet scientists as well as the A. Q. Khan network in Pakistan. U.S. intelligence helped interdict a shipment of uranium enrichment technology from A. Q. Khan to Tripoli in the fall of 2003. That played a crucial role in persuading Qaddafi to finally give up his WMD programs and realize he could no longer deceive us. Finally, we could rely on the credible threat of force in the event that diplomacy failed, reinforced by the examples of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
By the early spring of 2003, Kusa was ready to confirm Libyan acceptance of the terms we had laid out on Lockerbie a decade earlier. Meanwhile, lawyers for the families of the victims were negotiating with the Libyans about compensation. In several wrenching meetings with the families that spring, I briefed them on the progress we had made, and stressed that we would not conclude any settlement until the compensation question was resolved. Those were among the most painful conversations I ever had in government. The dull, antiseptic State Department conference room in which we met only put in sharper relief the anguish of the family members around the table. No form of words, and no amount of compensation, could erase their loss or atone for the murders of so many innocent people, dozens of whom were American college students on their way home for the holidays after a semester abroad. The grief and anger in that room could not be bridged by empathy or rational diplomatic explanation, and I understood that. One furious mother told me to “go to hell with your Libyan friends” in a session that spring, but most of the families were appreciative of what we were trying to do and the limits of what we could produce. I wish we could have done more. In August, the lawyers reached a compensation agreement providing $2.7 billion to the families, $10 million for each of the victims.
Meanwhile, we began to move ahead on the WMD issue. In each of our private conversations over the previous year and a half, I had reminded Kusa that this question would have to be solved before any normalization of relations. He made no effort to deny that Libya had active nuclear and chemical weapons programs, and I made clear that we had solid evidence that it did. Libya would have to take fast, dramatic, concrete steps up front to rid itself of WMD and advanced missile programs, which we would verify before normalization. I always emphasized that there was no ulterior motive in this—we had no interest in regime change, but a powerful interest in Libya making the strategic choice to abandon WMD. We were demonstrating in the Lockerbie negotiations that we would follow through on our end of commitments if the Libyans acted on theirs. This was a moment when Qaddafi, ever the contrarian, could gain in stature by renouncing weapons that would only buy him trouble, especially in the new and more perilous post–9/11 world. Kusa indicated to me that he thought Qaddafi was increasingly drawn to that logic, especially as he learn
ed to trust America’s word in the Lockerbie talks. On the margins of our March 11, 2003, meeting in London, after he had finally confirmed acceptance of the Lockerbie terms, he told me quietly that Qaddafi “is ready to move decisively” on the issue of WMD.25
That same month, Saif al-Islam, Qaddafi’s son and an erstwhile postgraduate student in London, conveyed much the same message to MI6. His father, he said, wanted to “clear the air.” Strongly encouraged by Prime Minister Blair, President Bush agreed to send Steve Kappes, a senior CIA officer, to join British intelligence counterparts for follow-on conversations with Saif and Kusa. The WMD interdiction in the Mediterranean in the fall finally convinced Qaddafi that it was time to move. After a last round of talks in December, Qaddafi agreed, and announced on December 19 that he was giving up WMD. It was a significant achievement for Bush and Blair, at a time when the Iraq fiasco was becoming more and more difficult to manage.
I made three trips to Libya in the following year to ensure strict implementation. The Libyans stressed repeatedly their commitment to follow through. Their sensitivities were predictable, and focused mainly on the need to be careful to characterize our WMD efforts in Libya as “assistance” rather than “inspection,” and the importance of showing the Libyan public concrete benefits of Qaddafi’s decision to get out of the terrorism and WMD business.26
For all of our progress, we continued to have plenty of difficulties with the Libyan leader—we caught him plotting against Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in the fall of 2003; he detained a group of Bulgarian medical personnel on trumped-up charges in 2004; and his human rights practices continued to attract, rightly and regularly, our criticism. But his abandonment of terrorism and WMD was a substantial accomplishment, and a reminder of the value of diplomacy.
There was a lively debate within the Bush administration about why Qaddafi had acted, with Vice President Cheney and other hawks drawing a direct connection to Iraq and the demonstration effect of Saddam’s removal. I always thought that was part of the answer, but only part, and not necessarily the decisive part. Afghanistan was evidence enough of our determination and capabilities after 9/11. Moreover, the track record we built up with the Libyans, on the foundation of what the previous administration had pursued, underscored that we were focused on changing behavior, not the Qaddafi regime, and that however difficult the choices and the pathway for the Libyans, our word could be trusted. Sanctions had taken a long-term toll. Qaddafi’s political isolation in the international community was tightly sealed. He needed a way out, and we gave him a tough but defensible one. That’s ultimately what diplomacy is all about—not perfect solutions, but outcomes that cost far less than war and leave everyone better off than they would otherwise have been.
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BY THE END of the first term of Bush 43, and four years in NEA, I was exhausted. I had been proud to serve under Powell and Armitage and proud of the dedication, skill, and courage of my colleagues in the Near Eastern Affairs bureau. I was also deeply worried about the mess we had made in the Middle East, and disappointed in my own failure to do more to avoid it.
In January 2005, Condi Rice succeeded Powell as secretary. In the note I sent to her before our two-hour transition conversation, I wrote, “The Near East is a region dangerously adrift….Across the Arab world a sense of humiliation and weakness is becoming more and more corrosive. Most regimes are perceived by their people to be corrupt and self-absorbed.” Blunt about the depths to which America’s standing in the region had fallen, with more than four out of every five Arabs expressing strong disapproval of the United States, I warned of further strategic setbacks in the second Bush term unless we shifted our approach. There could be “terminal chaos and warlordism in Iraq, the death of the two state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, the birth of a nuclear-armed, hegemonic Iran, and mounting popular pressures against Arab governments…unless we make common cause with regional partners in a coherent strategy for constructive change….We have to be seen as part of the solution, not as part of the problem. That is not the case today.”27
Arafat’s death in November and the election of Mahmoud Abbas as the new Palestinian president in January 2005 offered an opening to reorient our approach. So did the tragic assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February, orchestrated by the overreaching Syrians, who now faced a huge popular backlash in Lebanon. We managed to take advantage of the moment to build international pressure and push Syrian forces out of Lebanon, for the first time since the Lebanese civil war began in the mid-1970s. The wreckage of the administration’s first-term efforts, however, overwhelmed. The policy sins of commission were glaringly apparent, the sins of omission harder to measure but no less significant.
The Iraq invasion was the original sin. It was born of hubris, as well as failures of imagination and process. For neoconservative proponents, it was the key tool in the disruption of the Middle East—the heady, irresponsible, and historically unmoored notion that shaking things up violently would produce better outcomes. In a region where unintended consequences were rarely uplifting, the toppling of Saddam set off a chain reaction of troubles. It laid bare the fragilities and dysfunctions of Iraq as well as the wider Arab state system—proving that Americans could be just as arrogant and haphazard in their impact on Middle East maps as the original British and French mapmakers.
The chaos that spread across Iraq after 2003 created opportunities for Iranian mischief and influence, and helped reawaken broader competition between Sunni and Shia for supremacy in the Middle East. By 2004, King Abdullah in Jordan was already talking about fears of a “Shia crescent,” arcing from Iran across Iraq and sympathetic Alawite allies in Syria to Lebanon. Afflicted by sectarian violence and Sunni Arab alienation, Iraq became a magnet for jihadists and regional terrorism. While we made halting attempts to promote greater political and economic openness throughout the Middle East, the debacle in Iraq, including the miserable images from Abu Ghraib, poisoned America’s image and credibility. If this was how Americans promoted democracy, few Arabs wanted any part of it.
Poverty of imagination was another problem. Although we had tried in NEA to emphasize—repeatedly—all the things that could go wrong, all the reasons to avoid an ill-conceived war, and all the plausible alternative policy paths, none of us asked enough basic questions. None of us thought seriously enough about the possibility that Saddam had no WMD anymore and was obfuscating not to conceal his stockpiles but rather to hide their absence in the face of domestic and regional predators.
There was also a failure of process. Military interventions, especially in the dysfunctional circumstances of the modern Middle East, are always fraught with peril. Our capacity for underestimating that has become habitual. The polarization of views in the administration in the run-up to war in 2003 was stark and crippling, and never really resolved. Sometimes that was simply a function of wishful thinking, such as the neocon fantasy that Iraqis would quickly rise above a history devoid of consensual national governance and replete with sectarian rivalries, or the Rumsfeld notion that we could do regime change on the cheap. Prewar planning was erratic and stovepiped, with too little attention to the most fundamental questions about consequences and how best to anticipate and manage them. Immediate postwar policy suffered badly from seat-of-the-pants judgments, such as the momentous CPA decisions to disband the Iraqi army and cut its members loose financially, and to put Ahmed Chalabi in charge of a recklessly sweeping implementation of the ban on Baath Party members.
There was a continuous fixation on policy capillaries—hours and hours of discussion in the White House Situation Room about the ins and outs of restoring electricity across Iraq, or reconstruction of local health or education systems—without enough focus on the arterial issues of security and national governance, of how to keep the Kurds in, the Sunni Arabs engaged, and the Shia tempered in their newfound political advantage. There
was all too often a massive disconnect between bold pronouncements in the cloistered Situation Room and the messy challenge of connecting them to the realities of the Middle East.
And then there were the more elusive sins of omission. Some were deeply personal. Having tried to highlight all the things that could go wrong, all the unanswered strategic and practical questions, and all the flaws in going it alone, why didn’t I go to the mat in my opposition or quit? These are hard decisions, filled with professional, moral, and family considerations. I still find my own answer garbled and unsatisfying, even with the benefit of a decade and a half of hindsight. Part of it was about loyalty to my friends and colleagues, and to Secretary Powell; part of it was the discipline of the Foreign Service, and the conceit that we could still help avoid even worse policy blunders from within the system than from outside it; part of it was selfish and career-centric, the unease about forgoing a profession I genuinely loved and in which I had invested twenty years; and part of it, I suppose, was the nagging sense that Saddam was a tyrant who deserved to go, and maybe we could navigate his demise more adeptly than I feared.
In the end, I stayed, and my efforts to limit the damage had little effect. I wasn’t alone in my uncertainty in those years. “There’s honor in continuing to serve,” said one longtime colleague, “so long as you’re honest about your dissent. But you never entirely escape the feeling that you’re also an enabler.”
The Back Channel Page 21