Tested by Zion (2 page)

No one suspected, on the day George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, that his presidency would become deeply entangled with events in the broader Middle East. He had no foreign policy expertise, and as a former governor of Texas his interests lay with domestic issues. “Compassionate conservatism” was a stronger message during his campaign than pledges to solve any international problem. Nearly eight years later, Bush explained to a gathering of American Jewish leaders at the White House that “[y]ou know I didn't campaign to be a foreign policy or a national security president. I didn't campaign to be a wartime president. I ran on a domestic agenda, but events happened.”
¹

During the campaign Bush had said little about the Middle East, and his broad statements of support for Israel's security gave little insight into what he would actually do as president. Nor did he have the normal 10-week transition that might have provided time to focus on foreign policy matters: Because of contested ballots and “hanging chads” in Florida, the election results were not decided until the Supreme Court ruled on December 12, and a truncated transition process followed.

Yet on Inauguration Day itself, January 20, 2001, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis began to intrude on his presidency. Bill Clinton had ended his own years in office with a determined, sometimes desperate, effort to forge a peace treaty. He had devoted days and weeks of personal effort, meeting face to face with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and
his team and with PLO leader Yasser Arafat and
his. Although Clinton may have believed he was close to success several times, an agreement was impossible because of Arafat's unwillingness to sign any treaty. Clinton had invested in Arafat, and the investment went bust; as one of Clinton's top Middle East aides put it, “There is a common belief that ‘we came close’ to agreement at Camp David, but the truth is we were not close at all. After eight years, Clinton and
our team surely should have known with whom we were dealing. Clinton had become dependent on the statesmanship of Yasser Arafat.”
²
Clinton gives his own view of the Camp David negotiations in his memoir,
My Life
: “On the ninth day, I gave Arafat
my best shot again. Again he said no.…I returned on the thirteenth day of discussions, and we worked all night again.…Again Arafat said no.…Right before I left office, Arafat, in one of our last conversations, thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I was. ‘Mr. Chairman,’ I replied, ‘I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.’”
³

In the Oval Office on January 20, Clinton used the brief and usually ceremonial meeting with his successor to vent his frustration. He told Bush and
Vice President-elect Cheney that Arafat had torpedoed the peace process; Cheney often repeated later how bitter Clinton had been and how strongly he had warned the new team against trusting Arafat. As one of Cheney's top foreign policy assistants described it, “in the vice president's recounting, they couldn't get Clinton off the subject. I mean, it was the only thing Clinton wanted to talk about and it was, ‘That son of a bitch Arafat,’ you know, ‘Don't, can't trust him,’ ‘I put too much weight on him,’ ‘Biggest mistake I made in my presidency,’ was the way that they described it.”
⁴
The day before, on January 19, Clinton had called Colin Powell, the incoming secretary of state, to deliver the same message.

The last gasp of the Clinton-era effort came in Israeli-Palestinian talks held January 21 to 27, 2001, in Taba, Egypt. Yet Clinton was no longer president; it seemed clear that Israel's impending elections would bring Ehud Barak's time in office to an end; and there was no reason to think Arafat would agree to conditions he had rejected just months before at Camp David.

In fact, “[w]hen the forty-second president departed the White House in January 2001 the Palestinian-Israeli peace process lay in smoking ruins.”
⁵
After the collapse of the Camp David talks in July, Arafat had turned back to terrorism: He had launched a new intifada that was bringing violence to Israeli cities and settlements. In 2010, one of the top leaders of Hamas admitted that “President Arafat instructed Hamas to carry out a number of military operations in the heart of the Jewish state after he felt that his negotiations with the Israeli government then had failed.”
⁶
The Israeli military's effort to stop the wave of terror was front-page news. With the negotiations over and violence flaring, what was the Bush policy to be, and who was to lead it?

Bush and his team had no appetite for a Clinton-style personal role for the new president: It had brought nothing but grief to Clinton, Clinton warned adamantly against trusting Arafat, and no one believed the collapsed talks could be revived. There was, moreover, a desire not to raise expectations unduly, another mistake the Bush team believed Clinton had committed. The intifada had grown bloodier in the months before the transition in Washington, and the team saw its task as reducing the level of violence. “When we took office, our goal was simply to calm the region,” Condoleezza Rice writes in her memoir.
⁷
The very first National Security Council Principals Committee meeting, or PC (where all NSC Principals – the secretaries of state and defense, CIA director,
national security advisor, chairman of the joint chiefs, and the vice president – were present except the president; his presence would mean this was a formal NSC meeting), covered the Middle East. Bruce Riedel, a career CIA official who had been the NSC's senior director for the Middle East under Clinton and continued in that role in 2001 under Bush, described the consensus at that meeting:

Now is not the time for peacemaking; now is the time for conflict management. See if we can dampen this down. And my understanding of my responsibility was that: conflict management. There was a great deal of interest in what happened at Camp David, what were the offers and what were the counteroffers, but mostly from a “let's understand the context of where we are” rather than “let's pick up the pieces and do this” viewpoint. That's the way I understood the administration in the beginning – conflict management.…The meeting was devoted to the question of Arab-Israeli, Israeli-Palestinian situation, what do we do about it, what's our posture going to be, and Powell dominated the meeting and he came out very sober: You know, we have a big difficult issue, we're not going to plunge into the negotiations process, chances of success there are very, very slim, we've already seen Taba was not going to produce a breakthrough, it was clear Barak was not going to survive as prime minister very long and that Sharon was going to come in. Our focus should be on trying to dampen down the fire and see if we can come up with a durable ceasefire and truce and then see, you know, what happens after that.
⁸

Given the situation on the ground, no one in the new administration argued for intense presidential involvement. The real issue was whether to try diplomacy at all: Would there be anything resembling a “peace process,” or was that effort a waste of time? The director of policy planning at the State Department, Richard Haass, later explained:

I came to think two things: that the instinct of the administration was not to place what you might call a traditional emphasis on what we used to call the “peace process”; but also analytically they had determined that there wasn't much for them to work with. They essentially didn't see a Palestinian partner. At most there was a very flawed Palestinian leadership. The administration was essentially prepared to let things drift until a better Palestinian leadership came along.
⁹

Colin Powell opposed this drift and argued for
some
kind of diplomatic activity, no matter how slim the odds of success. After a trip to Mexico, Powell's first overseas venture was to the Middle East, where he met with Israeli officials as well as Yasser Arafat. In his view, he was engaging with all the parties, protecting the president, exploring what the new Israeli leadership thought, and seeing what the collapse of the Camp David talks had meant to Arafat. As a former State Department official who was close to him put it, Powell believed that “you can't be the American government without a process or without getting involved.…With no illusions about the personalities we were dealing with, and no illusions that process can be more than process. But frankly, that's very often what diplomacy is and what politics is all about: process, and see if you can go somewhere with it. That was not the prevailing view
within the administration.” Powell's disagreement with the consensus view at that PC meeting and his trip to the Middle East were the first inklings of a problem that would grow over time: the split between Powell's view of the region and his role in it, and the view of the White House. “State and the White House were not on the same page, and everyone in the region – and in Washington – knew it,” Rice later wrote.
¹⁰
In Powell's vision, the administration had to be – or at least to appear – active, and that meant travel to the Middle East by the secretary of state. The earlier mentioned source close to Powell explained,

The new administration cannot come in and pretend there is no Middle East problem, which would've satisfied most of the president's other principal advisors. And so Powell did that and he asked George Mitchell to reengage. Remember Mitchell had started something for Clinton and then was wondering whether we wanted to continue. Powell called Mitchell in and said, “George, give me something to work with.” And Mitchell came up with his sequential plan and so Powell tried to make something happen with that, a number of different ways.…Over the next several months we tried Mitchell, we tried Zinni [retired Marine general Anthony Zinni was also named a special envoy in 2001], and a couple of other attempts to see if we could not get something going. And we were not successful in getting something going, but we couldn't be accused of not being interested and not being engaged because Powell was, but he was the only one. The president had no theoretical or emotional engagement in this; nor did anybody else.
¹¹

Whatever Powell's vision of his activities, to many in the administration they seemed to be an unwanted continuation of the Clintonian approach: engaging with Arafat despite the terror he was fomenting, allowing him to pay no price for that terror, and supporting conventional plans (like Mitchell's) that were heavy on Israeli concessions but contained no vision of how to transform a disastrous situation on the ground.

Issued on April 30, 2001, the Mitchell Report
(formally,
The Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Report on the Middle East
) provided no answers. In their joint statement presenting the report, Mitchell and former Senator Warren Rudman stated, “First, end the violence.…The cycle of violent actions and violent reaction must be broken. We call upon the parties to implement an immediate and unconditional cessation of violence.” Yet the report took a stance of total moral relativism between terrorists and those defending against them and was in that sense truly a product of pre-9/11 America. Moreover, it went on to equilibrate terrorism and Israeli settlements. The Mitchell-Rudman statement summarized that “[a]mong our recommendations are…the PA should make clear through concrete action…that terrorism is reprehensible and unacceptable.…The Government of Israel should freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements.” On one side, murder; on the other, housing: To the Mitchell fact-finding committee, the moral responsibility was equally shared. Where the new administration could go with this report remained unclear.

What did the Arabs and Israelis make of the new Bush administration? Arabs and Israelis shared the view – actually, for Israelis, the fear – that the new president would follow in his father's footsteps and would be far closer to Arab governments than to Israel. Clinton's last assistant secretary of state for the Near East, Edward S. Walker Jr., recalled that “every Arab in the world wanted Bush to win” in the 2000 election.
¹²
This included the Palestinians: As one member of the Palestinian negotiating team analyzed it, “there is a recurring pattern in Palestinian political thinking and behavior: tending to personalize the problem. So, the problem was Clinton and his special relations with Israel and the Jews, and now here comes Bush from a Texan oil background who has a special affinity with the Arabs. And so there was a sense of totally naïve elation.”
¹³

Powell's special efforts at outreach to Arab leaders may have reinforced this perception. Jordan's ambassador to the United States later described his first meeting with the new secretary of state this way:

At the start of the Bush administration we were actually hopeful that things will move on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And we were hopeful because the Bush administration signaled to us that it wanted to work with the region and not just, you know, with individual players. And I remember a meeting with Colin Powell a very few weeks after he started, when I was the ambassador. And our foreign minister…came early on to Washington to sort of gauge what the administration's views were. And we were received very warmly by Powell at the time. And so the impression then was that this would be a fresh start and that the administration would indeed give it more attention.
¹⁴

This was, of course, not at all the view in the White House, where “more attention” was the last thing officials had in mind.

Bush himself was aware of Arab expectations. On May 31, 2001, he held a small dinner in the residential part of the White House for visiting Israeli President Moshe Katsav. At the dinner, Bush approached the head of a major American Jewish organization and told him, “The Saudis thought ‘this Texas oil guy was going to go against Israel,’ and I told them you have the wrong guy.”