Tested by Zion (39 page)

After the meeting, Rice told us that we could now say something like this: “We believe the elements now exist for ceasefire and if adopted by the Security Council would create a ceasefire.” We will have some separation from Israel, once the resolution passes, she said; this may be good especially if there is a ground offensive this week. Let's go to the Security Council this week and set out as much as we can in the draft text. We drove to Ben Gurion Airport and
took off for Washington. Rice's biographers called Lebanon her “worst crisis as Secretary of State” and said she “headed home exhausted and battered,”
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“shaken and drained.”
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Security Council Resolution 1701
was adopted unanimously on Friday, August 11, accepted unanimously by the Lebanese cabinet on the following day, and accepted unanimously by the Israeli cabinet the day after that. The Lebanon War
of 2006 was over. Ten days of vigorous diplomacy after we returned from Israel had produced the best resolution we could get but one that did nothing to change the status quo ante. The text called for full control of Lebanese territory by the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Army, but after the war Hizballah controlled more territory, and more firmly, than before. The text called for Hizballah to be disarmed, but it was soon rebuilding and became far stronger than before. The text said there must be no supply of arms except with the authorization of the government of Lebanon, but Hizballah subsequently received thousands of rockets and missiles from Iran and
Syria. The resolution did expand the size of UNIFIL
, but UNIFIL became no stronger or better able (or willing) to resist Hizballah.

During those days of diplomatic wrangling, tensions between us and the Israelis mounted even further. Hadley spoke daily with Turbowitz, but those conversations did not smooth things out. Both lawyers, the two would debate textual points endlessly, but agreement was made even harder because they were not looking at the same drafts: Somehow Israel never got the latest draft from the State Department. Relations between the two men were fine, but at bottom there was a growing gap between our position and that of Israel. They were clinging to demands they had made from the day the war started, but we had concluded that those demands simply could not be met. They reflected Israel's war aims but not the actual military situation on the ground, much less the situation at the Security Council.

Israel could not win at the UN what it had failed to achieve on the battlefield: It had not crushed Hizballah on the ground and, having failed to achieve its military goals, could not achieve its diplomatic goals. Hizballah remained the dominant force within Lebanon, though in another way it lost a good deal in the war: So much damage was done to Hizballah and
to the Shiite population who supported it that Hizballah has kept the border mostly quiet since the summer of 2006. There have been incidents but no conflagrations; Israel's deterrence was restored by the war. Thus, if Israel did not “win,” it also did not “lose,” despite many verdicts to that effect in 2006.

Yet Israel's Second Lebanon War was a turning point not only in Olmert's political life but also in Condi Rice's attitude toward Israel and her personal relations with Israeli officials. Olmert never recovered from the widespread view that he had botched this conflict. The failure of the IDF to do more damage to Hizballah in the 34 days of war was blamed in part on its chief
of staff, who was forced to resign, and in part on the defense minister, a trade union and Labor Party official with no military experience, but mostly on Olmert. After all, it was not obvious that the only possible response to the July 12 kidnappings was war – as opposed, for example, to a wave of air strikes. Going to war was his decision. The loss of public confidence was soon deepened by the next rounds of corruption accusations, but the corner was turned in Lebanon – and that loss of confidence soon affected not only Olmert's conduct of military affairs but also his conduct of relations with the Palestinians. How did Israel move from the “convergence” plan – taking control of its own fate, acting unilaterally if bilateral negotiations failed, and rejecting any big international conferences – to the great international festival at Annapolis in 2007? Gen. Giladi explained how in an interview years later:

The second war in Lebanon. If you ask me, this is a major factor. And after the war, an Israeli prime minister that launches a war – let's face it, we launched a war. Nasrallah defined the date, but we could respond locally, we could respond in three, four days; we decided to go for a war. You cannot launch a war and be found not prepared.…An Israeli prime minister that launches a war and doesn't win it cannot survive. Maybe survive, cannot recover. And I felt that Olmert cannot recover to the level of leadership necessary to lead a strategic plan. And I told him, “The Israeli people didn't change their mind. They want to stay in the West Bank because of Lebanon? Forget it. What the Israeli people have at the moment – they don't believe they have the necessary leadership to lead such a step.” And this is why he lost it.
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Olmert lost both the Israeli public's belief in his strength, something that had been critical to Sharon's power as prime minister, and its confidence in his stewardship. And on the latter, he lost not only the Israelis but also Condi Rice. The meeting with Olmert had been not so much “tense” as overtly hostile. She did not trust him to make wise decisions, and she had also lost her faith in the abilities of the IDF. The comments in her memoir that during the Second Lebanon War Israel “laid waste to Lebanon's infrastructure” and “the IDF…was destroying the country” are suggestive of how her opinion changed.
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Years later I asked Danny Ayalon, sitting in his Knesset office as deputy foreign minister, when Rice's warm relationship with Israel began to sour:

I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you exactly when. I was then still in Washington so I wasn't here, but Condi came here and she talked to Tzipi and Olmert. And then she was going to Lebanon to try to get an agreement. Then, Qana.…And from then on it was just…downhill.
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This was my perspective as well – and Rice's own staff agreed. Her counselor at State, Eliot Cohen, was not involved in Israeli-Palestinian matters but watched closely from his ringside seat:

The Lebanon war was a traumatic experience. It colored a lot of things thereafter…and there were a couple of elements to it. One was her own sense of having extended herself to defend the Israelis as they bumbled along in Lebanon. Another was a profound sense
of Israeli incompetence at managing their own security affairs. And the third element was a personal distrust of Olmert – quite different from her view of Sharon.
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Rice may have understood far faster than most Israelis or other Americans what the Second Lebanon War
meant for Israeli-Palestinian matters. Once again, our path forward had been blocked – first by Arafat, once by Sharon's stroke, and now by the war and its effect on Olmert. Whatever his intentions, he would not be able to carry out the convergence plan. He made one misguided effort to suggest that Lebanon proved how essential convergence would be, but it backfired badly: Families living in the West Bank immediately shot back that their sons were not fighting in Lebanon so they could allow Olmert to throw them out of their homes, and some Army reservists said they would refuse to fight in Lebanon if the convergence plan were the real goal.
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Shalom Tourgeman explained that “there was a terrible backlash politically.…[T]hat gave a political blow to the plan, and it lost momentum. I can't tell you the exact date it was put off the table, but it was being put off the table for all practical purposes.”
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Moreover, withdrawal from the West Bank would inevitably be far more complicated than Gaza, and Israelis now lacked the trust in Olmert that he would need to carry it out to the end. The vision we had once had of how things would look by January 20, 2009 – Israel out of Gaza and a significant part of the West Bank, the first significant change there since 1967 and likely due to unilateral Israeli moves – once again looked increasingly unrealistic.

This put the focus back on negotiations, and Rice had a view of how to move them forward: Simply cajoling the two negotiating teams would not be enough, so broader international support would now be needed. Whether it could work was a different question, but Rice's new “international conference” approach covered two bases. First, she believed it was the most likely foundation of any successful negotiation because Abbas would need Arab cover to make difficult compromises. Olmert too – now more than ever – would need some form of compensation for his compromises, and it could come in the form of some Arab moves toward Israel. But it seemed to me later that Rice also had another idea in mind – something closer to what had led Sharon to propose “disengagement” in Gaza to begin with. There was a vacuum, and something had to fill it with hopes of peace or at least of forward movement. An international conference might help lead to peace – or at least fill the space if no movement were possible.

The timing was significant for Rice because she was soon approaching the halfway mark in her tenure as secretary. The Agreement on Movement and Access of November 2005 had long since fallen apart. She had been close to brokering a peace in the Second Lebanon War, but Qana had blown that
up. What was there to show for two years as secretary of state? Eliot Cohen summed up the moment this way: “She didn't want to just kind of manage the store for the last two years. She wanted some large accomplishments and I think inevitably somebody in that position wants – they're thinking about history, but I think she was also thinking she doesn't want to just be a caretaker for the last two years.”
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Soon the news stories pontificating about a major effort in the Middle East would start appearing, so it is not surprising that making such an effort seemed increasingly worthwhile to her – as it had to so many predecessors. As for the president, 2006 was turning into a disastrous year. Iraq was bitter and bloody and appeared hopeless; the “surge” that changed that situation would come only in 2007. In Lebanon, there was war. In Congress, we were heading toward a terrible defeat that gave the Democrats control over both houses for the first time in 12 years and made the president seem even more like a lame duck. So a diplomatic initiative for Middle East peace must have seemed to Rice an awfully attractive effort – for her, for the president, and for the country. What is more, it would be
her
initiative. For better or worse, she was not in charge of the major issue occupying the country and consuming the president's time: the Iraq War. That was primarily a Defense Department issue, with a large NSC staff component deeply involved on a day-to-day basis; State was clearly in a secondary role. In a Middle East peace initiative, she could be the leader. Other agencies would be marginal.

There were other influences as well, all pushing in this same direction. One was the press. As a State Department veteran described the way the media affected top officials, “These guys read the press about themselves and they've got advisors who read the press and give it to them.…And so they start reacting to the press rather than driving it – they would deny this, I’m sure, but I saw it firsthand – they start reacting to it. And so if something starts to get you positive stories in the press, it's another motivator for just getting sucked along there.”
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There was the influence of foreign officials as well, always a far greater factor in the State Department than in the White House. In the West Wing, Rice had been surrounded by Americans. Foreign leaders visited, to be sure, but Rice made very few foreign trips during her four years as national security advisor. Now she was traveling constantly, and the milieu in which she existed consisted of foreign heads of state and their foreign ministers and of events at the UN, not White House staff meetings where the Bush team discussed the economy, the Congress, and everything from what the state governors wanted to the latest opinion polls. Rice was now seeing more of Kofi Annan than of Karl Rove or White House chief of staff Josh Bolten.

And she was doing so in a period where most foreign officials thought the war in Iraq was lost and Bush was of declining importance. John Hannah of the vice president's office described how these perceptions strengthened Rice's decision to put together a major Middle East initiative:

I’m sure she was under a lot of pressure from a lot of people that she dealt with on foreign policy on her trips to do it.…I think it's what everybody else wants to do, internationally.…I think at a point in time by the second term when the administration is certainly beginning day-by-day to feel politically weakened, it becomes much harder for it to resist that kind of pressure from the rest of the international community – when it's constantly being raised that this is what they want to do.…It becomes much harder to resist those arguments, given that…the sense of our international position and standing and dominance begin to recede just naturally as the administration gets closer and closer to the end.…[T]here's a sense that we're weaker and you may have to pay more to get other people to do some of the things you want to do, and invariably the Israeli-Palestinian thing becomes an easy thing to grab onto to say, “[H]ere, we're really going to make an effort.”
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Ironically, one of those foreign officials who must have influenced Rice, and who certainly influenced the president, was Ehud Olmert. Whether this influence was despite of or due to the corruption allegations increasingly surrounding him; whether it was due to his perception of having a shortened time horizon in office after the Second Lebanon War and his desire to make his historic mark; or whether he genuinely believed he could achieve a peace settlement quickly are questions about Olmert that Israelis continue to debate. Polls taken after the Second Lebanon War showed that Olmert never recovered significant popularity, but he was determined to undertake major steps as prime minister. Already in August 2006, there was discussion of a new effort to negotiate with Syria over the Golan.
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By early 2007, Israel was engaged with the Turks, exchanging notes that led in the following year to indirect negotiations. Throughout 2007 and 2008, Olmert would tell American officials that a breakthrough with the Palestinians was entirely possible and that he was determined to achieve it. Whatever her own doubts about what could be done, Rice must have seen Olmert's view as an additional source of optimism.