Tested by Zion (61 page)

I agreed with Olmert; I thought the terms shameful and believed the president should not allow the United States to support them. But there was obviously a huge problem here: Rice had herself negotiated the terms with the British, the French, and the Arabs. Had the text been negotiated the usual way, by diplomats up in New York while Rice was in Washington, she would not have had so much invested in it. During the course of Thursday, January 8, our own internal battle raged. Because the Security Council was not meeting until 9:15 pm, phone calls and meetings continued throughout the day. Olmert called the president around dinner time (coincidentally, a dinner the president was hosting for some Americans Jews who had been among his most loyal supporters). Hadley and I had several discussions during the day, and Hadley concluded, in the end, that we could not vote for this language. I believe he might have urged a veto were it not for Condi's role. She and I had an unhappy conversation as I drove home from work around 8 pm. What's wrong with this language, she asked; she did not see what Olmert was screaming about, and all UN language is always a compromise.

The president, I believe, would have happily vetoed this resolution and left office with that veto as his last act in the United Nations. But that would have
meant that his last act was a repudiation of Condi, and he did not wish to do that. He cut the baby in half and abstained, an extremely rare action for the United States in the Security Council. If we were going to abstain, it would be better not to be alone, and Tourgeman told me the French would abstain with us. He had just spoken to Levitte, he said, and Kouchner had been instructed to abstain if we did. This was too important to leave to hearsay, so I phoned Levitte – at 1:00 am Paris time. Yes, he assured me, the instruction had gone out from the Foreign Ministry, the Quai D’Orsay. But to be sure, he had personally spoken with Kouchner to tell him of President Sarkozy's decision. We will be with you if you abstain, he said.

But France voted for the resolution; the final vote was 14 in favor, none against, and the United States as the sole abstention. I could not resist calling Levitte the next morning to ask what had happened. He told me he had twice phoned Kouchner to instruct him to join us in abstaining, and Kouchner simply disobeyed his instruction. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Rice's own reaction to her instruction to abstain was not, of course, to disobey – but her explanation of her vote was clearly the speech in support of the resolution she and her staff had prepared before the president had made up his mind. She explained that we were abstaining only because we thought the resolution was premature: We should all have waited to see the outcome of the Egyptian mediation effort. She uttered not a word of criticism of the resolution and in fact said, “We decided that this resolution – the text of which we support, the goals of which we support and the objectives of which we fully support – should indeed be allowed to go forward.” This was as close as she could come to saying the president had called it wrong and she disagreed with the vote she had just cast.

That was the last act for the Bush administration's involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a sad ending, offering confusion when the president himself had so staunchly, for eight years, resisted international pressure in the UN and outside it. He had vetoed 10 resolutions in the Security Council, 9 of them dealing with the Arab-Israel conflict; one more would have changed little in the region but would have been a fitting way to end, a reminder of his dedication to the war on terror and to the defense of Israel's security. For the Israelis, it was a sad symbol of the divisions they had since the Second Lebanon War experienced between State and the White House, and of the contrast between the constant tension with Rice and
the constant support from Bush. For me, it was an ironic reminder of the remark Hadley had made when I had agreed to stay at the NSC: The White House is ultimately where Middle East policy is made. The comment was true but not the whole truth, not in an administration where the secretary of state had become so dominant in foreign policy. There were still red lines set by the president's deepest beliefs, and not even Condi's own role in the drafting of Resolution 1860 could bring the president to allow a vote for it. But I thought back to his conversation with Blair and
his agreement that a Palestinian state had to be built from the bottom up – that reality had to shape the diplomacy and not vice versa. There too he had expressed a view that might have led to a different policy, one focused
on building a state in the West Bank rather than on the slim chance of getting a signed agreement in the year left to us after Annapolis. But it was nearly January 20 now, and Middle East policy was no longer my job. It was time to pack.

On January 19, I went to the Oval Office to say goodbye to President Bush and then handed in my White House pass, my diplomatic passport, and my White House Blackberry and secure phones. I signed a statement promising to keep classified information secret and agreed to run any manuscript (including this one) by the NSC for approval so that it did not inadvertently reveal classified information. On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, my wife and I flew off to California for a much-needed vacation. Now the Middle East would be someone else's job, and the question was what to make of the Bush years – what lessons to learn from our successes and failures.

A key conclusion, one that I have tried to illustrate in the preceding chapters, is that every president should organize the White House staff to keep the key decisions in his own hands. The National Security Council staff should be instructed not to homogenize policy disputes and seek a consensus. The president should keep in mind Margaret Thatcher's famous 1981 comment: “To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects.”
¹
Too often I had heard officials who were confronting a dispute among cabinet principals say, “We can't go to the president like this; we have to work this out.” On the contrary, just as the Supreme Court does not review all court of appeals decisions but does take those where the various circuit courts have come out with conflicting decisions, so the president should insist on knowing of and on deciding the issues where his principal advisers are in conflict.

The president should also assume that bureaucracies have strong views and very capable and knowledgeable top officials. It is not a criticism of those career officials to say that by the time they reach the top, their life experiences will have molded them; a top general and a top diplomat will not, after 30 years in the field, see the world the same way. Nor will they necessarily see it the president's way, and that is the point. That is why the president should demand that his national security agencies, primarily State, Defense, and the NSC staff,
be peopled with political appointees who know and support his views. As I have noted, this was George Shultz's approach, and one must assume it was deliberate; Condi Rice took a different view and explains in her memoir that her approach was deliberate as well. I recall how Shultz would react, back in the days of the Reagan administration, when a top career diplomat complained that he thought a particular policy of Reagan's was wrong. He would as always listen carefully, but at the end he would say, “You know, you may be right and maybe we should do it your way. But first you are going to have to get yourself elected president. For now, Ronald Reagan is president, so we are going to do it his way.” I heard Shultz argue with the president many a time and he was not reluctant to state his views, but he made sure the bureaucracy understood that policy was made in the White House.

My own staff at the NSC – indeed, all the staff of the NSC – consisted mostly of career people from State (career Foreign Service officers), Defense (career military officers), and the CIA. One reason every White House favors getting such officers seconded to the NSC is budgetary: They are “freebies” to the White House, with their salaries paid by their home agencies, whereas the NSC often carried the full freight for political appointees. Whenever I interviewed career officers for an NSC position, I would tell them that they had no doubt heard this was for them the chance of a lifetime to work at the White House. It isn't, I would say; you're here because your peers think so well of you, and if this doesn't work out, you'll probably get another invitation in a few years. So, do not come to work for a president whom you really do not like or with whose views you are uncomfortable. There will be another president in 4 years, or 8, or 12, with whom you may be more comfortable, and you'll have a better time. Don't tell me your politics; I hope you say yes to this offer, but just think about this before you do so.

The goal should always be to make decisions as the president would want them made and to prevent people from substituting their judgment for his. When there are significant decisions to be made, and especially when his top appointees have differing views, the answer is to present them all to him. The thousands of smaller decisions that must be made – what precisely to say on the occasion of some country's National Day celebration, what to say to a visiting delegation and in what tone, how to word a cable of instructions to an ambassador, what signal the White House press secretary should send about the tone of a presidential phone call – cannot be presented to the president, so the goal is to ensure that the officials making those decisions are aware of and loyal to his views. The assumption that career officials will always subordinate their own views to his is mistaken. In the Bush NSC in 2004, one ranking officer quit one day and signed on to the Kerry campaign the next; another top official left and soon began denouncing his former colleagues. They were free to do this and right to leave when they disagreed with policy, but how faithfully were they following the president's policy views in the days, weeks, and months before they left? They were presumably doing what they thought best for the country, but the system works only
when presidential appointees do what the elected president thinks best for the country.

No system, no set-up, no procedures will substitute for this. As Peter Rodman wrote, “we need to allow for the possibility that to search for a
procedure
that assures the right decision is to pursue a mirage.”
²
We saw this in another sense (and probably closer to what Rodman meant) in the handling of the Syrian nuclear reactor. There, the procedures in place were ideal, but from my point of view, the decision taken was mistaken. Yet at least it was the president's decision, and the procedures guaranteed that he had heard all the arguments and that the policy reflected his considered view.

These comments relate to organizing the government, but what of policy? What, again, is to be learned from our successes and failures in the Middle East during the Bush years? The first lesson is to avoid subordinating all regional issues to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Doing so contradicts reality as Arabs and Israelis see it, and it leads the United States to give more weight to Arab officials’ statements on that conflict than to the realities of their rule and of their countries’ situations.

Without suggesting that the Israel-Palestine issue is unimportant to Arab populations or to Arab governments, it is one among many issues. For many Arab leaders, the central issue of these years has been the rise of Iran – an issue on which most see eye to eye with Israel. For Sunni Arab regimes, especially those in the Gulf, Israel is not an enemy, not a source of potential antiregime protests or violence, not a potential or current claimant of disputed lands, islands, or oil and gas reserves. It is not an ideological or religious rival. But Iran is all these things, so the apparent American obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a mistaken priority. Moreover, Iran's influence and actions make an Israeli-Palestinian peace much harder: Israel is unlikely to take additional risks with its own security when a defiant Iran is building up the strength of Hamas and
Hizballah every day and – as I write – moving ever closer to a nuclear weapon.

Moreover, the advent of the Arab Spring revolts in 2011 should have put paid to the view that all Arab politics revolves around Israel. For what happened in Tunisia was about Tunisia, and the same was true in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain. Our ability to cope with, indeed, even to see clearly, the realities of life in Israel and the West Bank and the challenge of Iran to the region can be compromised by the prism through which we analyze events. That prism is not a new invention: The view that in the Middle East the one central issue is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has for decades been an article of faith in the State Department's Near East bureau and to many academic analysts.

In the Bush years, Egypt's succession crisis, its decrepit authoritarian regime, its vast millions of desperately poor
fellahin
, and its declining influence in the region were increasingly ignored after 2006 as we turned to Annapolis and “the Annapolis process.” Only Egypt's attitude toward Israel-Palestinian peace talks counted. Similarly in the Obama administration, the president honored Mubarak by making Egypt the location of his first Middle East trip and his
speech to the entire Muslim world, while remaining silent about the miserable situation inside the country. Then George Mitchell, the Middle East peace negotiator, paid court to the vicious Assad regime in Syria, visiting repeatedly in 2009 and 2010 in an effort to improve the regime's attitude toward Israeli-Palestinian talks and get it back into direct peace talks with Israel. Syria's internal repression, its role in Iraq (where it supported jihadi groups trying to kill Americans and Iraqis), its support for Hamas and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (both headquartered there) and Hizballah, and its alliance with Iran were all viewed as secondary.

Too often, bilateral relations with everyone take a back seat once the goal of comprehensive peace is put on the table. The only important thing about a nation's policies becomes whether it appears to play ball with the big peace effort. As we saw in the latter part of the Clinton and Bush administrations, once you commit to a major effort at an international peace conference or attempt to broker a comprehensive Middle East peace, then those goals overwhelm all others. The net result of such an approach is to obscure reality, to ignore the immense complexities Arab countries face, and to concentrate instead on what their foreign ministries say about Israel and the Palestinians.

This approach also led the United States to pay more attention to what Arab officials said abroad, especially to us, about Israel and to ignore what they said to their own people. The Egyptian case is once again illustrative: Mubarak was seen as a peacemaker in Washington while for 30 years his regime fed the Egyptian people a steady diet of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hatred. Israel's peace treaty was with Sadat and Mubarak, while it had no such understanding with the people of the country. With the demise of
the Mubarak regime, the views of the Egyptian people will count for much more – and their views have been formed largely by government media spewing hate.

So the first lesson is that Arab political life does not revolve around Palestine. It is one issue among many and never the determining factor in any Arab nation's actions and even in its relations with the United States. The best example: the United States under Clinton and Bush had far closer relations with Israel
than the Obama administration maintained, yet simultaneously had closer relations with Saudi Arabia as well.

The second lesson is that Israel will be more flexible when it is certain of American support for its security than when that assurance is in doubt. Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel and then assistant secretary of state for NEA, summed this up succinctly: “The record…suggests that American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission.”
³

Some analysts would deny this assertion. Did not President Carter make great progress despite his unhappy relationship with Prime Minister Begin and the Israeli government, and didn't President George H. W. Bush arrange the Madrid Conference
despite a good deal of friction with Israel? Although a fair account of those events would take too many pages, and has in both cases
given rise to many articles and books, neither case suggests that the United States will get what it wants through, as Indyk put it, trying to browbeat the Israelis into submission. President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin began negotiating not because President Carter pressed them hard to do so but rather despite his efforts to stop them. He preferred a very large Geneva Conference and had convened one jointly with the Soviet Union. Sadat and Begin opposed bringing the Soviets into Middle East peacemaking, and neither man thought any progress would be made if the goal were a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace settlement rather than an Egyptian-Israeli deal. Those two statesmen were acting in opposition to U.S. pressure, not in submission to it. In the Madrid case, the United States did get the international conference it sought, but obviously it did not lead to peace; by the end of the Bush administration in January 1993, any apparent momentum for peace had disappeared. The most direct U.S.-Israel confrontation in the George H. W. Bush years came over the denial of American loan guarantees for Israeli borrowing to build housing for the massive inflow of Soviet Jews. The guarantees were denied as pressure to force a change in Israeli settlement policy, but the net result did not change Israeli Prime Minister Shamir's conduct on settlements. Rather, the confrontations with Bush and Secretary of State Baker, and what in his view seemed to be a tilt toward the Arabs, embittered Shamir and led him to distrust the United States. This conditioned his behavior before, during, and after the Madrid Conference
; led him to oppose a central American role in any ensuing negotiations; and surely was one key reason the fanfare at Madrid resulted in no real progress. So in neither case did a distancing from Israel produce what the United States wanted.

It is difficult to see Ariel Sharon making the decision to leave Gaza, form a new political party, or (if his colleagues are right) formulate plans or at least intentions to begin a withdrawal from large parts of the West Bank, if he did not believe America had his back. We saw this again when Ehud Olmert argued to his cabinet that there was a need to act fast – while George Bush was still president. This does not mean that Israeli decisions are to be supported regardless of their effect, and President Bush drew red lines (such as preventing the assassination of Yasser Arafat) and criticized Israel in public as well as in private (“when I say now I mean now” or “these remarks are unacceptable”). But he conveyed a deep commitment to Israel's security and stayed with it (“Israel has the right to defend itself”), even when almost the entire world was criticizing Israeli counterterrorism tactics.