In My Time (61 page)

The crown prince also wanted to talk about the initiative he had put forth to advance the peace process. I told the crown prince we welcomed his initiative, and we hoped it would give impetus to the peace process at the upcoming Arab summit in Beirut and beyond. But, I cautioned, we viewed Arafat as a serious problem. Abdullah was not naïve
about Arafat, but he saw him as the leader of the Palestinians, someone who should be treated as a partner.

Following stops in Bahrain, Qatar, and finally Kuwait, I headed for Israel. On the way, I called a meeting in the plane’s conference room to discuss the Arab-Israeli situation.

In Tel Aviv with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

The State Department representative on my trip, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns, lobbied for me to meet with Arafat. He argued that it would be wrong for such a senior U.S. official to travel to Jerusalem and meet only with the Israelis. Members of my staff—John Hannah, Eric Edelman, and Scooter Libby—objected to such a meeting. They argued that it would be seen as rewarding Arafat, who was still trafficking in terror. At a minimum, they suggested, if I agreed to meet, it would have to be in exchange for some positive action on Arafat’s part.

Tony Zinni, our envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was waiting for me on the tarmac in Tel Aviv, and we conferred in my limo about Arafat. Zinni had been working to get him to agree to key security steps on the path to a cease-fire. Would it be helpful, I asked, to offer up a meeting with me as an inducement for Arafat’s cooperation? Zinni said that it would, and so I offered to meet with Arafat provided he agreed to the conditions Zinni had set forth. Zinni was confident the meeting could take place before I was scheduled to leave the next day.

That night at the King David Hotel, in a room overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told me he wanted to help General Zinni, that he wanted to secure a ceasefire and get back to negotiations. He was willing, he said, to begin reducing the Israeli presence in the West Bank, but he needed Arafat to take steps of his own. And he left no doubt that he would respond to further terrorist attacks with an iron fist. Sharon was a tough old soldier who had fought in Israel’s war of independence in 1948, the Suez war in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. He didn’t mince words, and I believed that ultimately peace would only come through a strong leader like Sharon. He would drive a tough bargain, but his word counted—and he would defend his nation against terrorists and extremists who had no interest in peace.

As the hour for my departure from Israel approached, there was still no agreement from Arafat. I said I’d be more than willing to come back the following week. I would make a special trip to see Arafat if he met Zinni’s conditions. Instead, one week after my return to Washington, on March 27, 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, during Passover Seder, and killed thirty people. In the days that followed, Prime Minister Sharon sent Israeli army units deeper into the West Bank to hunt down the terrorists responsible.

From Israel, I headed to Turkey, a country that had long been a friend of the United States. Turkey had stood with us in Korea and, as a NATO member, been an invaluable ally during the Cold War. We had major military facilities at Incirlik Air Base, from which we had conducted operations during Desert Storm and in the aftermath, when we provided humanitarian relief to Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. But by 2002 a worrisome change was under way, and my visit with Turkish leaders, though cordial, was far different from the one I had made in 1990, when we were seeking allies to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In fact, all of my visits in the region were different this time. All of our friends were nervous. But something deeper was happening in Turkey. In November 2002 the Islamist AKP party would win a majority in parliament, making Recep Erdogan, leader of the party, prime minister the following March. The newly elected parliament would reject our request to deploy the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division through Turkey when it came time to begin operations against Saddam Hussein, and we would ultimately send it through Kuwait.

In general, I think we failed to understand the magnitude of the shift that was taking place in Turkey. The significance of an Islamist government taking power in one of America’s most important NATO allies was in a sense obscured because of all the other challenges we faced. Today, Turkey appears to be in the middle of a dangerous transition from a key NATO ally to an Islamist-governed nation developing close ties with countries like Iran and Syria at the expense of its relations with the United States and Israel.

As I ended my trip and headed for Washington, I thought about
what I would report to the president. As I saw it America had to pursue three broad objectives in the region simultaneously: vigorously prosecuting the war against terrorism, confronting Iraq about its support for terror and pursuit of WMD, and managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I did not believe, as many argued, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the linchpin of every other American policy in the Middle East. I saw instead a complicated region in which issues are interrelated and couldn’t be compartmentalized. We did not have the luxury of dealing with them sequentially, waiting until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved before we dealt with the threat that terrorism posed to the United States.

It would have been wrong to push the Israelis to make concessions to a Palestinian Authority controlled by Yasser Arafat, who we knew was supporting, encouraging, and funding terror. At the same time it seemed clear to me that if military action became necessary in Iraq, we would need Arab support, and it would be easier to get such support if we could reduce the tensions between the Israelis and Palestinians.

ON APRIL 4, 2002, President Bush expressed concern for the “mounting toll of terror” and announced he was sending Secretary of State Powell back to the region to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On April 12, with Powell in the Middle East, the National Security Council convened to discuss conditions for a possible Powell meeting with Arafat. In the middle of the discussion, an NSC staffer entered the Situation Room with news that there had been another suicide bombing in Jerusalem. There were six dead and over a hundred injured.

Nevertheless, at a press briefing in Israel, Secretary Powell decided to float the idea of an international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The president had not agreed to this, and it was a bad idea. Giving Arafat a place on the world stage would only legitimize him at a moment he was making it clear that he had chosen the path of terror. Secretary Powell repeated the offer again a few weeks later, making a similar announcement in a press briefing in Washington with some of his European and UN counterparts. When I heard this I called National
Security Advisor Rice from Air Force Two and suggested she needed to let Secretary Powell know that he was once more out of line with the president’s policy. We had all discussed next steps in the Middle East with the president in the Oval Office that morning, and he had not authorized Colin to announce we would participate in an international conference. I’m not sure what transpired between Condi and Colin, but the next day, when the Principals Committee—the NSC minus the president—met to discuss the Middle East, Colin apologized. He said he had “exceeded his brief” and gone beyond what the president wanted him to say.

My concern as we discussed the peace process and next steps was that we all needed to remember our number-one priority was winning the War on Terror. I argued that we would benefit from a limited or interim Israeli-Palestinian agreement that would allow a cooling-off period and give time for new leadership to emerge on the Palestinian side. But it was critically important that we not launch high-profile international conferences or summit meetings in futile pursuit of a final settlement agreement that Arafat showed no willingness to embrace on any reasonable terms. Bill Clinton had made that mistake at the end of his second term with a high-profile, high-expectations, and high-stakes maneuver that brought Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Camp David for a series of talks that failed tragically and led to the renewed intifada. There was no way we could afford to repeat that train wreck if we wanted successfully to pursue the War on Terror.

Looking back, I believe that Secretary Powell’s trip to the Middle East in the spring of 2002 was a watershed moment in relations between the State Department and the White House. Both Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, seemed to take the fact that the White House had been compelled to walk back Powell’s announcement of a Middle East conference as a personal affront to the secretary. I had built many relationships over the thirty-four years since I had first come to Washington, and it was about this time that I began hearing from a number of former and current high-ranking government officials that Secretary Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage were not only failing
to support the president’s policies, but were openly disdainful of them. I knew that Powell had been stung by press reports that he was not a strong secretary, but now it was as though a tie had been cut.

THAT SPRING WE HAD a visitor from another part of the world: Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao. As a matter of protocol, he and I were counterparts, and I had him out to the Vice President’s Residence for lunch. Of all the lunches I hosted over the years for visiting dignitaries, this one may have had the highest-ranking U.S. delegation. Flanking me on the U.S. side of the table were Colin Powell, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

I was interested in finding a way to pull Hu aside so that the two of us could have a private conversation. He had been rigidly scripted in every one of his meetings with U.S. officials, never deviating from his talking points. I thought that if the two of us could talk alone, he might loosen up and we could have a real exchange. My plan was to take him into the library on the first floor of my residence after lunch.

The Chinese delegation wasn’t on board with our plan. Moments after Hu and I had seated ourselves in the library, the doors flew open and Li Zhaoxing, a senior Communist Party member close to Hu’s boss, President Jiang Zemin, burst in. He had blown past my staff as they tried to explain politely that this was a one-on-one meeting, and now he seated himself between Hu and me. It was clear this was the minder reporting back to Beijing. Hu didn’t skip a beat and continued to deliver the scripted answers he’d been giving in other meetings.

My relations with Hu were capped off by the visit I had with him two years later when I was in China in early 2004. By that time Hu had ascended to the presidency, and I had a sensitive message President Bush had asked me to convey in a one-on-one session. We agreed that a small meeting would occur after our larger session. The meeting went fine, I thought, and I had conveyed the message without any minder pushing his way in.

As I left the meeting room I was surprised to learn from my staff that the conversation I thought had been private had actually been broadcast into an adjacent room, where Hu’s staff gathered around a speaker to listen. The Chinese, apparently, aren’t fans of one-on-one meetings.

DON RUMSFELD AND Tommy Franks came to the White House on May 10, 2002, with a status report on the military planning process. Part of the discussion focused on timing. The logistics of any major military operation are exceedingly complex, and though we were still hopeful that war would not be necessary, we worried that Saddam might launch an attack on us or our allies before we had sufficient forces in place. No one wanted us to be embroiled in a conflict at a time of Saddam’s choosing rather than ours.

I was concerned about a number of contingencies. How did our war plan deal with weapons of mass destruction? How did we intend to discourage Saddam from using these weapons, and what preparations were we making to protect our troops if he did? If we were successful at getting the inspectors back into Iraq, how effective did we believe they could be? Could we insist on placing U.S. inspectors on the teams? How could we deny Iraq the ability to launch Scud missiles at Israel, as Saddam had done during the first Gulf War? How was Saddam likely to respond to our actions? What would it take for us effectively to defend the Kurds against the Iraqi forces massed in the north?

Throughout the process Congress would be very important, and I wanted to know if we had a strategy to ensure that key members were briefed on how we would conduct the war if it came. We also needed to ensure that Congress and the American public understood the consequences of an unconstrained Saddam. With his tremendous oil resources and the fraying sanctions, failure to bring him under control or act against him would simply give him time to advance his WMD programs and perhaps develop a nuclear weapon.