Tested by Zion (41 page)

After his remarks, he and I engaged in a poison-pen email exchange because I thought what he said in the speech was very far from the president's policy. Using only a very slightly arcane diplomatic vocabulary, Zelikow had articulated what it seemed Condi was now thinking: We need the Arabs, for Iraq and other matters, so we need to push the Israelis into some peace deal. You didn't need a decoder ring to see where this was headed. There was no evidence for this assertion, of course; no Arab leader had said, “I will change my policy on Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan if you muscle the Israelis.” The Arab leaders were pursuing their national interests – or at least their own interests, the interests of unelected regimes whose goal above all else was regime survival. To believe, for example, that the Saudis, who did not wish to see a democratic Shia-led government in Iraq because they took dim views of both democracy and Shias, would change that view if Israelis and Palestinians were negotiating peace seemed downright silly to me.

But Rice was pressing forward: On September 5, Prince Bandar met with Rice, Hadley, and me in Hadley's White House corner office, and he told us how pleased the king was with the proposed UN speech and the idea of a big international conference. Clearly, the secretary had been discussing these ideas with Bandar, without – I thought, or at least hoped – approval from the president. Bandar said the Saudis proposed a vague UN speech that nevertheless demanded immediate final status talks. I argued to Bandar that this approach would not work, any more than it had in the past; the security conditions needed to underlie successful final status talks did not yet exist. When Hadley said he agreed with me, the question of where the president stood on all of this remained a mystery to me.

The late Peter Rodman, a brilliant analyst of foreign policy and
an official in several Republican administrations, wrote in his last book of the problem I was increasingly seeing from my Middle East policy vantage point. In the first term, Powell had been the odd man out in the administration. After 9/11, he and the president did not see the world in the same way, and I thought Powell had never aligned his views to those of the president. He had signed
on as secretary of state to a new president with no foreign policy experience; Powell would be tutor, representative, analyst, policy maker. After 9/11, George Bush took over foreign policy, along with Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Powell became marginalized, and State was often seen as out of tune with what the president wanted. In his memoir, President Bush writes, “I admired Colin, but sometimes it seemed like the State Department he led wasn't fully on board with my philosophy and politics.”
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Having the president's closest advisor, Condi Rice, take over State, Rodman had written, “was thought to solve the problem; she had been more attuned than anyone else to Bush's thinking.” Yet it did not work: “Over time however, the role of the career service reasserted itself in the department, and State's policy drifted in that direction” – back toward the traditional approaches of the Foreign Service. And that trend became stronger over time: “Especially with the departure of Rumsfeld, the balance of forces in the administration as a whole shifted in the State Department's direction. Hadley often acted as Rice's partner.”
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My own experience suggested the truth of what Rodman had described. The president had never said anything about a major policy change or a shift in his relationship with Israel. Yet every meeting Rice had with the Israelis after the Second Lebanon War was strained and difficult. As time passed, and especially in 2007 and 2008, I would often write memos to Hadley expressing that we were deviating from stated policy, taking positions that put all of the pressure on Israel and nearly none on the Palestinians and forgetting the major insights that had constituted the Bush approach. At times I would discuss the problem with the vice president or with White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, never suggesting that I knew what to do about it but wanting to ensure that they were at least aware of it. The vice president was a skeptic about the kind of diplomatic maneuvers the State Department and our EU friends found so alluring, preferring to rely on the sinews of power to protect the United States and our friends in Israel. While he maintained his close ties to the Saudis and other Arab rulers, he was an unwavering voice of support for the Jewish State.

Whether he and Josh raised these matters with the president was something I never knew, for rightly they kept their private conversations with him private; nor did I know what Hadley told him when they were alone. I had certainly seen the president express disagreement with Rice, contradict her words, and rein in her actions. But she was still his closest advisor on foreign affairs, far more influential than Hadley – who in any event did not like to take her on. His own foreign policy judgment was often, I thought, better than hers, not least on Israeli-Palestinian issues, but he did not consider a battle with Condi in his job description. In that, he was right: The president had left the Rice/Hadley team in place for the second term because it worked smoothly, and he surely did not want a bureaucratic war. But I thought Hadley took this policy of avoiding conflict too far; I thought the president should have heard more about the policy changes now being discussed, and heard them not as explanations
from Condi why what she was doing was natural and sensible, but as real debates.

On some issues this debate happened, certainly on matters like the surge in Iraq; later, our internal discussions of what to do about the al-Kibar nuclear reactor discovered in Syria were models of debating options heatedly before the president so he could choose one. Yet such discussion did not occur often when it came to Condi's transformation of our Middle East policy after the Second Lebanon War. Vice President Cheney notes in his memoirs the same failure to present “crisply drawn options for the president” and “clear choices” rather than “policy recommendations that split the difference” as a means of “managing conflicting views.”
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The very next day after the Bandar meeting came more evidence that something important had changed: We had one of the worst meetings ever with the Israelis. Turbowitz and
Tourgeman, along with Israeli Ambassador Danny Ayalon, joined Rice, Hadley, and me in Hadley's office. It was three weeks after the end of the Second Lebanon War and just before the UN General Assembly would meet. Rice told the Israelis that when we destroyed the regime in Iraq, we destroyed the old Middle East, and the radicals are gaining. Iran is the greatest strategic challenge since the Cold War. This administration has two years left and we need to move forward fast to implement the two-state vision. Turbowitz replied there was now very little support for Olmert's convergence plan because after withdrawing from south Lebanon and Gaza, Israel was being attacked from both. Nor was Olmert strong enough to overcome that resistance. As for negotiations, the Palestinians were not ready or able: Ismail Haniyeh was prime minister, and they did not have a government that accepted the three Quartet Principles, so there was really no one to negotiate with. True, said Hadley, but that's just analysis; I don't see a strategy. There are no shortcuts, Turbowitz said; we want to move forward, but don't see any plan that allows it.

This comment by Turbowitz brought Rice into the conversation. There is always a way; she said; if there is no solution, we will lose the bigger strategic game with Iran. Either reflecting Zelikow's advice or presaging what she would tell him to say, Rice told the Israelis that the United States could not put in place the alliance we need with the Arabs. We need Arab allies willing to confront Iran, but the moderate Arabs are saying they cannot confront Iran without movement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. We have a strategic imperative to find an Israeli-Palestinian solution. You need a policy now and don't have the luxury of saying there is no solution, she lectured Tourgeman and
Turbowitz. I had heard this line many times before from State Department officials, going back to my days in the Reagan administration; we were always going to lose the Arabs unless we pushed the Israelis harder – except we never lost them. This was a theory for which no persuasive evidence was ever adduced. I wondered how
Rice could believe that the Arabs, who opposed Iran for their own religious, political, and security reasons, would cut their own throats out of concern for the Palestinians. She was buying the NEA line.

We had a policy, Turbowitz argued – the Roadmap, disengagement, and then convergence, which we lost in the Lebanon War; now we are thinking anew but there are grave risks. We have to have a solution, Rice shot back; we don't have the luxury of not having one. Given our investment in Iraq, with 3,000 dead, the Middle East is now our fight. We need a new approach. All this was said to the Israelis not in a soothing manner designed to sugarcoat the message, but with language (and body language) reflecting her new mood. A worried Turbowitz asked whether the former plans and principles were now being jettisoned; what about the Roadmap? It may be an impediment, Rice said, or at least the detailed sequencing may be. The Palestinians do have to fight terror, of course, but now we may want to do things in parallel, not in sequence. But the whole crux was to stop terror, said Turbowitz. No, it was the
effort
to stop terror, Rice pushed back. No, said Turbowitz, the real criterion is results; we should not forfeit our conditions because the Palestinians cannot meet them. They can't stop terror, Rice replied; we can't either, in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Now an angry Tourgeman jumped in and, in fact, his own relationship with Rice never recovered from their exchanges in this meeting. What you are now saying is exactly what was tried in the Clinton administration, and it failed totally and it produced the intifada. Doing it simultaneously, demanding negotiations while the terror continues, is just what Clinton did, he told Rice. She did not appreciate the remark, and said no, we must simultaneously create a positive vision and space, a political alternative while fighting terrorism. Tourgeman shot back that this was the Rabin/Clinton approach, and we got negotiations in the morning and terrorism at night. Then you carried it out wrong, said Rice, but we have a strategic imperative and must have an answer. Her response struck me as mumbo-jumbo; “strategic imperative” is the kind of term that academics and Foreign Service gurus throw around, a Zelikow special, I thought, but it has no real intrinsic meaning. It means whatever you say it does.

Now Hadley told the Israelis about the forthcoming UN speech: there is great pressure for the president to talk about the Middle East at the General Assembly. He has to, Rice interjected, seeming to me to be arguing with Hadley more than the Israelis. Hadley continued, saying that the president wants to be knit up with Israel and with Olmert and, of course, true to his principles. Turbowitz was aghast: The General Assembly is only two weeks away. Don't surprise us. This is very alarming. What about the Roadmap and the Quartet Principles? To say you have an imperative is one thing, but how do we work out the details in two weeks? There are so many dangers here: enormous risks, things could deteriorate into violence easily. No, said Rice; we can't say we have a strategic imperative but can't meet it; we simply must meet it. In two weeks? Turbowitz asked again. Time is too short. No, it isn't, replied Rice; it
isn't a big departure; all we're saying is that discussing borders and discussing terrorism must go together. And the United States might state our basic views on issues like borders and the major blocks and the right of return. Wait a minute, said Turbowitz, now you're talking about jumping past Phases I and II of the Roadmap and starting to negotiate final status issues. Well, forget the sequence, there's no sequence now, said Rice; when you got out of Gaza you jumbled the sequence. Whoa, I thought: Now we are
punishing
the Israelis for getting out of Gaza, telling them they abandoned the sequence of the Roadmap?

I walked the Israelis out to the White House gates on Pennsylvania Avenue. Tourgeman was fuming, too angry to say much. Turbowitz was pale; what just happened there? he asked me. The 2002 speech is gone, the 2004 letters with Sharon are gone, the Roadmap is gone, Hamas won the election, there is a Hamas prime minister – and you have a strategic imperative to make us forget it all and start negotiating final status issues? All of a sudden Condi was saying final status issues should be discussed, right now; as she put it, we would “build the house” but not let the Palestinians move into the house until terror had ended. There was not much I could say. Condi's forcefulness, her tone of impatience and near hostility, had stunned me too. I suggested that Turbo, as everyone called him, discuss it with the prime minister and then maybe ask for another conversation with Hadley for him to explain where we were heading.

Turbo called Hadley three days later. The prime minister is very worried, Turbo said, and he just spoke to Condi; she told him not to worry because these were just her initial thoughts. What he told her, Turbo continued, was that there are no shortcuts, and he cannot change course now in a way that seems to reward terror. The basic element in disengagement, he had told Rice, was the April 14 letter, which had flatly said “the United States remains committed to my vision and to its implementation as described in the roadmap. The United States will do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan.” The Roadmap is not a principle, it lays out a plan – a series of steps in order. All of a sudden you consider a new order. Turbo went on: Condi had confirmed to Olmert that the “principles” of the Roadmap were alive but not the sequence. The prime minister said he could not agree to that; he could not tolerate it. But listen, Hadley answered, the president needs to say something about all this at the UN, and he's going to. He needs to show leadership. There will be no new Middle East peace plan, but there will be something – a down payment.