Tested by Zion (9 page)

Arafat was now making speeches about both political and security reform; he was not entirely deaf to the words coming from Washington. But despite the change in rhetoric, it was the old game: He was doing nothing to implement reforms – or to stop the terrorism. Three were killed and 50 injured at a market in Netanya on May 19. On May 22, 2 more were killed and 40 injured by a suicide bombing in Rishon Le Zion. On May 27, 2 were killed and 40 injured at an ice cream parlor in Petah Tikva, and 4 more Israelis were killed the following day in two more attacks. Finally, on June 5, 19 were killed and 74 wounded in a suicide bombing, in which a car laden with explosives drove into a bus at the Megiddo Junction in northern Israel.

For Sharon, that bombing was the last straw: Israeli troops attacked Arafat's compound and other West Bank locations again, this time eliciting a much quieter American reaction even when those troops entered and reoccupied the major towns. With terrorist attacks continuing almost daily, on June 15, Sharon announced a new plan: to build a fence 200 miles long separating Palestinians from Israelis and thereby thwarting suicide bombers.

Behind the scenes, Rice was thinking more about Palestinian reform. On May 21, she had met privately with a group of Catholic bishops, telling them the president had been clearer than anyone else about the need for a Palestinian state, but the issue was how to get there. Reform is the key, she said, because a corrupt terrorist state is impossible; we would not support it, and the Israelis would be right not to want to live next to such an entity. The occupation must end, but Palestinians needed a government that cares about their well-being. None of us, she told them, have addressed forthrightly the fact that the Palestinian leadership was failing its own people.

It is unlikely that the bishops understood what Rice was really telling them, which was that the administration was thinking through an entirely new approach: There would be an independent state of Palestine, but only if and when terrorism was abandoned and Arafat was gone. The key, then, was not diplomacy, not international conferences, nor was it Israeli concessions – it was Palestinian action.

Arafat was not immune from pressure, and on June 8 he appointed Salam Fayyad as finance minister. In the long run this would turn out to be an extremely significant move because Fayyad set about trying to clean up PA finances – the first time that had ever been undertaken. Serving in that post for three years, the U.S.-trained Ph.D. economist, a former International Monetary Fund official, became synonymous with honest and effective stewardship. Donors could, for the first time, begin to trace where their dollars went and could be sure they were not being stolen before reaching their intended aim. Fayyad computerized PA finances, gave financial reports, fought corruption – all previously unheard of. Naturally, he became a favorite of the United States and of the Europeans as well. But what Arafat would not do was give anyone similar influence over the security forces. Money was one thing, and he had plenty of that hidden away; guns were another. Though Arafat simultaneously named a new interior minister, Abdel Razak Yahya, Yahya resigned later in 2002 with the predictable complaint that Arafat had prevented him from undertaking any reforms or exercising control.

If there had been a glimmer of hope at the end of April that violence and terror would end, by June that hope was gone. With acts of terror almost daily and major Israeli action in the West Bank, could Bush continue to say and do nothing? The last time the president had dealt with the region, in April, the “action” he had taken was to announce he was sending Powell there again, but Powell's unsuccessful April trip took that option off the table. “The State Department again proposed a peace conference; the President again said no, not with Arafat,” Rice recalled.
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Cheney and Rumsfeld urged Bush to remain silent: He had given his views in the April speech and nothing would be gained by wading in again. From his own March trip to the region, Cheney had concluded that the Arab leaders were focused on the United States and Iraq, not the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. To Rumsfeld, the president was being set up for failure because the timing was poor: In June 2002, there was no chance for an Arab-Israeli peace. The risk was simply too high to attach the president's name to an initiative Rumsfeld viewed as a foolish push from the State Department.
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Those urging that the president speak again about the Middle East had a new argument: Iraq. However they phrased their argument, it amounted to a simple contention: If the United States was going to take action against Iraq, there had to be a credible “peace process” underway. “It was very much in the context of Iraq and Tony Blair's influence on the President,” Mike Gerson recalled. “Because Blair from the very earliest in the preparations for Iraq was making the argument that kind of fulfilled the familiar foreign policy argument: at the same time we're doing this, we have to be doing the peace process, or you have all sorts of problems.”
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Doug Feith, Rumsfeld's undersecretary, thought the same: The June speech would be “what the President is going to do in answer to Colin Powell's saying you can't do Iraq unless you have a major Arab-Israeli position taken.…[Y]ou're viewed as being adrift, you're
not engaged, Clinton was doing Camp David…and you're viewed as ignoring the Arab-Israeli conflict.…This was, as I understood it, the addressing of the Arab-Israeli conflict before the Iraq war.”
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In his own memoir, Blair could not have been clearer that this was his view. To take action in Iraq, indeed to advance in the broader struggle against Islamic extremism, required an initiative on Israeli-Palestinian peace. He said this in his speech to the Labor Party conference shortly after 9/11 and repeats this theme in his memoirs:

[L]ike a broken record thereafter, I believed that resolution of the Palestinian issue was of essential strategic importance to resolving this wider struggle. It hadn't caused the extremism, but resolving it would enormously transform the battle lines in defeating it.…I made a major part of my pitch to George the issue of [the] Israeli-Palestinian peace process. To me this was the indispensable soft-power component to give equilibrium to the hard power that was necessary if Saddam were to be removed.
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According to Blair, this pitch worked; in April 2002 at Crawford, he received “George's commitment to me to re-engage with it.”
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Blair continued to make that pitch: in July, “I sent George another personal, private note…stressing again the Middle East peace process”
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; in March 2003, “I stressed once again the seminal importance of the Middle East peace process.”
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Right up to the end of his tenure as prime minister and then afterward, as Quartet envoy, Blair peppered the president with advice about how to move things forward. Given his close relations with Bush, one must assume this pressure had some impact.

The debate over whether to speak out at all in June 2002, and what to say, lasted weeks. Steve Hadley, then deputy national security advisor, described the process:

Very controversial – and the vice president and Rumsfeld…thought the speech should not be given. That was their position: There should be no speech. And the president said, “Well, let's work the process.” And Mike Gerson and I had the responsibility to come up with a text that was true to the president's principles, advanced his policies, and as much as possible got everybody on board. We went over and over and over it, and I remember one session where we're actually in the Situation Room and the president is seated at the head table. We're all arrayed, I think it's the Principals, at least some Principals, and then Gerson and I at the other end of the table keeping book on the text – and we are going literally line-by-line through the speech telling the president what the disagreements are and getting some guidance from him as to how to resolve them. So, you know, we're
really
into the details of it and the president's into the details of it. But it's clear that while he wants to keep open the issue as to whether to give the speech, and he wants to try to bring his vice president and Secretary of Defense along, he wants to give the speech. And we go as far as we can to accommodate comments.
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The
view from Powell's camp was similar, according to a top official at State:

The June speech was extremely controversial. It was drafted. Rumsfeld and Cheney were violently opposed to it – totally, to any speech. “You don't need too. You don't need to give a speech, Mr. President.” And their basic objection to the speech is that if he was going to give a speech that laid out a position of the United States Government, he had to give something to the Palestinians. It can't just be “we fight terrorism along with our Israeli allies.” He had to give the Palestinians some sense of evenhandedness and hope, and that was the sticking point. Cheney and Rumsfeld did not want to give them anything. Powell told him, you have to tell them what it is you believe in: a two-state solution, find a solution to Jerusalem, find a solution to the final borders, and the right of return – the three biggies – and you've got to put some timeline on it, and he did: “I want to see it in five years.” But it was violently objected to by everybody. He gave it on a Monday. It was on Saturday afternoon when they were still debating whether he should give it, and Condi was getting hit from every side, and she called the Secretary [of State] at home. She said, “Well, what do you think?” She said, “I can't make this happen unless you are absolutely clear and forceful on the need for this.” There were a lot of good reasons to do it and not to do it, so Powell read it again, added some more stuff in it for the Palestinians, and then called her back and said, “Tell the President I think he has to do this.” We cannot just stand here staring at the sky. Powell felt he had to give a speech to show that he was interested in finding a two-state solution.
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Throughout, Bush was directly involved in drafting the text. As the chief speechwriter described, “This was not a Ronald Reagan policy process in which all the experts meet and then they write this speech and hash it out for six months to kind of figure out what to say. That was not the way it worked. The president participated in these meetings, came to very strong views, gave me direct direction, worked with me on the speech, and people made edits on the margins. We had a very White House-centric decision making process.”
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That was one way of putting it; Rice described it as “an interagency nightmare.”
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The speech went through 30 drafts and occasioned the unique phenomenon described by Hadley: an interagency meeting, chaired by the president himself, to debate the text of a speech. Doug Feith of the Defense Department attended the meeting and described it this way:

The president is being pushed on specifically the question of reviewing the final status issues. State, and I believe it was [Deputy Secretary Richard] Armitage – State was saying to the president that if you're going to give this speech, you've got to say something about boundaries, something about Jerusalem, something about refugees, something about water, the final status issues. The president said, “No. I don't want to do that.” So Armitage came back again and argued that there's been all this diplomacy and you can't just leave it aside. People are going to be expecting you to address these final status issues. He was pushing the president to adopt diplomacy that the president was intent on repudiating. And the president got ticked, and he turned and he said, “I don't want to reinvent that diplomacy.” He said, “I want to,” I remember this
vividly
, he said, “I want to
change
the way people think about the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He used the expression “change the way people think.” This was not a case where the president was being told what to think by Condi or anybody else. The president came into this loaded for bear. The president did not like Arafat; I mean no-how. He really thought
that Arafat was a crumb. The president also clearly believed that Israel and the United States were shoulder-to-shoulder in the same war.
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So did the vice president and the secretary of defense; as Bush later wrote, “Dick and Don were concerned that supporting a Palestinian state in the midst of an intifada would look like rewarding terrorism.”
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They did not favor giving any speech right then, but as the text emerged, they embraced it with enthusiasm while Powell thought it a great mistake. As draft followed draft, events in the region shaped the final outcome. On June 18, 19 people were killed and 74 injured, many of them young students, by the suicide bombing of a bus just outside Jerusalem. And the following day, 7 were killed and 50 injured in another suicide bombing, this time at a crowded bus stop in Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood. Responsibility for the June 19 bombing was claimed by the “al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade,” which was formally part of Arafat's Fatah movement. Days later, at a meeting in the final week before the speech, new intelligence was received showing that Arafat had authorized a $20,000 payment to the group – even as he was continuing to tell American officials he was opposed to terror and was stopping it. Yet even that evidence did not move everyone in the room: “Powell, actually, was pooh-poohing it all: ‘Oh, you don't know, you can't believe this stuff, how do you know, you can't really lay it on his doorstep,’ but finally the preponderance of evidence was just so heavy.”
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Yet the proof that Arafat was still financing terror in June 2002 – 10 months after 9/11 and after the promises he had made to Bush, Powell, Zinni, and other American officials – did end the debate. To Bush, as Mike Gerson put it, the conclusion was inescapable: “Israel doesn't have a partner. None of the steps make much difference because there was no adequate partner on the Palestinian side. There was this, I think, a dawning recognition that Arafat was going to make this completely impossible. That it was literally
impossible
while he was there.”
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On Saturday afternoon, June 22, Bush himself added the sentence calling for Arafat's removal.