Battle Ready

WARRIOR PEACEMAKER

After nearly four decades in the United States Marine Corps, Tony Zinni found it hard to adjust to a different life. He knew he had to move on to another phase, yet months passed before the new phase happened. Until it did, he briefly tried the usual occupations open to retired generals — memberships on boards of directors, consulting on military and foreign policy matters, senior mentoring, teaching college courses, lecturing at military schools, speechmaking.

These early pursuits brought in a comfortable income; all of them were interesting, and a couple were personally rewarding. Despite these satisfactions, however, he knew something was missing. He was no longer taking part in the significant events he watched unfolding every day on the news. He had moved from the heart of the action to virtual irrelevance.

The media networks offered positions as an analyst and commentator; their offers were tempting — a chance to keep a hand in. But he rejected them, preferring not to be a military Monday-morning quarterback. He didn’t want to be yet another retired general blathering on the screen about the state of the universe.

“I really believe that once you retire, you retire,” he comments. “The way is forward, not back. So for me, I really felt that the worst thing I could do is try to semi hang on. I wanted to cut the cords and get on with a different life. Just put the old life aside.”

The day he packed up his uniforms for good — a chore he had put off for months — was one of the bleakest of his life. The uniforms went into his attic; his sword went to his Marine officer son during his retirement ceremony. Yet this was a liberating pain; it was the opening he needed to finally accept that he had to move on.

About this time, wise counsel came from an old and respected Marine Corps friend, Paul VanRiper, a retired lieutenant general who had settled near Zinni’s new home in Virginia:

“The best way to manage your time is to divide your life into thirds,” he told Zinni. “One-third has to pay your mortgage, put food on the table, and cover whatever else you need to keep your household and family going. You’re not that old”—Zinni retired in his late fifties—“so look at doing work that you’re okay with, and brings home a decent paycheck.

“The second third comes from doing work you love, where the pay isn’t all that important. You might get some compensation; but that’s not the point. Whether these things bring in good money or not, this part of your life is about doing things you enjoy doing, things that excite you, inspire you. You can’t wait to do more.

“The final third is about whatever you want to put back. It’s work you do pro bono, because it’s the right thing to do; you have an obligation to do it. You feel required to give the service to your country, or to institutions — like the Marine Corps — that you have a close affection for.”

And that is exactly what Zinni tried to do.

After trying those various “normal” occupations open to retired generals, he moved on to more satisfying ways to pay the bills. He took care of the first third primarily by carefully choosing positions in businesses that had ethics, practices, and leadership of the highest caliber.

For the second third, he began teaching at William and Mary College. The pay wasn’t great, but he loved the wonderful faculty, loved being around the students, loved teaching, and loved passing on his experience to another impressive generation.

Early in 2001, he was contacted by Professor Steven Spiegel, the director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California San Diego. The IGCC ran a series of workshops, sponsored by the Defense Department, that brought together prominent people from the Middle East to discuss arms control and security. Spiegel asked Zinni to join this effort as a consultant; and of course Zinni accepted. It was an opportunity to reconnect with the peacemaking and conflict resolution process that had grown into a significant part of his life during the second half of his Marine Corps service. A dream began to emerge.

At the end of July, he took part in the first of what would become several IGCC workshops. Held in Garmisch, Germany, it brought together an impressive group of serving and retired government officials and academics from Middle Eastern countries to discuss the peace process. Though, of course, Zinni had followed these issues when he was CINC at CENTCOM, and discussed them at length with regional leaders, he found himself gaining significant new insights.

And then for the third third — the “putting back” into the people and the institutions that were important to him — Zinni made sure he gave talks and classes at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, and at local high schools whenever the opportunity arose.

The thirds plan allowed Zinni to put some structure into the life of a retired general, but it did not yet solve the problem of filling what was still missing — some way to take positive part in significant events out in the world… without butting in. He was ready if he was needed and called.

The call came. And another.

The first, in the summer of 2001, was from his old friend and boss, and now Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage: “Would you be interested in taking on a peace mission in Indonesia?”

This was followed a few weeks later by a second call from another State Department official: “Would you be interested in taking on a peace mission in the Middle East?”

THE WISE MEN

In Indonesia, a bloody dispute had been under way for twenty-five years between the national government and an independence movement in the oil-rich province of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. The call from Armitage was an invitation to take part in a mission under the guidance of the Henri Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HDC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The HDC realized a dream of Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, to establish a humanitarian center devoted to conflict resolution and mediation. It gave special attention to internal conflicts — problems within and not between nations. The latter are normally best handled by international organizations such as the UN or regional collectives of nations, but sovereign states get nervous when international bodies meddle in what they take to be internal affairs — as in the case of rebellions or separatist movements. Such conflicts are probably best resolved by private organizations, which have no agenda and no ulterior interests.

Though Zinni was unfamiliar with Indonesia and its multitude of troubles, and had never heard of Aceh or the HDC, he was eager to take on the mission. This was interesting. It could add a significant new angle of vision to what he already knew about peacemaking and conflict resolution.

Tony Zinni:

I learned long ago that finding new angles in peacemaking really matters, because — paradoxically — each peacemaking situation is unique. No matter how much experience you have, each conflict brings its own unique requirements. You have to develop a process distinctive to it. Sure, you can maybe call on or modify previous experiences, but there are no models, formulas, or formats that will necessarily help you reach your goals.

A lot of people think you can know exactly how to go about the process and become predictive. I learned you can’t. You can’t take some model off the shelf and hammer it to fit. It doesn’t work that way. What happens is this: Gaining more experiences builds up your experience base and your understanding of the possibilities, and that shows you how to combine, mix-match, develop, and modify from past experiences to fit the unique situation you’re in. Experience doesn’t give you any big answers. It shows you how to be creative.

He talked over the mission at a meeting with Armitage and Karen Brooks, a member of the National Security Council. There he learned that the State Department and the NSC had come up with an innovative idea to create a new element in negotiations: a group of Wise Men — people of significant international stature, senior diplomats and military men — who would stand above the negotiating process and advise all sides.

In tough negotiations, mediators always get dragged into the process. They become viewed as biased by one or both sides, or sometimes become too deeply involved in contentious issues to “step above” the heated exchanges. No matter how hard mediators try to maintain and protect their neutrality and objectivity, both sides transfer fears and hopes onto them, attack them, and blame them. It always happens.

The function of the Wise Men was not to change the process but to back it up. If the mediators were getting hit by stones from all sides, they lived with it, rolled up their sleeves, waded into the mud, and did the dirty work. The Wise Men stood above it all, there to be called on by both sides or by the mediators for advice, recommendations, consultation, or intervention.

The HDC jumped at the idea.

At that point, they had chosen three Wise Men for the Indonesia mission — Surin Pitsuwan, a retired Thai Foreign Minister; Budamir Loncur, a retired Yugoslav Foreign Minister; and Lord Eric Avebury, a Member of the British House of Lords. They now wanted a fourth, an American with military stature — someone with peacekeeping experience, who could handle issues such as how to monitor mechanisms and observers on the ground, and who could talk to the Indonesian military — who everyone thought would be the toughest group to bring into the peace process. Zinni was the obvious choice.

“This is great!” Zinni told Armitage and Brooks. “It’s just the kind of thing I want to do.” He agreed to take on the mission with State Department support, but only as an unpaid private citizen working with the HDC, thus ensuring his independence.

That set the machinery moving.

State Department briefs followed, detailing the history of the struggle, current intelligence about what was happening on the ground, the state of the negotiations, the U.S. position on the issues, and background on the HDC.

Zinni followed up on that by reading everything he could find on Aceh online and from local bookstores and libraries. He was surprised at the amount of information that was out there:

Indonesia is unique among nations. For one thing, it’s big. It spreads across thousands of islands, some of them among the largest in the world, that cover thousands of miles from east to west and many time zones. It’s extremely diverse in geography, population, and ethnic identity. In religion it’s predominantly Muslim (usually of a moderate kind), but there are also many Buddhists. All of these factors would make the country very difficult to govern; but add to that corruption, dictatorships, all kinds of divisive political issues, and a blanketing atmosphere of turmoil; and further add to that internal struggles with provinces in distant parts of the country — like East Timor (now independent), Papua New Guinea, and Aceh — that want to break away and gain independence; and you have a nation that’s never far from catastrophic fission.

In spite of the confusion and diversity, the political scene in Indonesia is surprisingly straightforward — more or less evenly divided between hard-liners and moderates. On the issue of separatism, the moderates wished to end the struggles through peaceful negotiations that would eventually allow areas such as Aceh some freedom and autonomy from the central government. The hard-liners — including much of the military[83] — would have none of that, and preferred an increased crackdown to end the conflict once and for all. Already, the military and police operations in response to the uprising had turned the beautiful and resource-rich province into a battle zone.

The fight for independence had been led by the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, directed by its government in exile in Stockholm, Sweden. Now an agreement had been reached to conduct negotiations between them and the government, with the HDC as mediator.

The United States had taken a carefully moderate position in these negotiations. That is, it supported a resolution of the problem within the context of the state of Indonesia. In the U.S. view, the independence of Aceh had to be off the table. The U.S. was not going to support a breaking up of that nation. By the same token, they sent a strong message to the Jakarta government: “You’ve got to do better for the people of Aceh. They are in a special situation and deserve special treatment. You have to find a reasonable way to give them that.”

There were several compelling reasons for the American position; but the most compelling was practical: Indonesia is fragile. The U.S. didn’t want to see it fragment, and create a constellation of potentially nonviable states. God knows what could happen if these failed or incapable states started harboring extremist movements.

There was a second, no less practical reason: Independence movements provoked governments to take a hard-line approach, and this almost inevitably ended in bloodshed. If ways could be found to moderate demands for independence, while delivering many of the material benefits that independence promises, and if all this was coupled with moderation of the central government’s hard-line approach, then everybody got a win. But getting there involved a lot of ifs.

Zinni was not involved in developing the U.S. government position in the Aceh-Indonesia conflict, nor was it his place to support or oppose it during the negotiations. His place, as he saw it, was to find a road to peace.

When I became involved with the HDC, I was clear up front to all parties in the negotiations: I’m not making judgments here, I’m not here to judge. I’m here to help you resolve this fight peacefully. My government’s position is clear; that’s what it is. But I am not part of the government in this respect; and it’s not my job to come in and sell my government’s line. I don’t have a line. I don’t have a position.

I learned a long time ago that a negotiator has to be nonjudgmental.

Later that year, when I became involved in trying to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, I was immediately hit from both sides to take a position. There was no way I could do that.

Who’s more right? The Israelis? The Palestinians? Who has greater justice on their side? Who has suffered more? How can anyone measure these things? And even if you could, how could you shape these measurements into the perfect balance that will result in a peaceful settlement?

As a mediator, you reach peace by finding a position that both sides can agree to and practice on the ground. We’ll never get there by trying to determine which side is more righteous or “deserving” than the other. It’s important to speak out about unacceptable actions, but your task is to help the parties find a lasting solution that all can live with over time.

So when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked me, “How do you weigh this issue? Where do you put the weight in terms of this situation?” I said:

“I don’t do that.”

Sharon did not reply. He didn’t like the answer.

“I don’t make judgments,” I continued. “There are things that are unacceptable to me, such as terrorist acts where innocents are killed. I reject that. I condemn those things. But in the process of negotiation, the mediator can’t allow himself to be put in a position where he starts to form or make judgments. I am here to facilitate both sides finding a workable solution to this situation. One that they and their children can live with.”

Obviously, judgments will inevitably creep into your thinking; but you have to resist them. You have to be really hard on yourself and reject taking any positions that come out of these judgments.

And even when you don’t form judgments, you’re still going to get hit by both sides.

In mid-July, Zinni flew to Geneva for his introduction to the HDC staff and his first meeting with the Indonesian government and GAM officials.

The Centre was located at a mansion on the lake, Henri Dunant’s former home, and was a truly international organization, receiving support from private donations from several countries. Its small staff of about twenty (most of them young) came from all over the world. The director and chief negotiator, Martin Griffiths, was a former foreign service officer in the United Kingdom who had worked with the UN in Africa and elsewhere. Griffiths had a wealth of experience in peacekeeping and diplomatic missions. His deputy, a Canadian named Andrew Marshall, had long experience working with NGOs and the UN in third world nations. Both of these men impressed Zinni.

The HDC had brought in other experts in conflict resolution and negotiation as well, but they had also come up with a really innovative idea: They brought in “civil society” to “speak for the people.”

At this point, the government said, “Wait a minute, we speak for the people.”

And the GAM said, “No way. We speak for the people.”

But the HDC said, “Why not let the people speak for themselves?”

And so they communicated with village leaders, civic leaders, and other prominent people in the community to get their views. What the “people” had to say often shocked everybody. They had a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude: The sentiment often was that neither the government nor GAM had done right by them. This strong sentiment eventually helped bring about an agreement.

When Zinni arrived in Geneva, he learned that the negotiations had proved difficult so far, with both sides feeling that they were expected to give up more than they were getting.

For the government representatives — moderates — it was an extremely high-risk situation. If the special autonomy status they were offering Aceh worked, fine. But if it didn’t, or if the negotiations failed, or if the special autonomy offer set a precedent and other provinces demanded a similar status, they knew they had dug themselves into a deep and escape-proof hole.

For the GAM, who had been fighting for independence for decades, special autonomy presented them with a serious crisis. Accepting it meant abandoning their struggle for full independence.

Divided views on these issues within the government and GAM further complicated the negotiations.

Despite the problems and obstacles, Zinni came away from this first meeting greatly encouraged. “This thing can work,” he said to himself. “Both sides are sincerely committed to finding a peaceful solution, and the first-rate HDC staff is dogged in its determination to bring that about.”

He was ready to plunge back in — when he got another call that changed his life. For the moment, Aceh would have to be put on the back burner… though he would return to it later.

THE MIDDLE EAST PEACE PROCESS

The call came from Assistant Secretary of State Bill Burns, a friend from Zinni’s time at CENTCOM, a few weeks after he returned from Geneva. “Could you meet me for lunch to discuss a project that’s brewing?” Burns asked. Zinni’s answer, of course, was yes.

Tom Clancy: Tony Zinni takes the story the rest of the way.

Burns, an Arabic speaker and Middle East expert, was head of the Near East Affairs Bureau at State. When I was at CENTCOM, he had been U.S. ambassador to Jordan — and one of our finest ambassadors in the region (greatly trusted by King Hussein and later by King Abdullah).

We lunched on August 27, 2001, at a Washington restaurant. There, my friend dropped a bomb: The Bush administration was about to sail against the conventional wisdom and seriously attempt to reengage in the Middle East peace process.

According to that wisdom, the Bush White House wanted to distance themselves from the Mideast snakepit. In 2000, the Clinton administration had failed to bring negotiations at Camp David between Yasser Arafat (the Palestinian leader) and Ehud Barak (the Israeli Prime Minister) to a successful conclusion. They had no desire to repeat that failure… or to suffer the resulting disastrous political fallout.

After the Camp David meetings broke down, the situation in the Mideast crashed. Barak lost his job and was replaced by Ariel Sharon; and Clinton failed to get the process back on track during the last days of his presidency. In September 2000, the Second Intifada reignited the cycles of violence that had plagued the region before the series of talks begun in the late ’90s had raised expectations.

As Burns and I continued our conversation, I came to understand that the President’s position had not in fact greatly changed; he was still understandably cautious. The inspiration for this new initiative, I gathered, was coming from Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, who clearly saw that it was critical for the United States to reengage. He was supported in this initiative by a core of senior people, like Bill Burns, at the State Department.

The Secretary had taken his concerns to the President, who had approved cautious and tentative moves at a very low level. (We were then only a few days from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which would change everything.)

In the recent past, the American approach had been to send high-visibility special envoys to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians, with attendant media attention and inflated expectations. After the collapse of the Clinton-sponsored peace talks, former Senator George Mitchell had traveled to Israel with a political plan, and CIA Director George Tenet had followed with a security plan.

Tenet’s aim was to bring the security situation on the ground back to where it was in September 2000, at the beginning of the Second Intifada. The Israelis would pull out of the areas they had occupied since then, they would move checkpoints, and the Palestinian workers would come back into Israel. For their part, the Palestinians would crack down on extremists, make arrests, and confiscate weapons.

Once everything had been restored to the September 2000 position, the two parties could then move forward on Mitchell’s more political plan, which was designed to build confidence and move forward on political issues such as freezing the settlements the Israelis had been building on the West Bank and in Gaza. Eventually, they’d return to final status issues, like the status of Jerusalem, the right of return, the final status of the settlements… all of the issues on which President Clinton, Barak, and Arafat had locked horns at Camp David.

Both Israelis and Palestinians had “agreed” to these proposals “in principle,” but implementing them had gone nowhere. As I was to learn, you could paper the walls with agreements. Getting them implemented on the ground was another matter; both sides disregarded them.

This time the approach was going to be softer and less visible. There would be no special envoy. Ambassador Burns was going to quietly run the mediation mission out of his own shop. Since he had to run the whole region, not just this one process, he was looking for someone he knew and trusted, with knowledge, experience, stature, and solid personal relationships in the region, who would become his semiofficial assistant, working closely with him and filling in when he had to turn his attention elsewhere. This person would become a part-time right hand, who could take over and oversee the process when he was away.

The goal, Burns went on to explain, was to reengage without making a big deal of it. Everyone knew what needed to be done and where we needed to go; and the Mitchell and Tenet plans already went a long way toward spelling all this out (as did the various agreements, near agreements, and accords already reached in Madrid, Oslo, and elsewhere). There was no need to create another big plan or to launch another big effort. What needed to be done was already out there. It had to be won or lost on the ground.

Burns and Powell wanted a few people to go over there and work out with the two parties how to actually structure the existing agreements, and to find the best way to set these up and implement them. These people would start up the process, feel it out, and then oversee it.

What I think Burns had in mind for me was to start the initial movement; and then, as the process moved along, if a bigger player was needed in there to close deals or whatever, he would come and take the lead. When he was not able to be present, but they still needed somebody with clout who could ride herd on this thing, then I would fill in for him.

“Are you willing to take this on?” he asked.

How could I not be excited? This was a job worth doing. Even if nothing lasting came of it — which was all too likely.

“Great!” I told him. “I’m not real familiar with all the issues or many of the people involved in this thing; but I’d really love to get involved in it.”

“I’d love to see you involved,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do to make it happen.”

And he continued: “What I’m talking about is a kind of unusual setup here at State. We’ll have to figure out how we structure our arrangement.”

“Well, look,” I said, “I have some thoughts on that. First of all, I don’t want to be paid for this thing. That way I can keep some measure of independence. I want to be able to do what I have to do, say what I have to say, and not feel that somebody’s going to accuse me of doing this for gain.

“Second, I don’t want a title. I don’t want to be called envoy or anything else.

“Third, we ought to keep this low-key. There shouldn’t be a lot of publicity about me doing this. I’m just a part-time special assistant who happens to be there with you.

“Let’s absolutely do this thing. But let’s do it with no pay, no title, no press, no media attention, and no making a big deal of it.”

He agreed that was the best arrangement. “I’ll take these ideas to Secretary Powell and see what he says.”

“Great,” I said.

Days passed. I waited restlessly for Bill Burns’s call, which would take us to the next step. I was very eager to find out my actual function and the nature of my mission — all still unclear.

As I waited, I did my usual thing when I took on something new; I read everything about the Israeli-Palestinian problem that I could get my hands on.

During the same period, I worked with Bill Burns’s people to structure my official relationship with the State Department. The lawyers drew up a contract. It turned out that even a no-pay employee is still bound by conflict-of-interest and ethics rules, which rightfully limited other things I might have done.

I have to confess that my refusal to take pay did not totally spring from altruistic motives, such as my wish for independence, or from my hope to be a wonderful servant of the nation (though these motives were important). This job was going to be part-time; and I was involved in other work that brought in paychecks. If I accepted pay from State, I’d have to give up these other positions. The ethics and conflict-of-interest rules still prevented me from taking on certain jobs; and everything I did had to be vetted and cleared by the government and the State Department. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

Two weeks after my initial meeting with Bill Burns, on September 11, 2001, the world changed drastically.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the Bush administration looked anew at reengagement in the peace process. Their approach changed, and expanded. According to Ambassador Burns, the rate of these changes was accelerating. He couldn’t be specific, but the nature of the peace initiative was no longer what we had discussed. I sensed that my own part in all this was also changing.

On the twenty-third of October, I attended a series of briefs at the State Department on the background of the peace process and an update on the current situation; and I was instructed to stay ready to travel quickly after the design of my mission was firmed up. How exactly it was going to be firmed up was still not clear to me.

On November 10, 2001, President Bush delivered a historic speech before the UN General Assembly in which he committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state — the first time a President of the United States had done that. The objective of the peace process, he told the delegates, is two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side. This was a very controversial and bold statement.

I was very impressed. The reengagement effort we were about to start promised to be more momentous than I had first thought.

The President’s speech was to be followed by a major speech from Secretary Powell on the nineteenth at the University of Louisville that would add specifics to the President’s general principles.

Shortly before the Louisville event, Ambassador Burns called to tell me that Powell’s remarks would trigger our departure for Israel, though he couldn’t actually tell me what this meant for me and what we were going to do… He was not keeping this from me; he truly didn’t know the answer. All he — or anybody — did know was that Powell’s speech would be the defining moment; yet right up to the eleventh hour, nobody was sure what the moment would define.

The day before the speech, Burns faxed me a rough copy of the speech, but with a caveat attached: These pages are not yet final — but they are close.

I read the pages, and, bang! I got knocked off my feet.

“Holy cow,” I said to myself. “There’s a big piece in this thing about me: I’ve got a big new title now! I’m the Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Middle East! So much for all our hopes about not making a big deal of my mission. There goes our no-title and no-publicity agreement.” (They kept my no-pay arrangement.)

Suddenly, for all practical purposes I’d become another special envoy. Powell had inflated my position into something I didn’t want it to be — not because I am all that modest, but because I wasn’t convinced it would work (an opinion later justified by events). On the other hand, I was excited to learn that the administration’s level of commitment and involvement had moved way up. I really liked it that Secretary Powell had showed what was called the path: We’d try to put the Tenet and Mitchell plans in play on the ground, and this, we hoped, would lead to the final status agreement, and then finally to the Palestinian state. We now had a horizon. The peace process was beginning to look promising.

The speech generated a lot of media excitement; my phone rang off the hook; and there was nothing I could tell anybody. I just didn’t know any answers. What was my job?

On November 21, I visited the State Department for further briefings and administrative processing in preparation for my initial trip, scheduled for the twenty-fifth; but my most important business at Foggy Bottom that day was the marching orders I got from Secretary Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage. They gave me tremendous latitude:

My mission was to achieve an immediate cease-fire in place, to be followed by implementation of the Tenet and Mitchell plans. They wanted these to be accepted on the ground rather than just in principle. How I did it was up to me. I was expected to use my head, and my own initiative.

“We don’t like to lose,” Secretary Powell told me. “We like to win. You get out there and make it happen, use your judgment. You’ve got a lot of latitude, a lot of freedom in action. But don’t hesitate to pick up that phone and call me directly if you need something.”

It was gratifying to hear the Secretary express such personal confidence in me. Yet taking on that kind of responsibility always makes you a little tense. I knew what kind of burden had fallen on me.

Ambassador Burns would travel out with me on the first part of the trip; and Aaron Miller would be assigned to assist me — a great choice.

Miller was the State Department specialist on the Middle East peace process. Years before, he had joined the Department as a historian, but somehow the peace process itself had captured him. It became his life. His total personal commitment was to bring peace to the region. In time, as the specialist, he’d worked for all the secretaries of state and presidents, becoming over the years the government’s corporate memory on that subject.[84] He knows everybody, and he’s known by everybody. He knows every issue, every event, and every betrayal. Nothing in that part of the world stays hidden from Aaron Miller.

In Israel, he was involved in everything I did, and was totally there for me — without in any way trying to impose his thinking or his way of doing things. He provided background, recommendations, support, ideas; and then encouraged me to add my own thinking. “We need fresh thinking,” he explained. “A lot of people in this business think they know how to do it, and they’ll never skip an opportunity to pass on their wisdom. But the truth is, no ideas have worked so far. So fire at will, and find something new.”

He and I became very close; it was just a wonderful fit of two different personalities. He was intense and full of nervous energy. While I’m not exactly easygoing, I try to be more relaxed and good-humored at work. He had started out as a liberal academic, and had never experienced a military guy before we met. I was a complete alien to his country. Yet he found that fascinating, and I found him fascinating; and so we somehow complemented one another. When he was down, I could pick him up; when I was down, he’d pick me up. And in the end, our friendship really helped the team.

Early on the twenty-first, Secretary Powell, Bill Burns, and I traveled to the White House to brief President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and National Security Advisor Rice.

When the president asked me about my mission — essentially to see how I understood what I was supposed to do — I let him know that I wanted to get the Tenet and Mitchell plans into play. This seemed to satisfy him. He wished me luck and told me he appreciated my doing this for the country. My sense was that he was giving this thing his blessing, but from a distance; this was Colin Powell’s baby. Still, we were good to go, and that was enough for me.

As I prepared to leave for Israel, I tried to keep a low profile and avoid distractions — such as encounters with the press. Better to leave the press interaction to the State Department. This caused resentment in the media and resulted in minor disruptions when some of the media retaliated; but I knew public diplomacy on my part would be counterproductive.

After the struggle to make the U.S. Constitution had been won, James Madison remarked that the twenty representatives who’d put it together had made an agreement to hold the process in confidence and not talk to the press. If that had not been done, he went on to say, if the fathers had failed to keep the process private and it had become naked to the media and the scrutiny of the public, we would never have had a Constitution.

If every step of the way, every consideration, every possibility, every proposal, every tentative glimmer of an idea, every thought put on the table suddenly got into the open where it could be endlessly analyzed or attacked or mauled by the press (and it didn’t matter which press — Al Jazeera, the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal), we’d never have moved anywhere. You can’t go forward in an emotional, involved, complex process like the Middle East peace process if the spotlight is on you.

Public diplomacy and transparency are a good thing. But these don’t work well in some places, under some circumstances, and with some issues. Often a process hits critical moments when private negotiations are necessary to work through sensitive issues or proposals. If these are made public every inch of the way, they can make it impossible for the parties to explore and develop possibilities. This was clearly one of those places.

As I prepared to take on the peace mission, I sounded out friends who were familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian nightmare, looking for advice and insights. Their predictions were gloomy: “You know, you ought to really think about this before you sign on to it. The chances of this thing going south are right up there with night following day. And when that happens, you’re going to be saddled with the failure.” Even the people from the State Department who solicited me for the job kept asking me: “Are you out of your mind? Do you really want to be actually stuck with this?”… Thoughts that were jokingly echoed by Rich Armitage: “Are you crazy?” he asked. I knew, though, that he appreciated my willingness to do this. One reason I was excited about this mission was the chance to work for Rich and Secretary Powell once again. These two great men have always been inspirations for me.

How could I not look hard at the slim chances of success? Yet I also had to face myself and my own conscience. “It’s not this or that failure that matters,” I told myself. “You know, if you save one life, you have to do it. But more important, if there’s even a point one percent chance of success, you’ve got to try. You can’t give up trying in these situations.”

The number of times you’re successful in these mediations is low. It’s like baseball. You get a hit every third time up, you’re in the Hall of Fame. You have to answer your country’s call to service regardless of personal interests or the likelihood of success.

I had one other strong motivation — Colin Powell’s personal commitment. If he was ready to put his ass on the line for this, then I was glad to be part of it.

I have a tremendous respect for Secretary Powell. I don’t know many people with greater honor, integrity, and ethics. The distinction between right and wrong is not a trivial thing with him. I have personally seen Colin Powell take actions that in no way benefit him, actions where the personal and political risks are high, actions that calculating people or those looking at their own personal benefit would avoid. He does them anyway, without calling attention to himself, because they’re the right things to do.

Powell was not standing back and letting the peace process take its course. He was pushing it. It wasn’t popular. It wasn’t politically expedient. Within the administration, he had enemies. I learned that the Defense Department opposed my selection for this mission. While I was at CENTCOM, I had disagreed with positions taken by many policymakers there; and now I had few friends at the Pentagon. Powell knew this, yet pushed on with what he felt was right.

On November 25, 2001, Bill, Aaron, and I departed for Israel.

ROUND ONE

Our plane touched down at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on the evening of November 26.

I spent the first night getting briefings from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem (which was our official point of contact with the Palestinians).

In the past, friction had developed between these two posts. Embassies tend to get “clientitis,” which meant that their staffs, if they’re not careful, begin to take the side of locals they see and live with day to day.

Fortunately, when I came to Israel we were blessed with two of our best diplomats — Dan Kurtzer and Ron Schlicher — running the embassy and the Jerusalem consulate. Kurtzer, our ambassador to Israel, is absolutely one of the finest diplomats we have ever created in the United States. He had been ambassador to Egypt when I was at CENTCOM, so I knew him well. In Jerusalem, we had Ron Schlicher, a career diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East and in the Arab world, whom I had not met, but his reputation was splendid.

These two brilliant professionals made it work and made their people cooperate. Although they both had strong personal feelings on the issues, they made it absolutely clear that their job was to promote the interests of the United States of America, and they made it equally clear that their first and foremost priority at that moment was to cooperate and find a peaceful resolution to the calamitous conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. These attitudes took hold of everybody in the embassy and the consulate. And it was the force of their leadership that made it work.

The initial briefs (and press reports) painted a bleak picture. No surprises here. The level of violence had steadily increased since the Second Intifada had begun in September 2000. All trust and confidence between the parties had evaporated, and peace talks were almost nonexistent. For the Israelis, the first priority was security, and in particular stopping the suicide attacks from extremist groups. Once that goal was achieved, they might begin negotiations and consider making concessions. For the Palestinians, the first priority was political commitment by the Israelis to Palestinian statehood, and removal of all Israeli troops from their territories. The gap between these views was huge.

The only ongoing talks were in the Trilateral Committee meetings. This committee — consisting of security experts from Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. — was set up by George Tenet to deal with security coordination and de-confliction issues (that is, where forces rubbed up against one another). Since it was then the only point of engagement between the two parties, it seemed to be the best venue for any attempt to get the Tenet plan into effect on the ground and a cease-fire in place.

At the end of the day, I retired to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where we set up our headquarters and living spaces. Because 9/11 and the Intifada had dried up tourism, there was very little occupancy. We set up in one wing of the hotel. My suite, which I used as office and living quarters, was at a corner that overlooked the Old City. It was a beautiful setting, a couple of floors up.

As I hit the sack after a long and exhausting first day of travel and briefs, dark thoughts swirled through my mind.

The task ahead was daunting. I knew I had a lot to learn about the situation, the personalities, the issues, but I couldn’t afford to take a lot of time to get up to speed, while at the same time getting the negotiations started and a process moving. I had to hit the ground running. Aaron Miller, Bill Burns, and the others on the team were certainly available with their considerable experience, but much of the responsibility still weighed on me. Expectations were already raised, people had begun to hope again; I didn’t want to see the momentum or the hope fade. Progress had to be evident right off the bat.

I had an additional gut feeling that we were going to get heavy pressure from the terrorists and extremists, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. According to our own and Israeli intelligence, the pattern with these groups was to pick up the level of violence whenever negotiations looked like they were making progress. Inevitably, the violence would box in the mediation effort. The Israelis would retaliate against the perpetrators of the violence. The Palestinians would hit back. And everybody would break off from the negotiations — always the goal of the extremist groups. So I expected that they would come at this one with a vengeance and would hit with a lot of violent events. If I was right, it meant we would have a very limited time frame in which to make progress. How much time depended on our ability to operate through the violence… or, better, to prevent violent events, catch a break, and get something done before the violence overshadowed our efforts. Unless I was very off the mark, we were going to be taking a roller-coaster ride… whipping from crisis to hope over and over again.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t have been more right. When the violence came, it was horrific. It eventually brought an end to the negotiations.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. Since neither of them, in my view, seriously buys the two-state solution, it’s hopeless to think they will compromise. With them, it’s all or nothing. That means they will simply continue to generate destructive violence to punish the Israelis and block any kind of peaceful resolution and compromise.

Their history is interesting: When Hamas was initially organized, it was encouraged by the Israelis as a counter to the PLO. It later took a more radical turn and now gets support from Iran, Syria, and elsewhere (Iraq, for example, before the fall of Saddam Hussein). When Islamic Jihad emerged, it was even more religiously fanatic, but just as skilled in the evil arts. It has never quite had the same clout as Hamas, however. Hamas is the big player. It is much better organized, has strong tentacles in the Palestinian population (cleverly put in play by charitable organizations), and has a powerful political wing. Hamas has much better reconnaissance than Islamic Jihad’s; and their attacks are far more sophisticated and achieve much greater effect, with far greater casualties. (They were responsible for the Passover bombing and all the major bus bombings — blowing up busloads of school kids, for example.) Their attacks strike right at the heart and soul of the Israelis. They really know how to jam the blade home.

Other Palestinian extremists can probably be handled. But Hamas is another thing. It would almost certainly take a civil war in Palestine to break their back — assuming they didn’t win the war.

In talks with mediators, the Palestinians will always press for a cease-fire and a compromise with Hamas. I don’t see it. It would be great if Hamas actually agreed to all that, and meant it; but it’s hard to see how they’d square their objectives with a compromise.

Even if they bought into a cease-fire, I’d be suspicious that it was just an attempt to regroup and rearm. And of course, as they went about doing that, the Israelis (whose intelligence is excellent) would find out about it and strike. The case would then be made that the Israelis had struck for no reason… and so on. The spiral of violence would start again.

The first full day was scheduled for meetings with the Israelis. To begin the day, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had laid on a helicopter tour, highlighted by his personal perspective on the geography and situation on the ground. This was to be followed by a series of briefs that would last well into the evening.

Some of my State Department advisers had reservations about this, on the grounds that the Palestinians might accuse us of letting Sharon co-opt the agenda; but I told them I could handle any attempt to manage my views. And if the Palestinians wanted to take me on a similar tour, they were welcome to invite me. I thought it was better to be open and transparent with both sides… and not tight-assed and overcautious.

Sharon’s tour gave me a strong sense of the land of Israel. We saw all the major sites — Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee. We flew down to look at Sharon’s farm in the south. We flew up to the Golan Heights, stopped at a military position, and talked with their people.

What was most interesting that day was Sharon’s own take on all this. He was a battle-tested soldier (1967, 1973), a farmer deeply attached to his land, and an Israeli convinced of his birthright, as well as a wily politician. His running dialogue during the trip came from all of those perspectives. He stressed security issues in relation to the terrain, the way any soldier would to another soldier. But there was open joy and pride in his voice as he dwelled lovingly on the agricultural aspects of the panorama that unfolded below us. And there was a similar joy and pride as he pointed out sites of historical significance to Israelis — ruins from Roman times and earlier.

“Look at those terraces up there in the rocks,” he’d exclaim with a simple passion that was very touching. “My ancestors built those thousands of years ago!” Or: “Look at this piece of terrain. You’re a military man. If we don’t control that, we’re vulnerable.” Or: “Look at this land. It was desert. Look what Israel has done here. We have greened it. Look at the orchards. Look at the fruit we produce. Look at those beautiful cattle down there.”

These three elements — soldier, farmer, Jewish roots — really sum up the man. Everything he is flows from these. His commitment to them is passionate and total. The man is committed with his entire soul to the land he’d grown up in: “We have returned from the Diaspora. This is our land, this is our birthright, this is our history.”

Before I met him, I was led to expect that I was going to run into some kind of big bully soldier. That characterization does not exactly fit. He is certainly a hard guy, who grew up in a tough environment — direct, frank, blunt, tells you right out what he wants to say to you, doesn’t try to twist words (he’s no slick politician) — but he never tried to bully me. What you see is what you get, that’s the way he is. If he couldn’t do something — make some concession he didn’t want to make — he wouldn’t weasel around the issue. He’d just say no. Unfortunately, I had the feeling that when we got down the road, when the tough concessions would be necessary, I couldn’t see him making the kind of concessions some of his predecessors had offered.

As long as I was in Israel, Sharon never stopped trying to get the read of me; or to pry judgments and opinions out of me; and I think he was very frustrated when I didn’t show him any of that. He simply couldn’t understand how anyone could not see what was obvious to him. To him, I think, you have to judge, you have to have opinions. It goes with being committed the way he’s committed.

From my angle, any judgment I expressed would close off the other side; and I couldn’t allow that to happen. Clearly every thing I said, or allegedly said, would be in the press the next day. Leaks from both sides were more like deluges. Though the two of us got along together, there was always an underlying tension between us.

Toward the end of the flight, a call came over the radio: A shooting had occurred in the small northern Israeli town of Afula. We immediately changed course and headed up there. Reports confirmed that a pair of Palestinian gunmen had opened up in the town’s marketplace, killing a pregnant Israeli woman. Several other Israelis were wounded, and the two gunmen were dead.

When we arrived overhead, we could see the security forces and medical personnel busily taking control of the scene. We hovered for a time, taking it all in, and then flew back to Jerusalem.

Later, I got a fuller account of the story — which leaves lots of unanswered questions. Earlier that day, as a good faith gesture at the start of my mission, the Israelis had taken down a checkpoint near Afula so the Palestinians could have an easier time moving about. The gunmen had obviously taken advantage of this opening to launch their terrorist attack. The big question is: Was the attack a deliberately planned provocation aimed at undermining the peace process? Or was it — as the Palestinians later claimed— simply a revenge killing? The Israeli military had recently killed a relative of the gunmen; the gunmen shot up the marketplace in retaliation.

Wherever the truth lay, this was clearly one of those violent incidents that tempted me to lose hope in the peace process. I knew I could forget about having a quiet start to my mission. My sense that this would be a roller-coaster trip from crisis to hope and back to crisis was proving right. Even though both sides had made encouraging statements about cooperating with my mission, I had to wonder how much any of that counted now that a violent event had already cast a black shadow over the first full day.

The rest of the day consisted of meetings and briefings with Prime Minister Sharon, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ben Eliezer, and Chief of the Israeli Defense Force Shaul Mofaz.[85]

This brought me up against a complicated situation: At that time, the Israeli government was a unity government, a coalition government… which means in practice that it was a divided government. Sharon was from Likud, the party which had the largest number of seats in the Knesset, while Peres and Ben Eliezer were from Labor, the chief opposition party. It was not an easy situation to handle. “Who can actually speak for Israel?” I had to ask myself.

Sharon cut through this confusion: “I’m the only one who can speak for this government,” he told me.

It was kind of strange to an American who is used to cabinet ministers who can speak for their boss. But I accepted this condition. It was their system, not ours.

The others I met with were far from unhelpful, even if somewhat marginalized by Sharon. Everyone had a lot of experience in the nitty-gritty of working with the Palestinians, and they all came through with powerful insights and solid advice.

Though Mofaz had a reputation as a tough hard-liner, he was a quiet, thoughtful man, and not immovable, nor totally unsympathetic to the Palestinians. When I met him that afternoon, he made it clear that he wanted to be cooperative, that he wanted me to succeed, and that he did not believe there was a military solution to the problem.

Later, he and I spent a lot of time together, just talking, and the two of us came to a good appreciation of our positions. I understood there was no way he would compromise on security; but within that boundary, he understood that the Israelis would have to give up some things… without — again — taking any security risks. He was aware there was never going to be a total and lasting military defeat of the Palestinians, so something had to be arranged to make the peace agreements go right. Yet he also made it clear that he did what he had to do out there in the field, even if it was hard and people got hurt.

Peres gave me valuable counsel on how my mission might proceed and on the possibilities that could develop. In these early days of my mission, he was the one person who gained my complete respect as I worked through the peace process.

I will never forget his advice:

“General Zinni,” he told me, “you’re going to find three kinds of people in this business.

“First, you’re going to find the righteous. Don’t waste your time with them. You’ll find them on both sides, and they’re always going to appeal to the righteousness of their cause.

“You’re never going to get anywhere with people like that. There’s no negotiating with righteousness. Yes, it’s their right to believe what they believe. But you’re not going to change them. They interpret facts from their religious angle, and they ignore any facts that don’t support that.

“The second group you’re going to meet,” he went on, “are the collectors of arguments, the debaters. You see them on TV with all the talking heads. They’re going to outdebate the other guy and score points. But where making real progress toward peace is concerned, these people are useless. If you want to get into the debate for academic purposes, that’s fine. But it serves no other purpose.

“The third group you’re going to meet are the ones that count. These are the ones who want to figure out a solution on the ground. These are the ones who ask themselves over and over: ‘How the hell are we going to make this ghastly situation work and get out of this terrible nightmare?’

“Focus on them,” he said, “and focus on what needs to be done, and then get it done.”

It was the best advice I got in Israel.

The other briefs were devoted to the security situation — the overriding issue, in the Israeli view. Their first order of business was to stop the terrorist suicide attacks. They were convinced that Arafat and the Palestinian Authority could stop, or at least control, most of the violent attacks, but chose not to. Or, to put this more bluntly, Arafat supported and condoned much of the violence. If the peace process was going to move forward, they made it very clear, he had to make a strategic decision to abandon violence and return to a negotiated settlement of the issues. They doubted his willingness to do this.

The Palestinian Authority couldn’t bring themselves to do that. If they did — if they confronted Hamas and Islamic Jihad, cracked down on the extremists, made arrests, confiscated weapons — there’d be blood in the streets. But if they did not confront Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israelis weren’t about to make any of the concessions outlined in the Tenet plan (and other plans) — such as removal of checkpoints, withdrawal of security forces to previous positions, and readmission of Palestinian workers to Israel. And there was no way we’d see any progress toward a Palestinian state.

At first the Israelis took a very tough line on how the Palestinian Authority had to demonstrate their good faith: Sharon insisted on one hundred percent compliance, including at least seven days of quiet, before he would approve any talks.

If we could not even get talks started for at least a week (if we were lucky enough to have no attacks), my job was clearly going to be impossible. In time, however, the Israelis backed away from their more absolute positions; and Sharon agreed to participate in the Trilateral Committee talks that I had decided to use as the venue for the initial meetings. But their bottom line remained the same: The Palestinians had to show good faith in stopping terror attacks.

The first day ended with mixed results. On the one hand, the terrible and tragic attack at Afula had cast a dark cloud over our hopes; but we had at least gained an agreement from the Israelis to meet in the Trilateral Committee. I had met with the Israeli leadership, we had connected well, and they had indicated that they would give, at least, cautious support for my mission.

I spent the second day with the Palestinians. Since it was the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, my meetings took place in the evening, beginning with the Iftar meal[86] with Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority had one of their headquarters (called “the Muqatta’a”; their official seat of government was in Gaza).

On the way there, our consular people took me on a tour of the Israeli settlement areas in the West Bank, where, contrary to agreements, significant settlement expansion was going on. During the tour, we passed through Israeli security checkpoints and witnessed the frustrating and humiliating process Palestinians had to endure in order to travel from place to place.

In our talks the day before, the Israelis had acknowledged that these checkpoints caused problems, but they were necessary to prevent attacks (such as the Afula incident). It was obviously a difficult situation. Young soldiers who could not compromise on security subjected Palestinians to time-consuming and humiliating security procedures. I was told checkpoint stories of the birth of babies, of people dying unable to reach hospitals in time, of senior Palestinian officials held up and embarrassed, and of many other incidents that inflamed the people.

My meetings with Arafat were cordial. He has always been hospitable, and very expressive, with abundant assurances of cooperation (always echoed by the people around him).

By then, meeting with Arabs came easy to me; I was comfortable with their ways. And though I didn’t yet know these Palestinians very well, they certainly knew me. Arafat had already talked with President Mubarak, King Abdullah, and the other major Arab leaders, all of whom had advised cooperation. “They all told me that you are a guy I could trust,” Arafat explained, “who can help me do what I want to do.” He strongly stressed that, and assured me that this was marvelous. “I’m totally committed to the success of your mission,” he went on to tell me. And when I brought up the Trilateral Committee as a venue for further discussion, he went along with that as well, though he added that he wanted to open up discussions in areas other than security — a far more loaded issue than it might have seemed.

On the whole, he was always agreeable, always quick to promise cooperation, but not so quick to deliver on his promises.

It became increasingly evident to me, as Yasser Arafat and I met again and again over the next weeks and months, that this wily old revolutionary could never really bring himself to make the compromises that would lead to a lasting resolution of the conflict. He could never look at concluding a deal that risked his own place in history and his personal legacy. He saw himself as the leader who had never given an inch in compromise, and this was more important to him than concluding and implementing an agreement that caused him to make serious compromises. He’s at the point in his life where he clearly sees his own mortality, and he wants to go out as defiant. “I’m the only Arab general that’s undefeated,” he said to me at one point. “You’re not going to walk behind my funeral like with Sadat and my partner Rabin.”

I began to realize toward the end of my piece of the process that he wasn’t the guy who could bring home the bacon. He wasn’t going to take the risks for peace that Sadat, Rabin, Hussein, Begin, and Barak did. Not when his own legacy and history were at stake and he saw their fate.

Of course he knew he would have to make compromises. And Barak put on the table at Camp David a lot of compromises. The deal might not have been perfect, and he probably could have negotiated a better one; but he didn’t seem to try. He walked out.

I once asked Arafat about that. “Were you close to a deal at Camp David?”

“Oh, yes, very close.”

There are a lot of versions about what happened at Camp David or Taba. Was the deal on the table good or bad? Could it have been further negotiated? I don’t know. Still, I could never fathom why the process ended so abruptly. When you’re close or at least have a process going in the right direction, why do you cut it off?

After my talk with Arafat, I met privately with other Palestinian leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the then number two man and later Prime Minister; Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala’a), the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and Abu Mazen’s successor as Prime Minister; and Sa’eb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority’s Chief Negotiator.

Abu Mazen had been involved in the process for a long time, did not agree with Arafat on many issues, was opposed to the Intifada, and clearly saw what had to be done on the ground pretty much the way we did. He wanted to move to negotiations. But it was clear that he didn’t have any real power; his position as number two didn’t give him much clout. He was not living as the number two guy.

The pecking order was always fuzzy after Arafat. Like every revolutionary leader, he spread out the guns and the authority; he didn’t let anybody who could challenge him have real power. Abu Mazen had stature; he openly disagreed with a lot of the steps Arafat had taken; but there was nothing behind him — no guns, no money, no popular support, no political clout. Yet he said the right things, I thought he meant them, and he had a tremendous reputation; and I thought, “Jeez, too bad this guy doesn’t have a lot more. He makes sense. He’s committed. He’s a realist.”

I had the same impression of Abu Ala’a, the Speaker of the Assembly. Abu Mazen did not last long as Prime Minister. And Abu Ala’a has not had much greater success.

Sa’eb Erekat is the mayor of Jericho — heavyset, balding, highly intelligent, easy to like. Sa’eb is constantly talking. A collector of arguments, he loves to debate (he’s on CNN all the time). He’s been in this process a long time, and by all accounts he is a very honest man. But I wonder if he hasn’t been in the process too long; maybe he’s too caught up in process. He and I got along very well, and I spent a lot of time with him and with his wonderful family at Jericho. (I enjoyed dinner at his home.)

I also got to know the security chiefs from the West Bank and Gaza, Jabril Rajoub and Mohamed Dahlan. These were practical men who could take the security steps necessary IF they were given the authority and backing from the top. Unfortunately, that would not happen.

None of these leaders had real power. Arafat called the game.

From these meetings, I gathered that the Palestinians’ priority was political issues, and their chief concern: Would the Israelis really make political concessions down the road once the security issues were resolved?

I also gathered that there wasn’t much stomach from these leaders to take on the extremists who were perpetrating the horrific suicide attacks. They wanted the Israelis to “end the occupation” and move out of their areas, and then they would deal with the extremists… but through negotiations rather than confrontation.

According to the Tenet/Mitchell plans, taking action against the extremists was the necessary condition for progress on the later steps leading to Palestinian statehood. Failure to take action would thus violate the principles of Tenet/Mitchell that Arafat claimed to have accepted.

For the Israelis, of course, this was an unacceptable risk, not only militarily but politically. No Israeli leader wants to be seen to yield on a point of security without unbreakable guarantees.

All of these roadblocks and potential roadblocks notwithstanding, by the end of the second day I was cautiously optimistic. My personal connections with both sides were good; they’d both be easy to talk to; yet I had no illusions about the probability of success. Each side viewed the problems differently. Worse, they each saw a different path to resolving them.

Bill Burns left on the third day. I was on my own.

We held our first Trilateral Committee meeting shortly after he left. To avoid press and security problems, we held back our announcement of time and place until the last minute for this and all our later meetings.

The crews from each side were the security chiefs from the various Palestinian military forces and their intelligence services and from the Israeli Defense Force and their intelligence representatives. These old rivals were all pros, who knew each other well and seemed to share mutual respect. I didn’t realize how well they all knew each other until they all gathered at our first meeting place. It was all hugs and kisses there, cheery jokes, questions about families, good fellowship.

And then they sat down and started screaming.

At breaks, they’d return to good fellowship.

The screaming bothered me. It’s no way to conduct a negotiation. But there seemed to be a need to vent, and I let it go for the first couple of meetings; after that, I demanded serious discussion and constructive sessions.

Even after they quieted down, results from these initial sessions were mixed. Both sides were reluctant to get serious; for every small step forward we had to suffer through hours of screaming recriminations and accusations; and I left meetings exhausted and frustrated. Yet, with a few exceptions, I came to like these negotiators. They could make it happen, I realized, if they had the support and authority from their political masters. I had to get that. Meanwhile, I needed them to do the painfully difficult work of hammering out the detailed measures that had to be accomplished on the ground.

We made a little progress — at least on one side. The Israelis eased up on their insistence on seven days without attacks and one hundred percent results. They now asked for forty-eight hours of quiet and one hundred percent effort.

But the Palestinians still seemed reluctant to act against the terrorists and take real action (arrests, weapons confiscation, etc.). Despite Arafat’s promise to cooperate, no serious orders to act had been given to his security forces (they privately acknowledged this to me). This was not encouraging. Without Palestinian action against the terrorists, there would be no cease-fire. And without a cease-fire, we could not move forward.

Even more discouraging, our intelligence and Israeli actions indicated that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were stepping up suicide bombing attacks in an effort to derail our mission.

The Israelis actually had great success blocking these attacks, but it was impossible to stop them all. For every ten attempts they foiled or countered, one got through. About every third day during this initial trip, a suicide attack would set back our progress and bring on retaliation attacks, sometimes with tragic collateral casualties, by the Israelis. It was obvious that these attacks would eventually cause the process to collapse. I felt like we were shoveling sand against the tide.

As casualties on both sides mounted, and the inevitable retaliation attacks destroyed Palestinian Authority facilities, anger grew in Israel and the streets of the Palestinian areas. I visited some of the sites of the attacks. The pointless murder of innocents sickened me.

As all this was going on, I worked on the Palestinian security forces to take action to break the cycle of violence: Arresting terrorist leaders would demonstrate their good faith and compliance with the Tenet/Mitchell plans.

They wanted that more than I did, they told me; but the Israelis were screwing them up by tossing on the table not one but many different lists of people they wanted arrested. Palestinian security claimed they were eager to pick up all the bad guys, but only if they had a single, authoritative list to act on.

“Fine,” I told them, “I’ll provide one list, compiled by our [not Israeli] intelligence, that will benchmark your effort.”

I gave them a list of thirty-three men who were on every list of bad guys; nobody had any doubt of their guilt.

Very little happened. Arrests were made; but only a few of them, at best, were real; and many of the “arrested” were actually either free or living under loose house arrest.

It was clear that the security heads would not — or could not — take any real action without a major commitment and direct order from Arafat. And Arafat was not about to give that order.

During the next three weeks, I continued my Trilateral Committee meetings, I met frequently with Sharon and Arafat and their lieutenants, but I also met with international leaders and representatives from numerous organizations and nations. All of them offered support.

The “Quad,” or “Quartet” (the U.S., the UN, the European Union, and Russia), was an especially important and helpful group. The UN, EU, and Russian representatives — Terje Larson, Miguel Moratinos, and Andrei Vdovin — became friends of mine, and provided tireless support for my mission. The EU representative Javier Solana visited several times to offer assistance and encouragement.

I also talked frequently with leaders from the region, particularly old friends from Arab nations. Both their frustration and their strong desire to see our mission work were evident.

On a more personal level, I tried to get a sense of ordinary people on both sides. I really wanted to know them and to understand their situation and views. I attended ceremonies and observances in Israel and in Palestinian areas. I ate meals with Israeli and Palestinian families. I ate dinner in both East and West Jerusalem. Everywhere, I was deeply touched by the desperate desire for peace. “Don’t give up,” everyone pleaded, with one voice. People on the street came up to me to beg me to hang in there. I visited Gaza and saw the awful conditions in the crowded refugee camps. On one occasion, I met with the kids from Seeds of Peace. “Why can’t the adults figure it out?” they asked with heartrending openness. “We have.”

For my own sanity and well-being, I worked out at the Marine House that billeted the Marine security detachment at our consulate in Jerusalem; and I sometimes dined with these hard-charging Leather-necks to keep my spirits up. Through them, I met Father Peter Vasko, an American Franciscan (the order has responsibility for the care of Christian sites in Jerusalem for the Catholic Church). Father Peter, the Marines’ unofficial chaplain, decided to look after my spiritual welfare as well. I sometimes ate with the Franciscans at their monastery, attended Sunday Mass with them, and enjoyed evenings talking to these dedicated and devout monks. Father Peter gave me a fascinating tour of the Old City.

One evening, the Custos (the Vatican custodian of the holy sites and the Franciscan superior in Jerusalem) presented me with the Papal Gold Cross for my efforts for peace in the region.

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” I told him when I accepted the award, “though I’m deeply distressed that we haven’t been more successful.”

“It’s important that we try,” he said in response. “That’s justification enough.”

I also met the Christian patriarchs from the sixteen other denominations who shared responsibility for the Christian sites. These holy men never failed to remind me that the Christians in the region had serious and long-standing concerns that the major combatants often ignored.

During my frequent meetings with Sharon and Arafat (never together; these two old rivals couldn’t stand each other), I tried to organize a senior-level political committee below Sharon and Arafat to oversee our efforts and provide a high-level group where we could open other areas for discussion besides security matters. I saw this committee as being made up of people at the ministerial level, like Abu Mazen and Abu Ala’a, the senior Palestinians, and Shimon Peres and Ben Eleazar, on the Israeli side, with me, perhaps, as the U.S. representative. This oversight body would oversee the security measures taken on the ground, and (I hoped) resolve differences, disagreements, or reports of violations. But on top of that, it could also open the political dialogue; and in so doing we might square the circle — satisfy the Palestinian demand for political progress without compromising the Israeli demand for security before negotiations on political issues could begin. That is, we might not make political commitments; yet a beginning of talk on these issues would give the Palestinians a sense that we were fulfilling expectations. This in turn would build confidence. In this way, we’d be opening a two-track approach: On one track, security. On the second, parallel track, political issues. I thought this parallel approach might get us around the sequentialism issue that was proving to be such a stumbling block.

Sharon was a little unsure about all this. “Why should we make political commitments up front?” he told me. “It looks like we’re caving in to terrorism and doing it under the pressure of violence.” He was leery of big political steps. Big political steps would show his hand; and he never showed his hand. Neither did Arafat. I never actually knew what either of them was really after or what they saw as a long-term solution.

Sharon would surely take security steps up front. And I’m convinced that if he had the right security cooperation from the other side, he would withdraw from certain areas, move certain checkpoints. I think he could implement the entire Tenet plan without a problem. Now when he got down the road, would he make the kind of political commitments on settlements and other more difficult issues (such as Barak offered)? That remained to be seen.

The Palestinians were very leery that he could or would do any of that. They were convinced that he’d be glad to move forward on Tenet and get the security concessions out of the way; but he would stall on political progress once the security situation leveled off.

In my mind that was always a possibility. I simply wasn’t sure. Would he move forward or not? I can’t say. He could definitely start a process. I wasn’t sure whether he could finish one.

As for the other side — I don’t think Arafat could even start it.

Sharon and Arafat eventually came around and agreed to set up the committee; but for one reason or another, we could never get it off the ground.

For three weeks we tried to get something started, to get an agreement working on the ground and to get the violence tamped down. It didn’t work.

I knew time was running out and we were close to it all falling apart.

The attacks and retaliations escalated. Targeted assassinations by the Israelis sometimes spilled over and killed nearby innocents. The Israelis had suffered a large number of casualties; innocents on buses or in cafes were brutally slaughtered by suicide bombers — young brainwashed Palestinians, agonized by the plight of their people. We were one event away from collapse.

It came on December 12 when a suicide bomber blew up a bus near the settlement town of Emmanuel. Ten Israelis were killed and thirty wounded. This brought the total killed since I’d arrived to forty-four, and it ended the Israeli willingness to continue the talks. They were now going to retaliate big-time. Arafat’s headquarters in Gaza, his helicopters, and many of his government facilities were bombed.

I was deeply dismayed that things had not worked out.

Many nights I had stood on my small balcony at the King David gazing at the softly lighted Old City of Jerusalem. I knew of no other place on earth that had seen so much glory and triumph and so much sorrow and violence, all in the name of religion.

It was decided that I would come back to the States for consultations, rather than stand helplessly by while the spiral of violence continued, and there was no immediate hope of talks.

Before we left, I was joined by Bill Burns; and on the way home we passed through Jordan and Egypt to talk to King Abdullah and President Mubarak. Since I knew both of them well, it was not easy to call on them after our failure to make progress. Both of them had high expectations and hopes for peace; and I felt their disappointment and frustration.

I arrived back in the U.S. on the seventeenth of December, and debriefed the President and Secretary Powell on the twentieth. They were still determined to make this work — a most encouraging development. The President thanked me for my efforts, and the Secretary told me to be ready to reengage when things settled down.

“I’ll be ready to go back at any time,” I told him.

In the days following, both Sharon and Arafat sent letters to the President asking for my return. In his reply, the President insisted on more action on the ground to curb the violence; but the news from Secretary Powell was slightly more positive. He asked me to prepare to go back after the holidays… if the situation improved.

Over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays I reflected on my trip: It seemed to me that the extremists were calling the shots. If it looked like we were making progress or creating hope for a peaceful resolution, they would attack with a vengeance, knowing retaliatory strikes would follow and talks would break down. Unless Palestinian security forces put genuine effort into curbing these attacks, there was no hope.

On a personal level, I knew that both sides had tested me at every opportunity, trying to measure my commitment and impartiality. On a more positive note, I felt I had made connections on both sides and had the trust of key people; and with the exception of a few members who felt compelled to create political theater (outrageous political statements, heated diatribes, screaming), I liked the makeup of the Trilateral Committee. Yet if I went back, I was determined to put an end to the screaming and the diatribes. The time for venting and posturing was past.

My greatest conviction: We could make progress if we could get a break in the violence.

As I followed the daily news, I sensed that things were quieting down.

The Palestinians had grown desperate. The Israelis had destroyed their headquarters in Gaza; Arafat was pinned down in Ramallah (the Israelis refused to let him go anywhere); things were coming apart; and they didn’t know what the Israelis would do next. Was Sharon going to take out Arafat?

The Israelis were also in a bind. Sharon had tried negotiating; and when that broke down, he’d tried a powerful military incursion. Now he seemed to have spent most of his options. He had to be asking himself, “What do I have to do to get this monkey off my back?” He was under a lot of political pressure, and hadn’t produced anything. He was getting a lot of bad world press as a result of the heavy retaliatory attacks.

So I think that for different reasons they were both desperate to get this thing restarted.

The decision was made for me to return immediately after the holidays. But this time there would be a different approach: Our visit was to be short, only four days. We would convene the Trilateral Committee, and give them very specific tasks and goals to accomplish over the course of two to three weeks. During that time, Aaron would return to determine whether or not there was significant progress. If there was, I would return to move to the next phase.

There were several reasons for this approach: First, we had to take the “theater” out of the meetings. With me out of the way, the temptation to waste time in heated rhetoric would be gone. Second, we had to force both sides to put more effort into bilateral communication and coordination, and not to rely on us to arbitrate every issue. Third, we wanted to take away our high profile, which drew press focus that was frequently disruptive. Fourth, low-key talks (unburdened of my continuous, direct involvement) might reduce the extremists’ will — and opportunity — to use terrorist attacks to break up the talks.

ROUND TWO

Aaron and I left for Israel on January 2, 2002, and arrived on the third.

As soon as we landed, we were briefed by the Israelis on an impending takedown operation: A ship in the Red Sea, the Karine A, had sailed from Iran with fifty tons of illegal weapons and ordnance ordered by the Palestinian Authority — a serious violation of the Oslo Agreement. Under that agreement, the Authority was permitted certain weapons and ordnance for their security. Though they actually had more weapons than the agreement permitted, the Israelis had looked the other way, as long as the excess weapons of the security forces were limited to small arms. But on the Karine A were Katyusha rockets, 120-millimeter mortars, and other high-caliber weapons systems, as well as explosives, mines, and demolitions. All this went way beyond Oslo.

The Israelis were planning to grab the ship when it moved into international waters, which would be around noon the following day. (The operation had to take place in international waters, rather than, for example, Saudi territorial waters.)

This news put me in a fury; it was a total surprise to me. No one had briefed us on it before we left the States, and now it threatened to derail our efforts before they even got off the ground… Later, to my immense relief, both the Israelis and the Palestinians kept their cool and did not use the takedown as an excuse to back away from the Trilateral Committee meetings or our proposed plan. Still, my mission was once again off to a less-than-desirable start.

The next morning at Prime Minister Sharon’s farm in southern Israel, I received more information on the pending operation: It would occur at noon during my first scheduled meeting with Chairman Arafat in Ramallah. Before I left the farm, I asked Sharon if I could break the news of the Karine A to Arafat. I wanted to see the look on Arafat’s face when I told him about it.

“Yes,” he said, “but don’t do it before noon. That’s when we’re going to run the takedown.”

Later that morning, I met with the members of the Quad, who recommitted to working with us. Since they had significant influence on the Palestinians, they proved to be invaluable in facilitating progress on confidence-building actions during my return to the U.S.; their permanent representatives added greatly to the undertakings of our embassy and consulate.

I flew to Ramallah, where I had a typically pleasant meeting with Arafat; he once again promised to take the actions necessary to implement the Tenet plan.

Noon came and we began preparing for lunch.

“Umm,” I asked myself, “should I give him the word during lunch?” I thought on that. “No,” I concluded, “I’ll wait till afterward.”

About halfway through the meal, people all of a sudden started running around with panicked looks, cell phones were firing up, aides were whispering in Arafat’s ear. I can understand enough Arabic to pick up on alarms and excitement. They had gotten word of the Karine A takedown.

I watched Arafat across the table, trying to gauge his reaction. He seemed both confused and dismissive. (One of his defense mechanisms is to deny bad news and seem indifferent to it, both at the same time.)

Finally, I asked him, “What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing. Forget it.”

“Well,” I said, “I know about the Karine A, I know about its cargo, and I know the Israelis were going to mount an operation to take it down. It looks like they’ve done that.”

“That is not true,” he shot back. “This was not our ship. It’s an Israeli plot. This is an Israeli setup.”

I gave him a skeptical smile and a shake of the head.

But later, after the ship’s master admitted Palestinian Authority involvement and the TV news was filled with pictures of the ship and the huge amount of weapons aboard, Arafat vowed to investigate. The investigation never happened.

Meanwhile, I gave Arafat’s top subordinates a warning. “Look,” I told them, “you better think hard about how you want to respond to this thing. I’m not sure it will be a good idea to try to shift the blame… or claim an Israeli plot. There’s evidence that leads right back to you. We and the Israelis know that Chairman Arafat made payments to the Iranians, bought the weapons, and chartered the ship; we know that the captain of the ship is a Palestinian Authority guy; and he is now spilling his guts.”

The situation was obviously looking bad for the Palestinians.

At this point, Arafat dumped the blame on one of his own people. It was an obvious scam. The guy could never have put out that kind of money without Arafat knowing about it.

There was no doubt that Arafat had his hand in the cookie jar big-time, and I was in fact just a little shocked that the Israelis didn’t just say, “Screw the talks.”

So the Israelis really surprised me by ignoring Arafat’s trickery. They just let it pass. They now had a tremendous military success, and they were proud of it — not only because it was a well-executed military operation but, more important, it put them at an advantage over him. “No, go on with the talks,” they said. “We’re not going to do anything.” Yet every day they released more pictures of the Karine A and the weapons they found in its hold.

For a change they had cleverly handled a potentially messy event. Usually they just went in there with brute force. This time, they put the Palestinians on the defensive in a really slick way.

I spent the next day in Jerusalem and Jericho with Palestinian officials, urging them to take serious action against the extremists who were responsible for the violence and to make a genuine commitment in the Trilateral Committee to implementing the Tenet plan. As always, they seemed willing to move forward, but were unable to take real steps in that direction because authorization had not come from the top.

On the sixth, at our initial Trilateral meeting of this session, I laid out our plan… pleasantly surprised at the absence of the usual theatrical outbursts. Everyone immediately accepted our proposals to work with each other and with our representatives on the ground to meet our timetables and goals. I began to think that our new approach to the talks might succeed. The takedown of the Karine A just may have had a sobering effect on everybody. My hopes were up.

The next day, Aaron and I left for the States with renewed hope. I couldn’t wait for the next trip.

Over the next two months, my heart sank. The spiral of violence grew more horrific. The continuing violence, together with Arafat’s failure to do more to stop it, diminished President Bush’s faith in the peace process. In his view, the Karine A affair had taken the credibility of Arafat to a new low. It was hard to see how he could rebuild it. Members of Arafat’s own political movement and security forces were now taking part in the attacks against Israel.

As a result, the plan for me to go back was put on hold.

In February, a small measure of hope returned when Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a truly remarkable offer: If there was a peace agreement, the Saudis would recognize the State of Israel. Twenty-two other Arab nations supported this initiative.

It started to get a momentum of its own; and the President decided that it represented an opening. In a Rose Garden speech on March 7, with Vice President Cheney and Secretary Powell by his side, he announced that I would return to the region for another attempt to get a cease-fire and implementation of the Tenet plan. During this time, the Vice President and Secretary Powell would also visit the region. The Vice President would travel to ten countries and link up with me at the end of his journey. This was a high-level effort to get things moving. I was scheduled to leave in mid-March.

ROUND THREE

We took off on March 13. As our Continental Airlines jet approached Tel Aviv, the passengers began to sing songs of peace. They knew I was on board; they were singing encouragement.

Since our last trip, there had been an endless series of attacks and counterattacks. The Israelis had occupied most of the Palestinian territories and Arafat remained restricted to his Ramallah headquarters. The U.S. had pressed Sharon to withdraw his forces as I arrived, in order to establish a positive environment for my mission. One of my first pieces of business was to determine Sharon’s reply.

After I deplaned, I went through the now-standard briefings, then went immediately to see Prime Minister Sharon. He had positive news: He would withdraw his forces from Area A, the areas in Palestinian territory previously agreed to be under their security force control.[87]

The good news meant the trip was off to a positive start, but I knew that gestures of goodwill didn’t last long in this environment.

The second day brought things back to reality as nine Palestinian kids were killed by a mine in Gaza near security positions protecting Israeli settlements. It was almost certainly planted by the Israelis to take out people trying to sneak up and fire onto these positions. What happened, I think, is the kids got in there to play, something went wrong, and the mine went off. Accusations flew: Was this a remotely detonated mine controlled by the IDF? If so, did the IDF deliberately kill the kids?

Wherever truth lay, the incident gave the Palestinians a club to beat the Israelis with. Inevitably, the controversy made my mission harder.

Yet in my meetings over the next few days with senior Israeli and Palestinianofficials and key members of the Trilateral Committee, I sensed a far more serious focus and readiness than ever before to make the process work. I had given all the participants homework in my absence, and they had actually done it: I had asked them to list what they could agree on and how they understood the agreement. And then I wanted them to list their disagreements, so we could focus on these.

To my enormous surprise, they weren’t that far apart. I’d expected a debate on every issue. I’d expected they’d be all over the map. But that didn’t happen. They were actually pretty close. Right at the beginning, there was a lot they could work with.

The first Trilateral Committee meetings were extremely encouraging. There were no political statements, heated accusations, or theatrics. Every member was ready to work. Each side developed a first cut at “a Tenet Work Plan,” detailing their take on the measures and timelines needed for implementation.

In subsequent meetings, we succeeded in dramatically reducing the differences. I was able to report to Washington that progress was exciting. If the attacks didn’t derail us before we gained agreement, I felt we just might start the process I had been sent out to put in place.

The third day brought the first terrorist attack. “Oh, shit,” I thought. “Now the Israelis will hit back. And we can forget about progress.”

But the Israelis, surprisingly, held back. They did not retaliate. And that gave us a small opening… I knew this would close if attacks continued.

Vice President Cheney visited on the eighteenth and nineteenth of March. We had meetings with the Israeli leadership, but decided Cheney couldn’t meet with Arafat until he had done more to curb terrorist attacks. I delivered the message to Arafat that Cheney was willing to meet with him in Cairo on as little as a week’s notice, once we saw real progress in stopping the attacks.

Arafat was disappointed that Cheney was avoiding him. He loves the big time. He loves the red carpet and the cameras. He loves to be out there on the world’s stage meeting heads of state. And here he was, pinned down by Sharon in Ramallah for four long months. So when I offered him a chance to go to Cairo to meet Mubarak and Cheney, his face lit up. He’d be out from under this crushing restriction.

We thought we might encourage Arafat to order real actions, such as arrests and weapons confiscation. We were wrong. In the next two days, suicide attacks killed a number of Israelis in a bus and street bombing. He had done nothing.

In Washington, meanwhile, the President and Vice President made statements that I would be the one who determined if Arafat should get the meeting with Cheney. “Thanks a lot!” They both knew Sharon was set against the meeting; and there was a lot of pressure at home against a meeting with Arafat. So they pinned that rose on me.

Okay, I’m a big boy. But I knew I had to be careful.

I looked at Arafat and I told him what he had to do; and when it came down to the crunch, he didn’t do it. On the twenty-second of March, I delivered the news to a sullen and disappointed Arafat that there would be no meeting.

Somehow, we managed to work through the attacks and setbacks, and the progress we were making encouraged everyone to refrain from retaliatory action. We were apparently very close to agreement.

On the twenty-fourth, I made a decision I was later to regret. Since we were down to only a few differences, I wanted to close the deal. But it was clear time would run out on us eventually, as long as the attacks continued. So I decided to put forth my own proposals to expedite the process and resolve the remaining issues. When we started, I thought I had written in stone that there would never be “a Zinni plan.” There were already enough plans out there. All the possible issues were already covered. Everyone knew what had to be done. The problem was doing it. I had always been convinced that the Israelis and Palestinians had to work that out themselves.

Still, I couldn’t resist the temptation to close the last gap.

The plan, known as “the Zinni Bridging Proposals,” was intended to do just that — bridge the remaining gaps and differences.

I tried to make it absolutely clear that these proposals were not a make-or-break thing. “I’m putting suggestions on the table, not demands,” I told everybody concerned. “You don’t have to accept them. If you can’t, there’s no harm, no foul. This works for either side. We’ll simply take them off the table, and then go back to working things out together.”

As we were initially presenting these proposals, preparations were under way for the annual Arab Summit, to be held in Beirut starting the twenty-fifth. Two big issues were then in the air. But the first — would Sharon allow Arafat to attend? — was dominating the media and political exchanges to the detriment of the second and far more important one — Crown Prince Abdullah’s proposal to recognize the state of Israel. The proposal was to be formally presented at the summit; its acceptance would be a giant step.

We were under a great deal of time pressure. If we could conclude an agreement before the summit, Arafat would be allowed to attend, make a speech, and be in his glory; and the summit’s focus would be on Abdullah’s historic proposal and not on the problems of Yasser Arafat.

Meanwhile, the Israelis had a number of reservations to my bridging proposals, but promised to study them and get me a quick response. After they looked at them (and it didn’t take them long), they came up with thirteen objections — all of them serious. They didn’t think they’d be able to accept them. “We’re going to think about all this for a bit,” they told me, “but it looks like we can’t go for it.” I waited. They thought about it; and some of Sharon’s top advisers (including some hard-liners like Mofaz) went to the Prime Minister; the debate went on late into the night, but they finally came up with a position: “Even though we have serious objections, let’s go with Zinni. Let’s just accept his plan as is. Let’s not be the ones accused of holding back peace. Let’s move on this.”

On the twenty-sixth, the Israelis called to tell me they had accepted the proposal with no reservations. I was astonished. I had expected it would be really tough to get agreement from the Israelis, and they would take a hell of a long time to negotiate. But somehow they had found a way to accept the deal.

The Palestinians had only three reservations. Two were minor administrative matters that we dealt with easily; but the third was a showstopper: We wanted to reestablish the security situation as it was prior to the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000; and the bridge proposal had a phased approach to this goal. The determination about whether or not to move into the subsequent phases depended upon performance measures monitored by teams we proposed, which would then be approved by the Trilateral Committee. The proposal additionally called for the establishing of a senior committee of leaders from the U.S., Israel, and the Palestinian Authority who would arbitrate any disagreements arising from this process. Finally, the two committees could agree to move ahead, even if some measures had not been achieved according to the timelines outlined, as long as good faith was shown.

The Palestinians did not want to be held to measurable actions — such as monitored arrests and weapons confiscations — and this came through very clearly. Privately, some of them told me that Arafat would never order action against terrorist groups, regardless of what he told us. Without that order, no security force commander could take action.

I hoped we could work through this issue; but I was beginning to sense that Arafat never intended to carry out the actions described in the Tenet plan, which he had agreed to in principle. I believe the Palestinians hoped the Israelis would be forced to accept measurable steps that they had to execute — such as withdrawals — while they could get away with just trying to talk the extremist groups into a cease-fire.

The pressure was now on the Palestinians; but I couldn’t get them to reply.

“Okay,” I told them, “then you don’t accept the proposals. That means they’re off the table. Okay, let’s go back to the committee negotiations with no hard feelings. But let’s move on.”

“No, they’re not off the table,” they countered; they didn’t want to turn them down because of the negative reaction they anticipated. “We are not opposed to them. We just need to talk further about them.”

“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “We’ve got to hurry! I need an answer!”

Meanwhile, the other Arabs got wind of the proposals, and they were putting a lot of pressure on Arafat to accept the bridging proposals.

All the while, the Palestinians were caught up in the question of Arafat’s trip to Beirut. Since Sharon was not inclined to let him go, they were looking at alternative means, like videoconferencing, for him to address the summit. The issue occupied their attention to the exclusion of everything else. The bridging proposals got shunted to one side.

Sharon was making a hero, a martyr, and a victim out of Arafat. The American government pressed him to let Arafat go, but the gut hatred between those two is so bad he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Of course, this enhanced Arafat’s stature on the street and played into everything that he was doing. It was a mistake. The conference started as scheduled on the twenty-fifth without Arafat. Even the teleconferencing option fell through.

Time was running out.

March 27 was Passover, and I had accepted an invitation to a Seder dinner with an Israeli family. During the meal, news came of a horrific suicide bombing at a Passover celebration in a hotel restaurant, with heavy casualties. This bombing had a tremendous effect on the people of Israel. It was their 9/11.

I knew immediately we had come to the end of our road.

Soon afterward, I talked with Ben Eliezer, the Defense Minister. “I don’t know what we’ll do,” he told me. “But we’re ready to retaliate. And if we do, we’re going to have to do something big. That will probably end peace talks for now. The only thing that can save this thing is if Arafat accepts the bridging proposals.”

I called Arafat. “You’ve got to condemn the bombing in the strongest terms,” I urged him. “And you’ve got to make a decision on the proposal. You’ve got to give us something to keep the talks alive. Otherwise, the Israeli retaliation is going to be severe.”

He hemmed and hawed, and I never received a reply on the proposal. Other Arab leaders continued to press him to accept the proposal; they knew what was coming if he did not.

The displeasure of the other Arabs presented Arafat with a problem. Since he didn’t want to get in hot water with them, he had to dump blame on somebody else (he is not inclined to accept blame himself), and blamed me (which was quite a shock) — accusing me of conspiring with the Israelis. “The bridging proposals are part of a plot to force unacceptable terms on us,” he told Arab leaders. His Palestinian leaders repeated these charges on TV.

I was incensed. I called some of the Palestinians who were making these accusations (people I thought were friends who knew better), and really unloaded on them. “Hey, it’s only business,” they answered. “We know none of this is true, but don’t take it personally. It’s just stuff that we have to say.” They really pissed me off.

My anger was somewhat lessened when I received reassuring calls from Arab friends, like Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. They did not believe the Palestinian accusations; they still trusted my honesty and appreciated my efforts. These calls greatly lifted my morale.

Now we had to wait for the Israeli attack. I knew it wouldn’t be long in coming. As I waited, a couple of lights dawned on me, really hit me hard: First, I realized that we had never been close to an agreement. Arafat was never going to rein in Hamas. Second, the Zinni bridging proposals were a terrible idea. By putting forward proposals of my own, I gave Arafat a target he could lay blame on. (The Israelis could have done the same thing.) And that’s what he did. He said the proposals were pro-Israeli (though if anything, the Israelis had more objections to them than the Palestinians; they were very apprehensive about agreeing to the proposals). I ended up giving them an excuse for failure that they could peddle around the Arab world. I should never have given them that excuse. Without it they would have had to sink or swim on their own.

At this point, Washington made the decision to keep me in place and not bring me home, which would have been the normal thing to do under the circumstances. It was a wise decision.

Over the next week, the Israelis unleashed a devastating attack on the Palestinians; really hammered them hard. We watched helplessly as virtually all Palestinian Authority government buildings and facilities were destroyed. Casualties mounted, and Arafat’s headquarters, the Muqatta’a, was under siege and half destroyed. There were other sieges at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Palestinian security headquarters for the West Bank. The town of Jenin was under systematic destructive attack.

For us it was a period of crisis management, dealing with desperate calls from Palestinians asking for help in handling all sorts of dramatic humanitarian situations. We tried our best to respond to each request. And we were constantly asking the Israelis to pull back from some incursion, to let help through where people were desperate, to de-conflict forces, or to provide emergency aid; but of course the Israelis were not in a very good mood to cooperate. Still, we could always find people in place and put pressure on them.

We had a lot of questions about what we were doing. Was it our job? The answer was nobody else was doing it. “Yes, we have to,” I said. “If it saves lives, we’ve gotta do it.” So we ended up becoming like a 911 emergency coordination team, and I think we did save lives.

Meanwhile, we worked for a quick end to the Israeli attacks. President Bush and many other world leaders called for restraint, an end to the attacks, and a withdrawal.

As the siege continued, it looked increasingly likely that Arafat himself might become a casualty, or if that didn’t happen, forcibly expelled from the region.

By then, Arafat’s Muqatta’a headquarters had been turned into Berlin in the spring of 1945. It was now surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers. Everything was blown down, the compound walls crushed, the cars in the parking lot destroyed. A pall of smoke and dust covered everything.

And nobody was talking. Sharon wanted to totally isolate Arafat. No outsider could see him. In retaliation, Arafat had refused to allow his leaders to meet with anyone until the siege was lifted or they came to see him first.

Sharon had stonewalled President Bush’s demand to end the attacks and incursions. It was therefore important for me not to sit idly by, but to keep pushing for meetings and contacts to signal our mission was not dead. I decided to break the impasse and visit Arafat, with the hope of restarting our meetings. Sharon didn’t object. So my security guys saddled up in their SWAT gear — black helmets, Kevlar, the whole deal — and off we went.

It was tense crossing the five-hundred-yard no-man’s-land between the IDF forces and the bombed-out building complex where Arafat and his security forces were barricaded. When the media heard I was going in, they came rushing out; but the Israelis shot at them and drove them off (some cameras were able to get pictures).

I walked the last yards and came to barricaded windows, the walls were blasted by tanks, Palestinian gunmen were at the doors, and I had to walk through this rubble to see Arafat.

Peace activists from the States and Europe had somehow made it in through Israeli lines. The hall- and passageways, where the activists were living, were overcrowded; there was hardly room for all of them. There was no electricity, no phone lines (and I’d noticed an IDF communications-jamming van outside to cut off calls), little water, and only sporadic food. The place smelled bad. Things were grim.

I met Arafat in a dimly lit little room; there was a semiautomatic weapon by his side. All of his aides looked like drowned rats, stressed out and beaten; but he was in his glory, upbeat and animated, more alert and fired up than I had ever seen him. The siege had brought out the fighter in him.

“I am under siege,” he announced dramatically, enjoying the hell out of the moment. This was what he lived for. This was an old revolutionary in his element.

That was okay. If he was having a great time, fine. But my aim in visiting him was to break the impasse with Sharon. Thankfully, that happened. Arafat agreed to let his people meet with me, and so I was able to keep up our contacts.

I met with some Palestinian leaders at a onetime casino in Jericho (now shut down because of the conflict). It was a somber meeting. We discussed where to go and what to do next. We made some progress. Defused some bad situations. Got some sieges lifted. Probably saved some lives but not much more.

But I knew the process was dead.

On Easter Sunday, I attended Mass with Father Peter at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher and walked in the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ had prayed before His betrayal and crucifixion. The olive trees in there — huge, gnarled, old things — went back to the time of Christ.

All this gave a much-needed spiritual boost… though I’ve got to say that I have a pretty good idea how Christ must have felt in the garden.

Secretary Powell came to the region on the eleventh of April to try to stop the Israeli attacks. The impact of that Passover bombing had struck at the core of the Israelis’ psyche. That was when Sharon finally wrote off Arafat. There would be nothing to do with Arafat, nothing. He refused absolutely to back down from that position.

The Secretary and I met with Israeli leaders, then went out to see Arafat in his gutted compound. We worked hard to arrange a relief of the siege. The stumbling block was two men inside the compound who were wanted by the Israelis. The pair had killed the Israeli Minister of Tourism Ze’evi months before; Arafat had refused to give them up; and the Israelis were close to a decision to storm the buildings. If anything bad happened to Arafat — and it didn’t matter what, death, injury, capture, or exile — it could end up being a disaster. We worked out a deal. The pair were to be jailed in Jericho by the Palestinians, but under U.S. and U.K. monitors. We also worked with others to relieve sieges in other West Bank areas.

For the next few days, Secretary Powell, Bill Burns, and I tried to find ways to salvage our mission, but the immediate future was looking terribly grim. By the end of these meeting, I believe that Powell had also lost faith in Arafat’s will to move forward on the peace process. Soon after his return to the States, the President reached a decision that we couldn’t deal with Arafat; he was a lost cause; and the Palestinian Authority had to be re-formed. By June, the United States made that position clear. Unless the Palestinian Authority was re-formed, and somebody other than Arafat was in charge, we weren’t going to do business.

Meanwhile, one of my daughters was about to be married, and I wanted to return home for her wedding. When nobody came up with objections, I prepared to leave, promising to return if needed. I left on the fifteenth of April.

For the next year, the process went nowhere. I remained under the contract with State Department; but it was clear the administration wouldn’t call on me again.

I did meet with Israelis and Palestinians on a number of occasions, especially at IGCC sessions in Brussels and Athens in the months after my departure. Each time I was asked when I would return. I had to answer, sadly, that I doubted that I would be sent back.

On March 1, 2003, I resigned my position with the State Department. It was pointless to remain under contract and keep the title of Special Advisor to the Secretary of State knowing that I wouldn’t be called upon again. By then, concerns I had voiced about the impending Iraq war made me persona non grata with the administration.

What could we have done that was different?

For starters, there should not have been another special envoy. The expectations and media attention become a detriment to progress with a high-visibility envoy. Also, it was time to get away from personalities. We needed worker bees.

Second, and more broadly, what we were trying to do was take that very small match, light a very narrow fuse, and hope it burned evenly all the way along. We were trying to construct peace by taking sequential steps along a path. Everything hinged not only on the sequence but on each very fragile and vulnerable step. All the focus went on these steps — media, people, leaders. And it’s all too easy to disrupt. Too easy to break. Too easy to attack. And peace fails.

What we need to do instead is put a large delegation on the ground, with a political component, a security component, an economic component, and a monitoring component. The delegation should come from the United States, the Quad, and any others from the international community that we can interest in the process. We should light a thousand fires instead of one fuse with one match. We need to find small positive actions, tiny cooperative measures. We need to go into towns like Jericho, where there aren’t many problems, and start some projects. We also need to start some joint model projects — a joint economic project here, a security arrangement there. While we continue trying to build on the Tenet/Mitchell plans or the President’s “Roadmap to Peace” (which was put forward in June 2002 and covers much the same territory), we’ll have other things generating activity, and giving a sense of momentum or progress to build hope. This is all going to be slow, but it will also go forward on a broad front. It’ll get there in time.

Third, the Palestinian Authority must be re-formed. But those that step up to the challenge like Abu Mazen and Abu Ala’a have to be given support and clout. This can only come from tangible U.S. support for them and from serious negotiations with them by the Israeli leadership.

ACEH

My involvement with the HDC as one of their Wise Men did not cease during my time in the Middle East.

During the first week of February 2002, we held a session in Geneva with representatives of the government of Indonesia and the GAM. The government of Indonesia’s chief representative was retired Ambassador Wiryono and the GAM’s chief representatives were Dr. Zaini Abdullah and Malik Haythar Mohmood. These negotiators were civil and cooperative. I did not see the kinds of theatrical outbursts I had seen in the Middle East; I had a sense that each wanted a successful and peaceful resolution to the issues.

Still, it was a tough meeting with intense negotiating periods. The two sides and the HDC mediators made considerable use of the Wise Men — in addition to me: Surin Pitsuwan, Budamir Loncur, Lord Eric Avebury. These brilliant and experienced statesmen added a great deal to the negotiations. Each negotiating party called on us to provide advice on developing issues and recommendations on constructing points for agreement. We were most effective when discussions hit an impasse and needed a “push.”

The Wise Men were also joined by an additional pair of outside experts in the art of negotiating, who provided valuable insights on procedure and processes.

This new approach (designed by the Henri Dunant Centre) of bringing in multiple parties beyond the traditional three has caused me to look hard at other nontraditional approaches to conflict resolution. This is a critical area that must have a great deal more study and development.

The Aceh process went through several steps.

The first session was aimed at achieving an agreement to accept the political process and get a cease-fire. Though this was far from easy (for all the reasons and issues discussed earlier), we got that.

In the second session we worked with the government to persuade them to make an offer on special autonomy, and then to draft a proposal. Once that had been achieved, we worked with the GAM to get them to understand it.

The third session put together what we called a cessation of hostilities agreement, which was the mechanism through which they would turn this into a political and a peaceful process.

The February meeting ended with the parties signing an agreement titled “Points for Further Consideration.” This was an agreement to continue to meet and a commitment to a peaceful resolution to the problems in Aceh. This was progress. I had learned that signing meant commitment.

We met again in early May outside Geneva, with much larger delegations from both sides, in a beautiful Alpine Swiss estate offered to us as a venue to provide privacy (there was growing press interest). It was an environment conducive to constructive negotiations.

This session produced a more substantive agreement to cease hostilities and pursue a political process to resolve differences. We Wise Men earned our keep — struggling with precise wording of the agreement that would satisfy each party.

All was not sweetness and light, however. I sensed a major roadblock that would later on prove fatal.

The government had proposed a political process with elections; but these elections did not include independence as an option. In the government’s view, the GAM would be no more than one political organization among others that might represent the people in the context of special autonomy.

The GAM leadership could not live with that. They could not bring themselves to publicly disavow their aspirations for independence. The best they could do was accept a nonviolent political process, with elections at the end, that allowed the people to decide whether to accept the government’s offer of special autonomy or opt for independence.

This was a serious impasse, with Jakarta pressing GAM to formally disavow independence as a goal, and GAM refusing to take that step. (They could not even tacitly accept special autonomy without formally acknowledging it, knowing with certainty that independence was not in the cards.)

All that aside, the agreement for a process and a cessation of hostilities was enough to move forward. It seemed to me that if independence didn’t become an immediate issue, we might resolve the block down the road through further negotiations.

Special autonomy was itself no small matter, from the government’s point of view. It set a precedent that could cause problems with other provinces (which is why hard-liners in the government continued to want to resolve the issue with greater military force). Meanwhile, the moderates, headed by the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, worked to convince President Megawati to accept this peaceful measure.

As the session closed, the mood was upbeat and positive; and I hoped we could sidestep the independence issue until constructive actions started happening on the ground in Aceh.

In august I traveled to Singapore and Indonesia, where I met with Minister Yudhoyono, General Sutarto (the chief of staff of the Indonesian military), and other government officials. They all expressed a strong desire to produce a comprehensive proposal on special autonomy and a process for implementing a peaceful resolution to the conflict. We agreed to work with them on this effort.

I also traveled to Aceh to get a firsthand sense of the situation there. There, I met with local government officials, GAM members, and ordinary people who were caught in the middle of the struggle. Over ten thousand of them had been killed so far, and many more had suffered from atrocities committed by both sides. They were tired of this painful conflict.

A drive through the countryside and jungle areas with HDC representatives brought on an eerie sense of déjà vu; it was like going back to Vietnam.

I had a great deal of respect for the small HDC staff on the ground in Aceh and their local employees. It took courage and commitment to work in this environment; and I could sense their determination to work for positive change.

I left the region encouraged that a peaceful resolution could be achieved there. Though I knew progress would be difficult, I felt the momentum would rapidly grow if we could get a process going on the ground.

In september, we met at Versailles to advise the government on the drafting. (The French government had offered the palace as a venue after the Indonesian government had expressed a desire to add significance to their proposal by drafting it in “a historic setting.”) Their proposal was then forwarded to the GAM, and over the next two months issues were worked out through the HDC.

In December, we convened in Geneva, where both parties signed “The Cessation of Hostilities Agreement Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement.” The agreement laid out a detailed process, which covered disarmament, political procedures, elections, monitoring mechanisms, and many other aspects of the peaceful path to resolution of their conflict. The HDC was designated as the monitoring agency, with countries in the region contributing personnel to support the effort. Things got off to a wonderful start and everyone involved was ecstatic.

Soon after the signing, President Megawati traveled to the province to kick off the process, and expectations and hopes continued to be high.

For a few months, all went well. But when the independence issue again reared up in a series of heated exchanges in the press, the situation rapidly deteriorated. The angry words triggered violence on the ground; the HDC monitors were threatened and forced to withdraw.

The HDC tried to get the two parties back on track, but arguments over dates and venues scuttled their efforts.

With the agreement breaking apart, President Megawati, under pressure from the hard-liners, dispatched troops to the province to commence a large-scale military operation.

In May 2003, I received urgent calls from both the State Department and the HDC asking me to fly immediately to Stockholm to encourage the GAM leadership to recommit to the agreement. This might possibly convince the government to call off, or postpone, the impending military action. I took a Concorde flight to London and reached Stockholm only hours after I left Washington.

As I arrived, I learned that the U.S., European Union, and Japanese ambassadors had issued a demarche to the GAM and another to the Jakarta government, making it abundantly clear that these governments could not support independence for Aceh; the outstanding issues between GAM and Jakarta had to be resolved within the context of the Indonesian state.

My side of the mission proved successful, but the Jakarta end of things was stickier. The GAM agreed to issue a statement recommitting to the agreement and requesting the government to join them in trying to get the provisions of the agreement back on track in Aceh. But the Indonesian government was not favorably inclined to accept the GAM’s offer. President Megawati did, however, agree to postpone military action for a week to give peace one more chance.

The U.S., European Union, and Japanese governments, together with the HDC, hastily arranged a meeting in Tokyo to get the two sides together (which, regrettably, I could not attend). It collapsed almost immediately when the government insisted on a statement disavowing independence as a nonnegotiable condition. The GAM refused.

Within hours of the collapse, government forces launched a full-scale military operation. Thousands of troops were involved.

I was tremendously disappointed.

In spite of the disappointment, the HDC and the Wise Men are still committed to the effort and standing by to help. I also committed to work with the HDC on emerging peace efforts in Africa.

THE PHILIPPINES

In early June 2003, the members of HDC, the Wise Men, and the monitoring teams that had been on the ground in Aceh all gathered in Geneva to discuss lessons learned and the possibilities of reengaging. Everyone agreed to remain ready to salvage the peace agreement or to begin a new round of negotiations if the opportunity presented itself. At this session, Martin Griffiths asked me if I would be willing to participate as a Wise Man in other peace meditations that the center was considering taking on.

“Absolutely,” I answered, “but I’d have to look at each situation and get a State Department okay, even though I’ll still be undertaking these missions as a private citizen.”

He of course understood that I would need the Department’s blessing.

Two weeks later, eighteen of the most prominent peace negotiators, post-conflict supervisors, and writers (the foremost experts and practitioners in conflict resolution) came together in Oslo, Norway, in a Norwegian government-sponsored conference they called “a Mediator’s Retreat.” I was flattered to be included in this group.

At the conference, Martin Griffiths discussed with me efforts to settle the decades-long guerrilla wars between the government of the Philippines and several separatist groups. The parties had approached HDC as a possible mediating body; and Griffiths was wondering if I’d like to be involved as a Wise Man. I agreed to participate, contingent on State’s okay.

On June 16, after my return to the States, I called Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage, who, it turned out, had also been directing attention to the Philippine conflict. During a visit to Washington in May, Philippine President Arroyo had asked President Bush for his support in peace negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a group that seemed ready to come to the peace table after long resisting that course. Though Rich was positive about the help I might offer the process, there were questions about which organization would be handling negotiations; and he was not aware of HDC’s possible connection. He wanted to get back to me about that.

A week later, Tom Cymkin, a State Department official I had worked with during the Aceh negotiations, called to clear up the issue. The U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), he explained, would be the designated “facilitators” for this process, and this had been squared with HDC. State wanted me to join a group of Wise Men being formed at USIP to engage in that process. The Malaysian government had taken on the role of mediator; the USIP Wise Men would augment and support the effort, as a follow-up to President Bush’s public commitment to support the peace process.

The USIP was established by Congress “to support development, transmission, and use of knowledge to promote peace and curb violent international conflict.” The institute’s primary work was in education, training, and research to promote peace and the resolution of conflicts. The mandate to establish a team of Wise Men to facilitate the mediation effort was a new role for them. The team they formed — seven others in addition to me — was impressive. All were highly experienced and well-regarded diplomats. Four had been U.S. ambassadors to the Philippines.

Ambassador Dick Solomon, the head of USIP, called me later that day to welcome me to the group and to set up meetings and briefings over the coming weeks. On the first of July, I visited USIP offices in Washington, met with the other Wise Men, and received detailed briefs on the situation and the approach we would take.

The conflict we were dealing with, begun over three decades ago, had its roots in the long-standing friction between the Muslims of Mindanao and the Christian majority in the rest of the Philippines. In 1968, non-Muslim soldiers had massacred Muslim soldiers in the Philippine Army. This outrage led to the formation of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF); their aim was independence. In the mid-eighties, the more religious and ideological MILF broke away from the MNLF.

In 1996, the MNLF reached a peace agreement with the government (which was not accepted by the MILF). Though it has had a rocky implementation, it has been holding; and recently, the MILF had indicated that they too were ready for talks. The government under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had declared its intention to join these negotiations.

In response to President Arroyo’s May request, President Bush issued a statement promising support. This was welcomed by chairman Hashim Salamat, the leader of the MILF.

Following our initial briefings, we were briefed by representatives from the Malaysian Embassy in Washington. We reassured them that we were truly there to support them and not to replace them as mediators.

Our next step was a fact-finding trip to the region to get a firsthand sense of the situation on the ground and meet some of the key players. On August 10, four of us left for the Philippines, just as the MILF announced the death of Salamat, their leader. The death of their longtime leader caused the MILF to undergo internal adjustments, but his heir apparent claimed that he too was committed to a peace process.

We spent the first days of our visit in Manila calling on President Arroyo and other government officials. The President was a truly impressive leader. Her self-confidence, intellect, knowledge of details, and obvious leadership ability, together with a sincere commitment to the peace process and honesty about past government failures, clearly came through. The members of the congress, ministers, military leaders, and the chief negotiator for the government seemed equally committed. Though there were hard-liners in the government who did not favor negotiations, the majority seemed to support them. Everyone we talked to acknowledged that there was no military solution to this conflict.

In Manila, we also met with members of the Muslim community, the media, Christian church representatives, NGOs, and our own embassy officials. Our Ambassador, Frank Ricciardone, was an old friend from my CENTCOM days. We also met with our USAID officials who were working in Mindanao. They had started a series of impressive projects there, whose incentives and rewards helped keep the ’96 agreement together. The promise of more of these was a big reason for the MILF’s motivation to reach an agreement.

On our third day, we traveled to Carabao, Mindanao, the small port city that served as the capital of the autonomous region set up by the ’96 agreement. There we met representatives of the MNLF, the MILF, and members of civil society. Mindanao is a beautiful Pacific paradise… with striking poverty and little promise of a brighter future. The Moros (as the locals were called) described centuries of oppression, injustice, and suffering; and gave mixed reviews on the fulfillment of the ’96 agreement and the programs it had promised.

In the hinterland, we presided over the opening of a USAID project that provided training and facilities for former MNLF guerrilla fighters, now trading their weapons for farm implements. It was another countryside that eerily reminded me of Vietnam — thatched huts, water buffalos, rice paddies, and bamboo clumps, all familiar sights. At the site of the ceremony, a small grain-storage building and training area in a jungle clearing, I studied the faces of the wiry, tough former guerrillas as they sat through the speeches and ribbon-cutting ceremonies in the hot sun of midday; I had seen thousands of such faces before. I wondered what was going through their minds. The security was heavy with Philippine military and police, and MNLF security forces all around us.

We returned to Carabao and continued our meetings with local USAID representatives.

On my last day, we had sessions in Manila with Lieutenant General Garcia, the deputy chief of staff of the Philippine Armed Forces and the chairman of the Coordination Committee for the Cessation of Hostilities, the element established to implement the ’96 agreement. General Garcia was an impressive man, honest and experienced, with exceptional insights about the practicalities of implementing the agreements on the ground (always the tough part of conflict resolution). He taught me invaluable lessons.

I left the Philippines on the fourteenth of June with a real sense that this effort could work. It was going to be difficult, but enough pieces seemed to be in place to encourage hope.

The process continues…

Working toward a peaceful resolution to long-running, bitter conflicts can be difficult and thankless. Your successes are few. But along the way, you save lives or better the lot of poor souls caught up in conflict. And on those rare occasion when you fully succeed, every effort becomes worthwhile. I have experienced firsthand the pain and devastation of war. I know I have to work to find alternatives to it where I can.