No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

44 THE ROAD TO ANNAPOLIS

IN GENERAL, THOUGH, the situation in the Middle East was improving. The atmosphere was particularly propitious concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where we were seeking to launch bilateral political negotiations on all the big issues. In the early years of the Bush administration, the time had never seemed right for an international conference—certainly not at the time of the intifada, nor in the middle of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, nor when Hamas had won legislative elections, and certainly not when the Palestinians had formed their unity government. But in the wake of Hamas’s stunning and violent takeover of Gaza and its expulsion of Fatah officials from the area, the situation was different. Abbas needed an agreement with Israel, and Olmert seemed ready to give him one. Olmert and Abbas both told me in June that they were ready to talk about “core issues.” It was time to give the two-state solution a real push. An international conference could achieve that.

I’d raised the idea of a conference in my weekly meeting with the President in early June. He was immediately skeptical but not hostile to the idea. He rightly pointed out that an international conference could be hard to manage. Delegates might think it their responsibility to begin to negotiate rather than simply support the bilateral negotiations between the two sides. And then there was the matter of expectations: if we called the world together to discuss Middle East peace, people would expect something momentous to happen.

“How do we keep expectations from getting out of control?” he asked. “What if we can’t get an agreement?” I said I thought we had to take the risk. The key would be to promote the conference as simply a forum for endorsing the work that the parties were already doing, though it might actually launch formal negotiations too. It could also be a forum for the Arab states to demonstrate their own commitment to the peace process. The Palestinians in particular would find an international send-off helpful. Reviewing all the progress that Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was making in the West Bank, I said that a conference would help sustain the good guys by giving international momentum to the process. We’d always argued that the Palestinians needed new leadership before they could have a state. Now they’d fulfilled their part of the bargain; we needed to fulfill ours. It would also discipline the Europeans and Arabs by highlighting bilateral negotiations, but giving these other players some pride of ownership and some responsibility. We could pursue increased support for building the institutions of a Palestinian state, particularly from the Arabs.

The President wanted to restrain expectations and be sure that the Israelis were on board. “I’ll call Olmert, but I need to know that you want to do this,” I said. “The Israelis are going to hate the idea because they don’t like international ‘interference’ in the peace process. So when I call Olmert, I have to know that when he calls you, you’re ready to say that you support the idea.”

The President asked that I get together with Steve and sketch out how an international gathering might work. “And can we call it a meeting?” he asked. Somehow that sounded less grandiose.

“Fine with me,” I said. “It’s a meeting.”

We structured the meeting around three elements, or “tracks,” for progress toward Palestinian statehood. First, we’d accelerate progress on the first phase of the Road Map—matters such as removing checkpoints and improving security cooperation to show the Palestinians that the occupation was receding. Second, we’d launch bilateral negotiations on the “core issues” that were key to ending the conflict. And third, we’d make implementation of the political agreement subject to the completion of Road Map obligations.

The last point helped to resolve a sticky “sequencing problem.” The original Road Map had a strict three-phase structure. Political negotiations were not to begin until the third phase, when the Palestinians would, in effect, have created all their institutions and defeated the terrorists. That had been a key element in Sharon’s acceptance of the document. Yet to assure further progress on the first phase, the building of institutions, we needed a political track. So we rearranged the sequence but agreed that implementation of a peace treaty and the creation of the Palestinian state would be subject to completion of the Road Map obligations, particularly concerning the restructuring of Palestinian security forces. That was acceptable to both the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Still, the Israelis were uncomfortable with the idea of an international gathering (conference, meeting, whatever). Olmert had a long-scheduled meeting in Washington on June 19. Fortuitously, the Palestinian unity government, which had brought together Fatah and Hamas, collapsed less than a week earlier. With Fatah’s temporary partnership with Hamas over, Olmert had fewer reasons to object to an international meeting, as long as it wasn’t expected to accomplish much. “I’m ready to negotiate,” he said. “But I don’t need the Europeans and others in the middle of it.” The point of the meeting then would be to launch bilateral negotiations between the parties, not to substitute for them. The President announced four weeks later that he’d hold an international meeting on Israeli-Palestinian issues before the end of the year. He didn’t give a date or a place. There was still too much work to do in preparing the meeting. We’d invite participants only when that work was done.

The prospect of an international meeting on Middle East peace was wildly popular with my colleagues in the Middle East Quartet—both the Russians and the Europeans. My biggest problem was to prevent them from running to the microphones before the President could announce his own meeting. I knew that in preparing the meeting I’d have little trouble with those colleagues. The Arabs would be somewhat harder.

After years of begging for a peace conference, the Arabs suddenly had all kinds of reservations, worries, and demands. David Welch, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, was spending hours on the road and on the phone with them. During my trip two weeks after the announcement, I met with the Egyptians and the Saudis. They refused to sign on to the idea, leaving me to explain to the press that I didn’t expect anyone to accept an invitation that hadn’t yet been issued. Well, it was a good talking point anyway.

I would return to the Middle East four more times before the meeting—the last trip being my twentieth to the region since becoming secretary. We’d committed to holding an international meeting in Annapolis at the end of November. Unfortunately, there was little agreement about what it would do, and we were determined not to send out any invitations until everyone had privately agreed to come. Several times the whole thing seemed in danger of coming apart.

But by early November the pieces had started falling into place. We had announced that the international meeting would be held at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, a city that had been the host to a past peace process of historic significance. It was in the Maryland capital that Congress had ratified the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which had formally ended the American Revolution and brought our country into being. The venue would provide a secure location outside Washington for the various ministers and heads of state to launch a peace process of a different kind at the historic site.

At the beginning of the month I attended the Saban Forum in Jerusalem and delivered a well-received speech that strongly and emotionally affirmed our friendship with Israel. My first visit to Israel had been “like coming home to a place I’d never been,” I said. At Olmert’s request, I didn’t say much about the international meeting. “I need to do this in my own way,” he’d told me in a phone conversation the week before. Speaking after me, he proceeded to deliver a truly pathbreaking speech in which he made it quite clear that he was ready for negotiations, strongly endorsing the meeting in Annapolis. And he did it in Hebrew, making sure that it was broadcast live to the country.

It was somewhat more difficult to secure Arab cooperation. During my trip the month before, the Egyptian foreign minister had actually suggested postponing the meeting. It wasn’t clear what we were supposed to achieve as a result of the delay. So I knew that I had my work cut out for me at a dinner of the Arab League and the Middle East Quartet in Cairo. I found myself defending the decision to even hold a meeting, flabbergasted at the seeming lack of enthusiasm. Finally Saudi Prince Saud al-Faisal revealed the code, saying that they all badly wanted a meeting but feared failure. He cited yet again the violence that had broken out after Camp David. You’ve wanted a meeting for four years to show that the Bush administration is involved in the peace process, I thought. Now you’re afraid of failure?

I answered by saying that my favorite movie line was from Apollo 13: “Failure is not an option.” Everyone smiled, and Saud publicly said for the first time that Saudi Arabia believed some good could come of an international meeting.

Now with support for the idea of a meeting, I undertook the task of drafting the invitation, which would reveal what the meeting was intended to do and which both the Arabs and Israelis presumed they could word. The Arabs wanted the invitation to set the terms for a peace agreement. The Israelis wanted little more than the time and place. The Arabs wanted a reference to the 2002 Saudi peace initiative as a basis for negotiation. That was unacceptable to the Israelis, who didn’t see it as a basis for anything. We agreed on mentioning it without characterizing its role. The Palestinians wanted the core issues—borders, security, refugees, and Jerusalem—spelled out. “That will bring down my government,” Olmert said. The Arabs wanted a deadline for the conclusion of an agreement. “In the invitation?” I asked. They dropped the idea.

Then there was the matter of who should be invited. No one suggested Iran, but Syria was a more difficult matter. Bashar al-Assad was hated by most of his colleagues, but no one was willing to leave the Syrians out. The Egyptians had assured us before the President announced the conference that they didn’t care if Syria was invited; now they insisted that the Syrians participate. I talked to the President and to Olmert, who finally agreed that we could extend an invitation to Damascus. But before accepting, the Syrians said they would come only if there was a reference to a track to negotiate the return of the Golan Heights, disputed territory on the Israeli-Syrian border. Lebanon wanted a mention of Shebaa Farms. We decided to say that the meeting was about the Israeli-Palestinian track but to mention the other outstanding issues as key to a comprehensive peace.

The final issues came to a head in a weekend meeting of the Arab League a week before we were to convene in Annapolis. The Arabs made clear that they would vote as a bloc on whether to attend the meeting. Here we were, ten days before the intended date, and we didn’t have agreement on who would come or what the invitation would say. I made more than twenty phone calls that weekend, mostly through the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. At one point I had even gotten the Arabs to agree, only to have the Israelis dig in their heels. A week earlier I’d gone to Crawford with the President, and at each meal that weekend he’d ask me, “Is it done yet?”

“No, sir, but it will be,” I’d answer. At least, I hoped so.

Finally, on Sunday night, I got the pieces into place, and on Monday the President sent the invitation. Olmert hit the roof when he saw it, saying that there were references to the Saudi peace initiative that he hadn’t approved. He called the President, who didn’t want to undermine me. “Talk to Condi,” the President told him. Finally, I just said that the offending references had been the result of last-minute negotiations but that they weren’t going to change the nature of the meeting. I’d take the blame if anything went off track in Annapolis. That seemed to calm him down. We were ready for the international meeting, which, by the way, had come to be called a conference after all.