No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

46 FINAL-STATUS TALKS BEGIN

MUSHARRAF TOOK OFF his uniform on November 27, the day of the Annapolis Conference for Middle East peace. The days in the run-up to the meeting were dominated by haggling among the parties about whether there would be a joint statement and what it would say. Again the Palestinians looked for as complete a recitation of the terms of an agreement as possible. The Israelis wanted the document to say very little.

Our preference was to have a framework that enshrined the three elements of a deal: performance on the Road Map; support for direct bilateral negotiations between the parties on the core issues; and a provision that would make implementation of an agreement subject to completion of the Road Map obligations. We were also prepared to establish a timeline for completion: one year. The last provision was controversial and risky. If the parties didn’t conclude an agreement, everyone would talk about failure. But as I told anyone who asked, the Bush administration had a deadline anyway. Within a year there would be a new President of the United States, whether an Israeli-Palestinian peace had been brokered or not.

Two days before the conference, there was still no agreement on a joint statement. The Israelis and Palestinians had been negotiating on their own with the help of David Welch. I met separately and then together with them throughout the afternoon, but we couldn’t agree on language.

That night I took Tzipi Livni and the Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qurei (also called Abu Alaa), to dinner at the 600 Restaurant at the Watergate. The management was always helpful and gave us a private room for the dinner and discussion. “I’m not going to negotiate language tonight,” I told them. “But you have got to find common ground. We can’t start the conference with disagreement.” The evening was pleasant, but perhaps the fact that the waiter mixed up the orders—serving the kosher meal to the Palestinian and the beef to the vegetarian Livni—was a metaphor for the confusion of the moment.

The night before the conference there was a kickoff dinner in the Ben Franklin Room at the State Department. The delicacy of Middle East diplomacy was very much on display, as we had to work hard to make sure that the paths of the Israelis and the Saudis didn’t cross. I’d promised Saud that he wouldn’t be forced into an awkward handshake with the foreign minister of the Jewish state of Israel. It would have been a nice breakthrough but not worth the trouble: We would need Saudi Arabia to make far more important decisions if we could get close to an agreement. After the dinner, I met again with the negotiators, and we made a little more progress. But by the morning of the conference, David, who had been at it all night, told me we still didn’t have a document.

I arrived at the White House for the helicopter ride to Annapolis with the President. “Do you have an agreement?” he asked hopefully.

“No, sir,” I replied. “You’re going to have to do it yourself. I’ve got them within striking distance. Now you’ll have to deliver the deal.” The President smiled broadly. I could tell that he was relishing this moment to try his hand at Middle East peace. We agreed that he’d have a private meeting with Olmert and Abbas when they arrived at the Naval Academy. I would continue to work on the negotiators.

After a few minutes alone with the two leaders, the President called the rest of us into the room. “Okay, we want a deal,” he said. “That’s what my friends and I have agreed. Now, Tzipi, Abu Alaa, and Condi, go get one.” That was really all we needed because the clock was ticking. Olmert spent a few minutes with Livni, and the Palestinians caucused. We finished the statement about ten minutes before the conference was to start.

Steve Hadley took the document and began to search for a staff aide who could put it into a form that the President could read, meaning in big type. “Give it to me,” the President said. “I’ll just read it as is.”

The three men proceeded together toward the conference hall—a cordon of midshipmen lining the way. Displayed on the Naval Academy campus were U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian flags. It was not universally noticed, but that was the first time the Palestinians had come to an international peace conference under their own banner. Abbas was very proud.

When they entered the crowded room, there was great anticipation of what they would say. The betting money was that there would be no joint statement. So when the President, using his reading glasses, which added drama to the already electric moment, read out the agreement, there was an audible sigh of relief. The conference already had a successful outcome: formal bilateral negotiations to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians had been launched.

The two leaders then delivered remarks, Olmert’s frankly a little more conciliatory than Abbas’s. But there sitting at the table was Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia. Saud had made a special effort to be there, despite his poor health that day. He was wearing his robes, though the Princeton-educated man often wore Western dress when in the United States. I knew that Saud would leave after he spoke, but his presence meant everything. It was also the first time the Saudis had come under their flag to publicly sit across the table from the Israelis. It was a great moment as the representative of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques applauded the speech of the Israeli prime minister.

After the President, Olmert, and Abbas departed, I took over the chair of the meeting. I welcomed the ministers and made a few remarks about the task at hand, emphasizing that we were present to support the parties, not negotiate for them. I called on Saud early in the queue so that he could leave. The speeches were overwhelmingly positive. Even the Syrian was conciliatory, and I made sure to treat him with respect. Of course Damascus had sent its deputy foreign minister. That’s fitting, I thought. One foot in the international community and one foot in terrorism.

Everybody who wanted to be seen as a “player” had lobbied to be at Annapolis, the first Middle East peace conference in almost twenty years. It was quite a gathering, including some ministers whose country’s interest in the Middle East would have seemed remote, to say the least. Brazil laid claim to a spot ostensibly because of its large Palestinian population. The Vatican asked for a representative. Who could say no to the Holy Father? Several small European states just traded on their good relations with the United States to get an invitation. It was quite a scene, with more than fifty delegations in attendance.

I found it challenging to sit and seem interested in every speech, no matter how irrelevant to the chances for a successful negotiation. I even suggested that not everyone had to speak. Fat chance of that—every minister did.

Finally, at the end of a long day, I began my comments to wrap up the conference. I’d prepared some fairly innocuous remarks restating U.S. support for the negotiations and employing standard language to reiterate our core positions. But I looked out at the gathering and decided to put my prepared speech to the side.

“We have said the words ‘two-state solution’ so often that it now sounds rather bland and meaningless,” I began extemporaneously. “But we’re talking about people’s lives that could be changed forever. You see, I know something of what the Palestinians and Israelis feel. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, at a terrible time for black people. I think I know what it’s like for a Palestinian mother to tell her child that she can’t travel on that highway—because she is Palestinian. And the anger and humiliation that comes with that. My mother had to do that—because I was black and there were places that I couldn’t go just because of the color of my skin. But I know too what it’s like for an Israeli mother to put her child to bed and not know if a bomb will kill him in the night. My parents had to comfort me when my little friend was killed in that church in Birmingham in 1963. They must have wondered if I was ever truly safe. People shouldn’t have to live that way. So we need to create a Palestinian state to live in peace and security with the Jewish State of Israel not because of politics. We need to do it for the changed lives—Palestinian and Israeli—that it will bring.”

When I finished, the place exploded in applause. I closed the meeting, and minister after minister came up to me to thank me for the commitment I’d shown. Tzipi Livni and Abu Alaa said almost the same thing: “You really do understand.” As secretary, I rarely let my emotions show. My style was to be coolly analytical and, if necessary, unfailingly tough. I hadn’t planned this more emotional appeal; it had just felt right, and I followed my instincts. I was glad I did.

ANNAPOLIS WAS EMBLEMATIC of more than forward movement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The countries represented there—with the exception of Syria—were also the bulwark of resistance to Iran. We’d hoped to get one further UN Security Council resolution before the end of the year. Hank Paulson and I had unilaterally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and its elite and brutal Quds Force as a supporter of terrorism, the first time that we’d blacklisted entire government institutions in Iran. We also designated three Iranian state-owned banks: Bank Melli and Bank Mellat for their involvement in proliferation activities and Bank Saderat as a terrorist financier. No U.S. citizen or private organization would be permitted to engage in financial transactions with these entities or their members, and foreign businesses would likely be deterred from doing so as well, given how pervasively entangled the IRGC had become in the Iranian economy.

Hank had also launched his “road show,” as the former investment banker called it, warning European financial and corporate executives of the dangers of doing business in Iran. It was his own terrific idea—a kind of whisper campaign in which the secretary of the treasury would remind those global economic and financial giants that Iran was a complex place where enterprises’ associations with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction weren’t always apparent. He pointedly asked, do you want to wake up one day to find that the Iranian bank or company that you’ve been dealing with is actually an IRGC front? Do you want to risk your reputation? It was very effective. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was so impressed that she planned a meeting with her country’s business community to urge them to cut back on financial ties with Iran.

Then, in November 2007, we received a National Intelligence Estimate that judged with “high confidence” that Iran had halted its suspected nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. Anyone who read that assessment would be shocked, since the implications of this finding were very different from those of the estimate presented two years prior. More worrisome to us, though, was the manner in which the phrasing of the 2007 NIE seemed to downplay the equally significant judgments contained within it. The mere fact that a nuclear weapons program had even existed in Iran, regardless of when—or indeed whether—it was halted, suggested to us that the country’s supreme leader had intended to pursue nuclear weapons at some point in time. Furthermore, if the assessment was accurate, it had developed this program in defiance of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The key statement was buried in the middle of the declassified version of the estimate: “Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing.” This finding struck at the heart of the argument: the technical capabilities that Iran was actively pursuing through a civilian program could be converted clandestinely to produce nuclear weapons. Given its past pursuit of a secret nuclear weapons program, it would not be unreasonable to assume that Tehran might intend to pursue one again. But we knew that in the public sphere this conclusion would be overshadowed by the NIE’s more prominently featured assessments.

In the NSC, we debated for several weeks precisely what to do about the estimate. Given the failed intelligence of the Iraq war, we were suspicious of its assessments. The Vice President argued briefly that we should simply reject the NIE. But that didn’t seem feasible, given the failure to find WMD in Iraq and what that had done to our credibility regarding intelligence. So the President decided to declassify the estimate’s main findings and release them before they leaked. At least that way we could provide context for the information.

When we released the declassified version of the NIE in December, few of our closest allies accepted its central findings—not the British, not the French, and most especially not the Israelis. All told us that they believed the estimate to be wrong. The Russians crowed that they’d always said there was no military element to the Iranian program. We were trapped. And the poorly constructed NIE, today universally recognized as flawed, did damage to our diplomatic efforts.

I felt especially bad for Nick Burns, who was trying to negotiate sanctions with his counterparts when the NIE became public. He hadn’t been able to tell the other negotiators what was coming. Needless to say, the momentum toward a resolution stalled. And Chancellor Merkel canceled her meeting with the German business community.

AS THE END of the year approached, the world was serving up new problems, but I was by now accustomed to the fact that my inbox never got smaller. With the Middle East a little better, I took a trip to Ethiopia, calling together the African Union to address the deteriorating situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, the implementation of the peace agreement in Sudan, and the instability in Somalia.

Shortly after Christmas 2006, the Islamic Courts, a group of fundamentalist militias, had overrun the minimal resistance of Somalia’s security forces and started to take over strategic parts of the country. Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of neighboring Ethiopia, had warned that the situation in Somalia was becoming intolerable for his country. He was worried about the possible spillover effects of having a violent extremist group gain a foothold in territory adjacent to his country.

On December 29 Meles called me. At the time I was with my cousin at her house in Atlanta for a few days of vacation before returning to Washington. “I will make this quick, and I want to be out as soon as possible,” he said. I knew exactly what he meant—he planned to deploy Ethiopian forces across the border into Somalia to rout out the militants. Frankly, I didn’t try to dissuade him. The disciplined Ethiopian troops expelled the Islamists and occupied the upper third of the country. I was relieved that the al Qaeda–associated groups had been denied a safe haven.

But now almost a year later, Ethiopian troops were still in the country. The longer they stayed, the greater the instability seemed to grow as they became a target for terrorism and tribal opponents.

The meetings in Africa at the end of 2007 were in part intended to push the African Union and the United Nations to take on greater responsibility in stabilizing Somalia. Every effort in the last several decades to govern the country had failed, and the territory had consequently emerged as a safe haven for terrorism. The latest transitional government was a pathetic collection of decent people who hadn’t even been able to reside in the country before the Ethiopian invasion.

I met the putative Somali president in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and knew right away that he had no chance of stabilizing his country. He and his colleagues were a government in name only. The meeting ended as so many did—with a call to find an answer through the international community and an increased deployment of African Union (and perhaps UN) peacekeepers. I was getting tired of this.

The chaos in Somalia had brought the world face-to-face with an age-old problem: pirates. These armed raiders had become a scourge in the Gulf of Aden, attacking cargo ships off the horn of Africa and taking refuge in Somalia’s weakly governed territory. After several high-profile incidents of armed robbery by these pirates, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a Chapter VII resolution in December 2008 authorizing states to conduct land-based operations into Somali territory to pursue the perpetrators. As I worked on this problem, I could not help but reflect on the fact that Thomas Jefferson had confronted the Barbary pirates at the dawn of the Republic. Some things, I guess, never change.

WHEN I HELD an end-of-the-year press conference to review all that we’d done in every region of the world, I felt good about 2007. We’d recovered a lot of lost ground from the year before. In our last meeting before Christmas, I told the President that I was looking forward to one last year in which we could tie up a lot of loose ends and maybe—just maybe—declare the creation of a Palestinian state. Don’t tempt fate, something inside me whispered.

Two days after Christmas, that little voice turned out to be prophetic. I was sitting in my den—having decided to work at home in advance of my trip to Atlanta the next day—when CNN flashed a news bulletin. Benazir Bhutto had come under attack as she was campaigning in Rawalpindi; there had been gunfire and an explosion, but the extent of her injuries was not known. I called Anne Patterson, who was hearing from Bhutto’s people that their leader had been mortally wounded. Within a few minutes that news was confirmed. Benazir Bhutto was dead. Images of mourning and chaos rushed across the screen. Pakistan was again in a deep, deep crisis.

The following day we held an NSC meeting on the situation in Pakistan. There was little to do except assess the situation and wait for the chaos to begin. I visited the Pakistani Embassy and signed a condolence book. “This is a day of great tragedy and great mourning,” I said at the embassy. “She was a courageous woman … the way to honor her memory is to continue the democratic process in Pakistan so that the democracy she so hoped for can emerge.”

I got into my waiting car and experienced a feeling of deep sadness and emptiness. Benazir Bhutto’s death was very bad news for Pakistan—and for the United States. And for me it was a personal blow. I’d helped Bhutto return to Pakistan in the hope that she could lead her country out of crisis. Now she was dead. It felt as if yet another chance for a democratic and stable Pakistan had died with her.