Innocent Abroad

An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East

Martin Indyk

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781416594307
• eBook ISBN: 9781416597254
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Making peace in the long-troubled Middle East is likely to be one of the top priorities of the next American president. He will need to take account of the important lessons from past attempts, which are described and analyzed here in a gripping book by a renowned expert who served twice as U.S. ambassador to Israel and as Middle East adviser to President Clinton. Martin Indyk draws on his many years of intense involvement in the region to provide the inside story of the last time the United States employed sustained diplomacy to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and change the behavior of rogue regimes in Iraq and Iran. Innocent Abroad is an insightful history and a poignant memoir. Indyk provides a fascinating examination of the ironic consequences when American naïveté meets Middle Eastern cynicism in the region's political bazaars. He dissects the very different strategies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to explain why they both faced such difficulties remaking the Middle East in their images of a more peaceful or democratic place. He provides new details of the breakdown of the Arab-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, of the CIA's failure to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and of Clinton's attempts to negotiate with Iran's president. Indyk takes us inside the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the palaces of Arab potentates, and the offices of Israeli prime ministers. He draws intimate portraits of the American, Israeli, and Arab leaders he worked with, including Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon; the PLO's Yasser Arafat; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak; and Syria's Hafez al-Asad. He describes in vivid detail high-level meetings, demonstrating how difficult it is for American presidents to understand the motives and intentions of Middle Eastern leaders and how easy it is for them to miss those rare moments when these leaders are willing to act in ways that can produce breakthroughs to peace. Innocent Abroad is an extraordinarily candid and enthralling account, crucially important in grasping the obstacles that have confounded the efforts of recent presidents. As a new administration takes power, this experienced diplomat distills the lessons of past failures to chart a new way forward that will be required reading.

PART ONE

THE ASCENT

1

Syria First

On January 23, 2001, Bill Clinton was in his final hours as president. There was one piece of unfinished business he was determined to take care of: it was payback time for Yasser Arafat.

Three months earlier, the two of them had met at an urgent summit hosted by Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh at his favorite resort hotel, the Marriott Golf. Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, King Abdullah II of Jordan, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and the European Union diplomatic chief, Javier Solana, were there, as well.

Clinton was trying to persuade Arafat and Barak to end the intifada that had erupted two weeks earlier. The escalating violence was destroying Clinton’s chance of achieving a negotiated peace agreement before he left office. As he was preparing for his meeting with Arafat, his advisers had urged him to take a tough line, but he was hesitating. When Clinton sat alone with Arafat, gazing out at tailored greens and fairways framed by the Red Sea and the Sinai Desert, his resolve melted. Arafat, sensing that Clinton’s real priority was the peace deal, made him a solemn promise to conclude the final status agreement with Israel before the president left office. Clinton was buoyant afterward. “He really does want to do the deal,” he told us.

In the final days of his presidency, Clinton had still been waiting for Arafat to make good on his promise. In December 2000, the president had put forward his far-reaching set of parameters on all the final status issues to serve as a basis for an agreement. He was even prepared to spend his last four days in office negotiating the deal. A desperate Barak was waiting for the call to a final summit meeting. Barak’s foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, was so keen to reach agreement that he had gone beyond his instructions and informed Arafat that he could even have sovereignty over the Jewish Holy of Holies, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But at the last moment, Arafat reneged.

Now Clinton wanted to make it clear to the incoming administration just who they would be dealing with. He had already dwelt at length on Arafat’s perfidy while briefing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that morning. Now he called Colin Powell, the secretary of state–designate, who had earlier served as Clinton’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When the phone rang, Powell was dressing for a pre-inaugural concert. He was surprised to hear Clinton’s voice. “I just wanted to wish you all the best in your new position,” the president said. Then he launched into a vituperative, expletive-filled tirade against Arafat. Powell understood the real motive for the call. As he would recount it to me, the president warned him, “Don’t you ever trust that son of a bitch. He lied to me and he’ll lie to you.” Arafat had failed his people and destroyed the chances for peace, Clinton emphasized. “Don’t let Arafat sucker punch you like he did me.”

THE FIRST TIME I had heard Clinton talk about sucker punching was on August 11, 1992. As the Democratic candidate for president, he was about to have his first meeting with Yitzhak Rabin, the recently elected prime minister of Israel. Clinton knew little of Rabin, but what he did know made him nervous. The hero of Israel’s Six-Day War, Rabin had served as Israel’s ambassador in Washington while Richard Nixon was president. He had developed a close relationship with Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser, and together they had forged a strategic relationship between Israel and the United States. On the eve of the 1972 presidential election, Ambassador Rabin had ignored diplomatic protocol by endorsing Nixon as Israel’s best friend.* Clinton feared Rabin might do something of the sort this time around, too.

Rabin would be coming to the meeting from Kennebunkport, Maine, where President George H. W. Bush had just announced, with much fanfare, the release of a $10 billion loan guarantee for Israel to finance its absorption of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It was an obvious effort by Bush to repair the damage he had done to his relationship with American Jews by attempting to end Israeli settlement activity through withholding this aid. If Rabin now endorsed Bush, as he had Nixon, it might help change attitudes in the Jewish community, a core base of political and financial support for Clinton.

To prepare Clinton for this meeting with Rabin, his foreign policy advisers met him on the campaign trail at the Doral Country Club in Miami. Anthony “Tony” Lake and Samuel “Sandy” Berger had brought me into the campaign to work on Middle Eastern issues. I was then the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank I had founded with support from the pro-Israel community eight years earlier.

Clinton was late, as usual, having just delivered a speech to the Southern Legislative Conference’s convention—a group of Democratic state representatives. The candidate surged into the room where we were waiting, excited, red-faced, larger than life. Immediately, he began to recount how he had brought a huge audience to its feet by warning them repeatedly not to be “sucker punched” by George H. W. Bush’s assertion that he was a “crazy, wild-eyed liberal anxious to spring radical ideas on an unsuspecting public.”

Clinton had been pumped up by the encounter. He asked one of his aides to get Hillary on the phone so that he could recount the event to her. With that finished, what he really wanted to do was eat, and play golf. His brothers-in-law, Hugh and Tony Rodham, were waiting for him outside on the driving range. But Sandy Berger, who would become Clinton’s national security adviser in his second term, was determined to prepare him for what could be a critical encounter with Rabin. Sandy put his hand on Clinton’s shoulder and pressed him to sit down and listen.

As Clinton devoured a full plate of food from the buffet, I quickly gave him a thumbnail sketch of the prime minister, explaining that Rabin had won a mandate from the Israeli people to pursue peace and that as a general who had seen too many wars he now intended to end them. Rabin was a strategic thinker, well aware of the profound shifts in the Middle East’s balance of power. The Soviet Union’s collapse had deprived Arab states that still believed in making war on Israel of their superpower patron. The defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army in the Gulf War had punctured the Arab “military option” by destroying the potential for an anti-Israeli eastern front coalition between Syria and Iraq. For the first time, all of Israel’s Arab neighbors were conducting direct negotiations with the Jewish state.

I told Clinton we were witnessing a rare moment in Middle Eastern history when a window of opportunity opens wide. To capitalize on the moment, if he were elected president, he would just need to put his immense influence as the leader of the dominant power in the Middle East behind Rabin as he moved forward. I boldly predicted that if Clinton put his mind to it, he could achieve four Arab-Israeli peace agreements in his first term as president. Clinton, who had been listening intently, stopped his ravenous eating, looked me in the eye, and said, “I want to do that.”

AS SIMPLE AS that; at least we thought so at the time. Five weeks after he entered the White House, on March 3, 1993, Clinton convened his first National Security Council (NSC) meeting. Middle Eastern peacemaking was the only item on the agenda.

With the president already preoccupied with domestic issues and overwhelmed by controversy—at the time of this meeting, he was dealing with a political storm over the issue of gays in the military—meetings of the president’s NSC were normally chaired by Tony Lake, his national security adviser, in the underground Situation Room. But on this day the president wanted to signal his commitment to peacemaking by chairing the meeting in the Cabinet Room.

Warren Christopher, the genteel secretary of state, perfectly groomed in his Savile Row suit and Turnbull & Asser tie, sat next to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, the eccentric intellectual in his rumpled Lieutenant Columbo–style clothes. Tony Lake was seated on the other side of the president. Tony was a low-key, bookish academic whose experience in the Nixon and Carter administrations had rendered him determined to avoid confrontations with the cabinet secretaries. Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed up in his uniform greens. He was the only cabinet-level hold-over from the previous administration and was using his considerable charm to establish himself as part of the new team. CIA director James Woolsey brooded at the end of the table. A neoconservative wooed back to the Democratic Party by Clinton, he was constrained by Lake’s insistence that he stick to intelligence assessments rather than opining on policy; that constraint soon led him to resign. Vice President Al Gore was the last to enter the room; the president would come to rely on his judgment when making difficult foreign policy decisions, especially those involving force.

They were a diverse crew who would not work easily together as a team even though they were not divided by the ideological disputes that would dominate discussion in the next Bush administration. In this first meeting they were determined to demonstrate conviviality. Lake discussed baseball with Aspin; the vice president exchanged jokes with Leon Fuerth, his national security adviser; Warren Christopher chatted with Colin Powell.

There I was, too, with my own name tent, sitting opposite the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—I was the special assistant to the president for Middle Eastern affairs. We all sat in oversize brown leather armchairs around a huge oval mahogany table. As my awestruck eyes wandered around the room, I noticed that each of the chairs had a brass plaque on the back engraved with the name of a current cabinet secretary. The president’s chair stood at the middle of the table, a few inches taller than all the others, with its back to the long wall of French doors that opened out to the Rose Garden, and facing portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson.

The president arrived late and wasted no time opening the meeting by expressing his satisfaction with his first five weeks in office. On the foreign policy front, Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti were presenting problems. But in the Middle East the prospects seemed good for quickly resuming peace negotiations. He turned to Christopher to report on the regional tour he had just completed.

On this trip—the first of nineteen Christopher shuttles through the Middle East—the secretary of state had succeeded in brokering an agreement that would bring all the Arabs back to the negotiating table with Israel.* Christopher reported on his discussions with Syrian president Hafez al-Asad, who had made clear that Israel would have to engage in a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. If it did so, Asad would agree to a “full” peace and the necessary security arrangements. When Christopher relayed this to Rabin, he was encouraged. Rabin approached problems in a cold, analytical manner; realism was his hallmark. In this case, Rabin concluded that Israel should focus on the Syrian track. He explained to Christopher that Asad was a leader who could make decisions and that peace with Syria would be a strategic achievement for Israel, dramatically reducing the danger of war. Rabin would not define the extent of Israeli withdrawal, however, until the Syrians specified the nature of peace and accepted that the agreement would “stand on its own feet” (that is, not be linked to progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track). Rabin then added a coda that, in retrospect, can be seen as an indication of his own calculations: “If the Palestinians see Syria moving it might encourage them.”

Christopher invited Rabin to Washington for an official visit. In accepting, Rabin said that when he met the president he would ask him, Would Israel have to make a full withdrawal from the Golan? If so, what would the United States be prepared to do, especially in the event of Asad’s death? Would the president be prepared to put American troops on the Golan to replace the Israeli army there? He needed to hear the answers from Clinton before he engaged the Syrians.

Christopher concluded his presentation with uncharacteristic forcefulness. There was, he argued to Clinton, a tremendous opportunity to make progress, an unusual moment to achieve Middle Eastern peace, and he was recommending it as a good place for the president to invest his prestige and influence.

Clinton asked Colin Powell for his professional view of what it would take to secure Israel if it withdrew from the Golan. “No military officer would want to give this up,” Powell replied. He then surprised everyone by arguing that the only way Israel could be convinced to withdraw from the Golan Heights would be if the United States were prepared to insert a brigade of American troops—some four thousand GIs—on the Golan. Unlike the Israel-Egypt peace treaty observer force deployed in the Sinai, which contained only one battalion of American troops, he said the Golan deployment would need to be a full-fledged fighting force to signal Syria and the Arab world that if they broke the peace agreement they would have to tangle with the U.S. Army.

“It would be worth it,” the president responded. He expressed confidence that the traditionally pro-Israel U.S. Congress would go along because it meant securing an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement. If Syria were brought into the peace camp, he said, the risk of regional conflict would be reduced significantly, Israel’s northern border with Lebanon would be stabilized, the Palestinian conflict would be more easily managed, and peace with Jordan would be facilitated. Clinton knew that asking Israel to give up the high ground of the Golan Heights to an implacable adversary would involve tangible, life-threatening risks. But the president had made his judgment clear. “We shouldn’t minimize the advantage of concentrating on Syria first,” he said. “If we have a chance to do that we ought to take it while pushing on the other tracks, too.”

THE PRESIDENT HAD based his judgment on an assessment of the situation he inherited in the Middle East. The combined effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rout of Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Gulf War, and the elimination of what the U.N. inspectors could find of his weapons of mass destruction capability had made the United States the dominant power in the Middle East. Even though the Gulf War left Saddam in power in Iraq, and even though the Iranian ayatollahs still portrayed us as the “Great Satan,” they were all much weakened in their ability to challenge the United States or counter American influence. The destruction of the Iraqi army and the disappearance of their Soviet patron had left the Arab states with only one recourse: to follow the example of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and negotiate with Israel under American auspices to try to recover on the diplomatic front what they had failed to gain by conflict. Clinton had inherited from the Bush administration an ongoing negotiation on all tracks and a new Israeli government with a mandate to pursue agreements urgently.

Looking back on this first Cabinet Room discussion, it is remarkable that the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli negotiations received barely a mention. At the outset of his presidency, the man who would end up hosting Yasser Arafat in the White House more than he hosted any other foreign leader was little interested in the Palestinian cause. This was partly a reflection of the low standing of the Palestinians in Washington at that time. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which Arafat led, was on the State Department’s terrorism list. U.S. officials were prohibited by law from shaking hands, let alone engaging in negotiations, with any member of the PLO.

The first Palestinian intifada, which raged in the territories from 1987 to 1991, had brought the Palestinian cause into focus, but Yasser Arafat’s decision to side with Saddam after his invasion of Kuwait had done the Palestinians tremendous damage. Among America’s Gulf allies, especially Saudi Arabia, Arafat was viewed as perfidious. Palestinians who had worked in the Gulf for decades were now rendered suspect, too, and were summarily evicted.

So low had Palestinian standing sunk that their Israeli-approved representatives were only allowed to attend the 1991 Madrid Middle East peace conference that launched Arab-Israeli negotiations as part of the Jordanian delegation. In the subsequent negotiations, conducted at the State Department, the negotiators had spent the first six months arguing about whether there could be a separate Palestinian negotiation.*

Once in the room, the Palestinian delegation had refused to begin negotiations until the Israelis committed in advance to freeze settlement activity and include Jerusalem in the agenda. It was clear that the Palestinian negotiators were taking their instructions from Arafat and that, as long as the United States and Israel ignored him, he would block any progress. Yet given his recent behavior and existing law, the United States had no interest in dealing with him, or ability to do so.

This affected Clinton’s perspective. He believed the United States had a strong interest in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict to stabilize a region of vital concern, strengthen our relations with the Arab world, and fulfill a long-standing commitment to the security of Israel. But on the strategic level, who ruled over whose well in Nablus was a local issue of no great import to the United States, especially compared to the strategic importance of who ruled over whose oil wells in the Persian Gulf. Clinton had no intention of ignoring the Palestinians; he just felt it would be easier to make progress on their issues if he were able to make progress with the Syrians.

No one imagined that Asad would be an easy customer. But as Henry Kissinger had argued after one of his many shuttle trips to Damascus, “You cannot make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you cannot make peace without Syria.” As Asad was fond of reminding his guests, Syria was the “beating heart of pan-Arabism.” It had led the Arab world’s rejection of Sadat’s peace with Israel, isolating Egypt for more than a decade. If the “lion of Damascus,” as Asad was known in the Arab world, were now to lie down with the Israeli “lamb,” then no Arab nationalist would be able to question the legitimacy of making peace with Israel.

Because of Syria’s influence on Lebanon, peace with Israe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE THE ASCENT
• PART TWO THE OTHER BRANCH
• PART THREE THE SECOND CHANCE
• APPENDIXES
• NOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Photo Credits
• About the Author
• Photographic Inserts