Tested by Zion (11 page)

The Bush speech was a clear statement of policy: When there was an end to terror and corruption, and the reform of Palestinian institutions was creating a democracy, the United States would lead the Palestinians to statehood. But how was all this to happen? How would the Palestinian reform, which required the marginalization of Arafat, be foisted on Arafat and his cronies in Fatah and the PLO? How would the reduction in terrorism, which Bush had made a prerequisite for progress, come to pass? And what roles would other states, Arab and European, play? For that matter, what role would the State Department play, after the arresting cameo on June 24 – not just Powell but also Rice and Rumsfeld appearing with the president as he spoke? The evolution of Bush's thinking had threatened not only Arafat and his coterie but also Powell and
his, because Bush had rejected the traditional State Department approach. The “peace process,” involving endless negotiating sessions with Arafat, had been declared bankrupt. Was it now to be U.S. policy to cheer for Palestinian reforms – or to impose them? The administration had no answers on June 24.

Yet one motivation for involvement in Israeli-Palestinian issues had been the coming confrontation with Iraq – by the time of the June speech, only nine months away. It was easy to argue, then, that silence and inactivity could not be the follow-on to the June speech, and it was not hard to persuade the president that some tactic or program was needed. For whatever other actors had in mind, the president was sincere: He believed he had found a formula, indeed the only workable formula, for achieving Middle East peace. If there were good ideas about how to make this experiment work, he was fully open to them. The potential vacuum was soon filled by several parties, beginning with Quartet activity at the United Nations, then involving more nations and international institutions like the World Bank, and finally coalescing around the production of a “Roadmap” toward Palestinian statehood.

On July 16, Powell convened a meeting of the Quartet he had formed in Madrid the previous winter. The meeting endorsed not only the approach Bush had taken in his speech but also his timeline: “Consistent with President Bush's
June 24 statement, the UN, EU and Russia express their strong support for the goal of achieving a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement which, with intensive effort on security and reform by all, could be reached within three years from now.” That would mean a Palestinian state by mid-2005. The Quartet statement also spoke of a new Task Force on Reform that would work under its auspices and produce a “comprehensive action plan” for Palestinian reform.

For the State Department, such activities were a bureaucratic imperative. Seen from across the river at the Pentagon, the invention of the Roadmap had less to do with the Middle East than with Washington politics. As Douglas Feith described the initiative, “It got turned back to the State Department, and [Deputy Secretary of State] Armitage, with his colleagues, invented the Roadmap to retake the ground that he had lost in the June 24th speech. I remember having people at the State Department say to me, the purpose of the Roadmap is to win back in operation what was lost at the strategic level in the fight over the June 24th speech.”
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In the NSC, there was no doubt that “the Roadmap was the State Department's baby,” as Rice's then-deputy Steve Hadley put it.
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For Vice President Cheney's staff, the concern was not bureaucratic but programmatic: His foreign policy advisor Eric Edelman worried that “people who didn't like this – like the State Department – just wanted to walk away from that June 24th speech before the ink was even dry.”
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In fact, the State Department had not invented the Roadmap but had only seized on the idea after several other governments brought it forward. Oddly, the idea appears to have come first from Denmark, which was taking its six-month rotation as leader of the European Union during the second half of 2002. During that summer, Danish Foreign Minister Moeller visited the Middle East and presented to the Israelis a short draft, a three-chapter version of the Roadmap whose first chapter dealt with security.

The Jordanians were meanwhile pursuing the same path, working not with White House officials but only with the State Department, and urging that the steps leading to a two-state solution needed to be spelled out. Powell, their main interlocutor, was not encouraging in his discussion with Foreign Minister Muasher; perhaps his losing struggle over the content of the June 24 speech made him careful about predicting what he could push through the White House. “We're not there yet,” he told the Jordanian. In July, the Saudi, Jordanian, and Egyptian foreign ministers were invited to meet with the Quartet in New York, at the United Nations, and the following day were asked to come to Washington to see President Bush in the Oval Office. In those meetings, the Jordanian minister again pressed for a Roadmap that outlined concrete steps, measures of performance, and timelines.

Ten days later, on August 1, King Abdullah of Jordan met with Bush. Preparing for the meeting, Muasher heard from Rice on July 31 precisely what he had been told by Powell: “This is a non-starter.” The Palestinians needed to
perform on security first “and then we will see.” Muasher prepared the king for a tough meeting because the Americans were plainly rejecting the Roadmap concept. When King Abdullah presented the idea to Bush, the president replied as Rice had predicted: We are not ready for that yet; the Palestinians must work on security first. But this Roadmap is nothing new, the Jordanians argued; it is merely a way to translate your vision into steps. In a back and forth with Muasher, whom the king asked to explain what the Jordanians meant by a Roadmap, Bush began to come around. I don't think I have a problem with that, he finally said, and asked Muasher to work with Bill Burns on a proposal.

Both the Jordanians and the State Department leapt at the invitation and the drafting began. This was an unexpected gift for the State officials: In late June it had appeared that the traditional diplomatic approach was at an end, but only five weeks later the president was instructing them to reengage with their Arab and EU counterparts. In August and especially in September, when so many foreign ministries move to New York for the UN General Assembly, the preliminary Danish version was amended over and over again, and by the September 17 meeting of the Quartet, a near-final text was in hand. The White House had had little influence in these revisions; its supposed representative was a career CIA official detailed to the NSC and fully in sympathy with Burns and
the Near East Bureau at State.

In mid-October, Sharon was to visit the White House again, and so it was time to reel in the Israelis. To that point the text had been developed entirely without their input, and indeed they did not even know of the American involvement in the Roadmap. At a preparatory meeting between American and Israeli officials shortly before the Bush-Sharon meeting in the Oval Office, Hadley handed over a few pages. Take a look at this, he told Weissglas and
Tourgeman; it's something we've prepared. The pair had become Israel's two-man foreign ministry when it came to dealing with the United States, and between Weissglas's humor and panache and Tourgeman's brilliant mind and command of detail, they were perfectly balanced. A career diplomat who had served in London and Amman, Jordan, Tourgeman later succeeded Ayalon as diplomatic advisor and played a central role under Prime Minister Olmert as well.

The pair went back to Blair House, the presidential guest house across from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue where Sharon was staying, made a few copies of what Hadley had handed them, and discussed the text with Danny Ayalon and
others in the delegation. They told Sharon that the draft contained many problems for Israel. “It's a very bad document,” Tourgeman told him. After reading the text and hearing all the comments, Sharon decided, “We are not going to respond to this document now. We will have to take it home, and we will examine it there. It is not something that should be part of the visit.” When Hadley called to get the Israeli reaction, Weissglas replied, “Look, it's a six-page document. For you it's six pages. For us it's our life. It's our future. So we need to examine it, and cannot give you any response to it now.”
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The sour Israeli reaction reflected, no doubt, their memory of the July Danish draft, which they had liked and had thought particularly strong in its handling of security issues. But it also reflected their anger at the way the text had been developed: without them. They were being presented by the United States with a fait accompli. They were asking themselves, “How is it that in our intimate dialogue with them they are presenting us with a document without even consulting us about it?”
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Perhaps the answer lay in the choreography of the process: The idea had come from the EU and the Jordanians, and the president had then asked Burns to confer with Muasher, not with the Israelis. Still, as things had unfolded, the Israeli reaction was entirely predictable. It seemed that State was determined to develop a text without any Israeli input but with sufficient Arab and European support to make amendments impossible, and then to shove it down the Israelis’ throats. These tactics worked, at least in that the final text was almost identical with the October draft. But they weakened Israel's desire to adhere to the Roadmap's conditions, which were always seen as imposed more than agreed to, and they certainly strengthened the Israeli view that Powell and Burns could not be trusted.

What did the Roadmap say? Its formal title – “A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” – revealed immediately that, unlike the Arab Plan, it would address only Israeli-Palestinian and not Syrian or Lebanese issues (though these were given a nod at the end) and that it had a very clear objective: establishing a Palestinian state.

The document began by stating its ambitious goals:

The following is a performance-based and goal-driven Roadmap, with clear phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, humanitarian, and institution-building fields, under the auspices of the Quartet. The destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005, as presented in President Bush's speech of 24 June.

There followed some language that was close to the Bush message of the June 24 speech, but also laid the foundation for endless debate in future years:

A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will only be achieved through an end to violence and terrorism, when the Palestinian people have a leadership acting decisively against terror and willing and able to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty, and through Israel's readiness to do what is necessary for a democratic Palestinian state to be established, and a clear, unambiguous acceptance by both parties of the goal of a negotiated settlement as described below. The Quartet will assist and facilitate implementation of the plan, starting in Phase I, including direct discussions between the parties as required. The plan establishes a realistic timeline for implementation. However, as a performance-based plan, progress will require and depend upon the good faith efforts of the parties, and their compliance with each of the obligations outlined below. Should the parties perform their obligations rapidly, progress within and through the phases may come sooner than indicated in the
plan. Non-compliance with obligations will impede progress. A settlement, negotiated between the parties, will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.
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The Roadmap had three phases. In the first, all Palestinian violence and terrorism would end, the Palestinian political reform Bush had demanded would begin, there would be a new Palestinian constitution and free elections, Israel would withdraw from Palestinian cities in the West Bank, and Israel would freeze all settlement activity and remove settlement outposts erected after March 2001. The Quartet would monitor all these activities, which were supposed to be completed by June 2003 – an amazingly ambitious timetable.

The details of the text showed that the marginalization of
Arafat was a goal in Phase I. On the security side, Palestinian security forces would be reorganized and removed from his control: “[A]ll Palestinian security organizations are consolidated into three services reporting to an empowered Interior Minister,” not to Arafat. On the financial side, funds flowing to the Palestinian Authority would be sequestered and kept out of his hands. Politically, the Roadmap demanded “appointment of [an] interim prime minister or cabinet with empowered executive authority/decision-making body” and the “continued appointment of Palestinian ministers empowered to undertake fundamental reform” including “genuine separation of powers.”

Phase II would come after Palestinian elections and would

end with possible creation of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders in 2003.…Its primary goals are continued comprehensive security performance and effective security cooperation, continued normalization of Palestinian life and institution-building, further building on and sustaining of the goals outlined in Phase I, ratification of a democratic Palestinian constitution, formal establishment of office of prime minister, consolidation of political reform, and the creation of a Palestinian state with provisional borders.

The Roadmap noted the conditional nature of the timeline, however: “Progress into Phase II will be based upon the consensus judgment of the Quartet of whether conditions are appropriate to proceed, taking into account performance of both parties.” Phase II also included a huge international conference designed to amass support for all these efforts, as well as the restoration of some Arab ties to Israel.