Chapter 18
During the Clinton administration, Iraq and America exchanged many violent words and a few missiles but stopped short of outright war. But in January 2001, as the administration of George W. Bush came into office, that dynamic began to change. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Elliott Abrams, and Richard Perle had long harbored ambitions to take down Saddam Hussein and finish the job that Bush’s father, in their eyes, had begun. Many of these neocons began to take up strategic positions in the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department. They had the access; now all they lacked was the opportunity. All too soon, one would present itself.
The Bush administration showed little or no interest in building on the work of the Clinton administration. The day after Bush came into office, on January 21, 2001, the Israelis and Palestinians met at Taba in Egypt to try to follow on from the previous year’s negotiation at Camp David and, with the assistance of Clinton’s last-minute proposals (the Clinton Parameters), to bridge their final differences. But the talks soon broke down. After Taba, the revolving door in Israel began to spin again.
Ehud Barak was defeated in March by the Likud Party, led by Ariel Sharon. By electing Sharon, the Israeli public was sending a clear message. As his actions would soon demonstrate, Sharon had little interest in peace.
As dusk fell on the evening of May 18, 2001, Israeli F-16 fighters took off from their bases, heading for the West Bank and Gaza. Some of their bombs struck at the Palestinian security headquarters in Nablus, flattening the complex and killing eight people. Others hit targets in Ramallah and the Gaza Strip, killing eleven people and wounding many more. It was the first time since the 1967 war that Israel had attacked the Palestinians with fighter jets, and the strikes brought international condemnation. An unrepentant Ariel Sharon said in an interview with an Israeli newspaper, “We will do everything necessary and use everything we have to protect Israeli citizens.”
The Israeli attack was the culmination of a week of escalating violence. On May 14, five Palestinian police officers were killed by Israeli soldiers. Four days later, on the morning of May 18, Hamas sent a suicide bomber to attack a shopping mall in the coastal resort town of Netanya, killing five shoppers and wounding around a hundred more. Later that evening the Israelis deployed their warplanes and bombs. Each side seemed to be trying to outdo the other in atrocities. Every human life is sacred, and I believe it is simply wrong to target innocent civilians, whether using suicide bombers or F-16 jets.
U.S. vice president Dick Cheney appealed for calm in a television interview a few days later, saying, “I think they should stop, both sides should stop and think about where they are headed here, and recognize that down this road lies disaster.” But neither side was listening.
Later that year, on September 8, 2001, I sent a letter to President Bush urging him to speak out on the Palestinian problem, and I was quickly invited to travel to the United States and discuss my plan with him. On September 11, 2001, I was flying across the Atlantic on a private plane, on my way to the Baker Institute in Texas to give a speech before going on to meet President Bush in Washington. I had taken a sleeping pill, so I was knocked out when my brother Ali came and shook me awake, saying, “We have a major problem. Something has happened in the States.” We had received reports from the BBC that an airplane had crashed into the twin towers in New York, but as we had no access to television, we could not fully comprehend the horror and destruction of the attack.
Back in Jordan, Rania was glued to CNN, watching the devastating events unfold minute by minute. She managed to get a call through to the onboard telephone and urged me to turn the plane around and go back to Britain. But I had been raised to support close allies in times of crisis and told her I would stick to my plan. “We’re going to continue to the United States,” I said. “I want to show solidarity with my friends.”
“Abdullah, you don’t understand what’s happened,” she said. “They’re not going to be interested in looking after you.”
While we were talking, the pilot had contacted U.S. air traffic control and obtained clearance for our plane to land in America. But as we approached Labrador, Canada, I made the decision to turn back. In the cockpit we managed to catch a BBC broadcast that was reporting on the attack and I started to realize the magnitude of what had happened. Several hours later we landed back in the UK, at Brize Norton Air Base in Oxfordshire, about sixty-five miles west of London. While the crew was refueling, I walked across the tarmac in the dark and headed for the passenger lounge. As I went through the main doors, I saw the awful images of the two airplanes crashing into the twin towers. I was shocked by such naked aggression against civilians. Then I thought, “Oh my God. All hell will break loose if this has been done by an Islamist group.”
My next thought was, “How can Jordan help?” I found a secure telephone and began to place calls to the United States. President Bush was very busy at that point, but I managed to get through to George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “George,” I said, “whatever we can do, Jordan is behind the United States.” He confirmed my fear that Al Qaeda was behind the attack and mentioned that there might be forthcoming operations in Afghanistan.
Then I called General Tommy Franks, who was commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and would be in charge of any military operations covering the Middle East. Tommy was someone I had known for many years, going back to my Special Operations days. I said, “We’re committed to helping you.”
When I got back to Jordan, I gathered my senior military officers and told them that I was determined to help in the fight against these madmen. My officers were ready for Jordan to join in the fight; they had been battling militant extremists in Jordan for years, so they well knew the harm they could do.
When the United States and its allies went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, we sent a field hospital and Special Forces detachment to Mazar-e-Sharif in the north. After 9/11, the first priority of the United States was to go after its enemies.
From that point on, the Israelis would do their best to link their fight against Arafat and the Palestinians to what the Americans were now calling the “global war on terror.” I noticed this disturbing development early on and feared what might happen if they succeeded.
Early in the morning of January 3, 2002, a battered blue ship moved through the calm waters of the Red Sea, rounded the Horn of Africa, and headed north along the coast of Saudi Arabia. The 4,000-ton freighter Karine A had stopped in Dubai to pick up a cargo of mattresses, sunglasses, and sandals. The captain of the ship, a former senior officer in the Palestinian naval police, had made an earlier stop at an island off the Iranian coast. At dawn, the quiet of the ocean was broken by the sound of Israeli army helicopters heading toward the ship, accompanied by Israeli naval vessels. Israeli commandos seized control of the vessel, subdued her crew, and diverted the Karine A to the southern Israeli port of Eilat. Beneath the flip-flops and bedding, the Israelis found boxes of Kalashnikov rifles, Katyusha rockets, and plastic explosives.
The seizure of the Karine A further damaged the already reeling peace process. Yasser Arafat had been under siege at his Ramallah headquarters for nearly a month, his authority severely undermined by Israel’s high-handed actions. Sharon’s government had ordered the killing of several leaders of Hamas in targeted assassinations and the intifada was growing more violent daily as Palestinians began to despair. Eight years after the signing of the Oslo agreement, little had changed for the Palestinians, as subsequent Israeli prime ministers had reneged on its promises and prescriptions. Sharon periodically closed off access to Israel and sealed off Gaza and parts of the West Bank, making it impossible for Palestinians with jobs in Israel to go to work.
On January 7, Sharon held a press conference in Eilat next to the captured ship. He displayed the seized weapons and called Arafat a “bitter enemy,” claiming that he had bought deadly weapons from Iran with the intention of smuggling them into the West Bank and Gaza Strip and launching further attacks against Israel. President Bush could have used his influence to calm the situation, but his attention was focused elsewhere, and he seemed to have no desire to rein in Sharon. His administration appeared to have decided to stand aside and watch as the peace process sputtered and died.
On January 31, after the State of the Union address in which Bush described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” I headed to the State Department for a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell. I wanted to stress the importance to the entire region of setting the peace process back on track, and to get a better understanding of the administration’s new focus on Iraq. In February of the previous year, Powell had visited Jordan as part of a wider trip to the Middle East, and I had met him at the airport. Typically, this is a practice reserved for visiting heads of state, but I had known him for many years and considered him a good friend. We spoke about Iraq and the stalemated peace process in a long meeting at Raghadan Palace. I was preparing to take him back to the airport when, having taken a liking to my new Mercedes S500 sedan, he asked if he could drive instead. He drove us both to the airport, surprisingly sticking to the speed limit the whole way. Powell was heading to the West Bank for a meeting with Chairman Arafat, and as we got out he pointed to his security detail and said, “I wanted to drive it to Ramallah, but they said no.”
When I saw Powell in January, he raised the Karine A incident and said that it was unfortunate, because up until then things had been improving a bit. Even Sharon had said as much. But the capture of the ship and its cargo of weapons had undercut U.S. efforts—Powell’s envoy, General Anthony Zinni, had been shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate a cease-fire—and made it difficult to move forward. He insisted that there would have to be relative quiet, and that Arafat would need to say something about the ship for the U.S. domestic audience.
I told Powell that the United States needed to send a message of hope to the Palestinians. It had to reinforce their belief that peaceful negotiations would lead to statehood, and to reach out and help those who had been hurt by the intifada and had lost their jobs because of the closures. I also said that the United States needed to be more transparent about what exactly Arafat would have to do to relieve the situation. I suggested that a plan detailing the obligations of both Palestinians and Israelis would help achieve this. Then we started to discuss the only subject anybody in Washington wanted to talk about: Iraq. Ever the diplomat, Powell sought to soften the impact of the president’s State of the Union address, saying that if Iraq abandoned its support for terrorism and its weapons of mass destruction program, then the United States would change its attitude.
The next day I met with President Bush in the Oval Office. I raised the one topic that was then and is now to my mind the most important issue for America in the region—the peace process. I told him that all too often it was relegated to a sideshow, but it was in fact the central issue. Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I said, would remove a rallying cry for the likes of Al Qaeda and make other Arab leaders more supportive of America’s goals in the region.
But Bush was in no mood to talk about the peace process. He quickly revealed his frustration with recent developments. He said that Arafat had “led us down a path and then reneged.” He insisted that Arafat had to do a better job in controlling extremists; otherwise, the United States would not spend political capital trying to resolve the conflict. “We can’t be hypocrites on terror,” he said, and then he made it clear that he felt Arafat was siding with terrorist organizations. As I had feared, he began to elide his own struggle to tackle Al Qaeda with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
I defended Arafat, saying that he was a national symbol for the Palestinians, and warned Bush that he would slip away if he felt cornered. I described the situation in the region as two old warriors fighting each other while their peoples suffered, and said that the United States should formulate its demands of Arafat in a way that would be understood by Palestinian people. We kept getting bogged down by problems relating to the leaders on both sides, I said, while the majority of Israelis and Palestinians wanted to improve the situation.
The president said he would look into the idea and discuss it with Sharon. He emphasized that the United States would tell Sharon on his upcoming visit to Washington that if he went overboard it would undermine America’s ability to fight terror. Bush also mentioned that he had told Sharon he would have a real problem if the Israelis killed Arafat.
I asked Bush for his help in convincing the Israelis to let Arafat leave his compound in Ramallah, where he had been kept under “house arrest” by the Israeli military since December 2001, so that he could attend the Arab League Summit in Beirut in March, noting that preventing Arafat from attending would only energize the radicals. Bush promised to raise the issue with Sharon, and then we moved on to a discussion of Arafat’s role in the larger peace process. Again Bush said, “We can’t be hypocrites on terror.” He repeated his claim that Arafat was siding with terrorist organizations, and then he said, “Maybe there is someone better?” He said he was not suggesting overthrow but pointing out that there was a need to think over time about who could best replace Arafat and lead the Palestinians to a better future.
I was alarmed by this turn in the conversation. I said that there was no alternative to Arafat. He had become a symbol of the Palestinian people, and the more pressure Israel put on him the more support his people would give him. Israel had also “cantonized” the Palestinians, leading to a fragmentation of political authority in the West Bank and Gaza. I added that Sharon had a very short-term view, and that while it did not mean we could not eventually be partners in peace, we definitely disagreed with his methods.
At this point Bush steered our discussion to Iraq. Taking a harsher line than Powell had done, the president criticized the Iraqi regime, saying, “Saddam needs to be taken to task.”
“You are going to create a major problem in the Middle East,” I said, slowly and deliberately. “The problem is not with the United States removing Saddam—but what happens next?” But Bush remained adamant in his position.
I returned to Jordan the next day. In subsequent conversations with fellow Arab leaders, including President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, I learned that they had had very similar discussions with members of the Bush administration. “What happens the day after you remove Saddam?” they had asked. The inability of the administration to give a concrete answer left us all very uncomfortable.
It had become clear that America would no longer take the lead in pressing for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. But American disengagement from the peace process would almost certainly kill any hope of progress. So we continued to pressure for the resumption of negotiations, and this time around with a collective Arab peace initiative that we believed would encourage a more active U.S. role in the peace process.
In the last years of his reign, my father developed a new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian problem—one that would include all Arab states and commit them to collective peace with Israel in return for Israel’s total withdrawal from all occupied Arab land. Under such an approach—wider than the Madrid process and designed to win international support—all twenty-two members of the Arab League would offer a collective peace to Israel, backed by security guarantees, provided that Israel agree to meet specific requirements. These included the establishment of a Palestinian state, agreement on the status of Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinian refugees, returning the Golan Heights to Syria, and ending the occupation of Lebanese territories. My father wanted to set out what the generic concept of “land for peace” would mean in practical terms, and to eliminate some of the political maneuvering that had taken place between different Arab countries. Unfortunately, his proposal did not gain momentum and stalled with his death. On becoming king, I took the opportunity to revive my father’s plan and asked our government, in concert with the Egyptians, to discuss it with Saudi Arabia. Eventually the Saudis developed the idea into what first came to be known as Crown Prince Abdullah’s initiative and later became the Arab Peace Initiative, after Saudi Arabia presented it to the Arab League, which adopted it at its summit in Beirut in 2002.
As I was preparing to leave Jordan for the Arab League Summit in Lebanon in March 2002, our intelligence service learned of a plot to assassinate me and the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, when we arrived in Beirut. I called Mubarak and passed on the intelligence. He agreed that the security concerns were real, and we both decided that it would be best if we did not travel to Beirut. Not wanting to offend our hosts, I let it be known that I had been struck by a severe cold and would be unable to travel.
Also missing was Yasser Arafat. True to his word, President Bush had sent Vice President Cheney to Israel to try to persuade Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to let Arafat attend the summit. This was the summit that would launch the Arab Peace Initiative, and it was, therefore, extremely important for Arafat to attend it. But Sharon was unmoved. He said that if Arafat went to Lebanon he would not be allowed to return to his headquarters in Ramallah. Arafat stayed in his compound and tried to join in via videoconference. Showing its petty side, Sharon’s government jammed the signal, and Arafat was reduced to sending a taped message.
On March 28, 2002, the twenty-two members of the Arab League formally endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative. This proposed that, in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories to the June 1967 boundaries, a just and “agreed upon” solution to the refugee problem, and the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital, Arab states would consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, enter into a peace agreement with Israel, provide security for all the states of the region, and establish normal relations with Israel.
For the first time since the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arab states had formally and unanimously made an offer to Israel for normal relations as a basis for ending the conflict. The Israeli response was swift and unambiguous.
On March 29, 2002, Sharon ordered Israeli troops into West Bank cities in an operation called “Defensive Shield,” the largest Israeli military operation since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israeli forces reoccupied almost all of the Palestinian self-rule areas it had redeployed from under the Oslo process. Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jenin, and Nablus were once again under Israeli occupation. A refugee camp in Jenin suffered the worst attack during a two-week siege that was supported by blanket bombardment of its neighborhoods.
The next day Israeli tanks and soldiers assaulted Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, smashing through the walls, cutting the electricity, and leaving the Palestinian leader isolated in his second-floor office, working by candlelight. The crudeness of Israel’s handling of Arafat made even his staunchest detractors soften toward him. Because he was imprisoned for so long, up to a few weeks before his death in November 2004, and treated so badly, many became sympathetic to his plight. He essentially became a hero.
The violence continued to escalate when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two people. In April 2002, some Palestinian fighters, fleeing from Israeli soldiers who were hunting them, took refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The Israeli army quickly surrounded the church and blockaded the Palestinians inside, along with some 250 priests, nuns, and other civilians. People across the world watched appalled as a sacred place of worship was surrounded by Israeli armored vehicles and snipers huddled on nearby rooftops, with their guns trained on the church.
On April 21, Israel halted its military operations and pulled out its troops from Palestinian areas but kept the siege on the Church of the Nativity and Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. The UN General Assembly convened in an emergency session on May 7 and issued a resolution that expressed grave concern at the deteriorating situation in the Palestinian territories. It demanded that Israel, as an occupying power, abide by its responsibilities under the fourth Geneva Convention. It also condemned Israel’s attacks on religious sites and its refusal to cooperate with a UN fact-finding team that was ordered by the Security Council in a resolution adopted on April 19 to investigate its attack on the Jenin refugee camp.
The siege on the Church of the Nativity lasted for over a month. What was shocking was that the Israeli government had no compunction about allowing its soldiers to open fire on this most sacred site. At one point, two Japanese tourists wandered into the middle of the armed standoff, and were saved by nearby journalists, who motioned for them to get out of the way. Eventually a peaceful solution to the standoff was negotiated, but there was little progress in the larger conflict. It was clear that Sharon had no intention of making peace. The decades-old struggle would have to wait for new leaders to emerge.
In June 2002, the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), meeting in Sudan, endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative. They decided to make every effort to win international support for its implementation. The OIC, established in 1969 at a historic summit in Rabat, with fifty-seven members, is the world’s second-largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations. By endorsing the Arab Peace Initiative, the OIC had given the proposal the explicit backing of the entire Muslim world. Holding out the promise of normal relations with Israel with all of its members, the OIC put a fifty-seven-state solution on the table.
The OIC again reaffirmed its support for the Arab Peace Initiative the following year, at the foreign ministers’ meeting in Tehran in June 2003 and at the full OIC summit meeting of heads of state in Malaysia in October. But the Israelis showed no interest in this unprecedented opportunity.
In April 2002, in one of its most controversial decisions, Israel announced that Sharon had authorized the construction of a twenty-six-foot-high wall between Israel and the West Bank. Although the stated purpose was to prevent “terrorists” from crossing into and attacking Israel, parts of the wall were built on West Bank territory occupied by Israel in 1967, not along the 1949 armistice line. Reaching into the West Bank, in some cases up to twelve miles, the wall was constructed so that some 80 percent of the settlers in the West Bank would be on the Israeli side. Its path in some cases cut through the middle of Palestinian villages and in others trapped Palestinian towns on the Israeli side.
We, along with the whole Arab world, suspected that Israel’s real intention was to create a de facto border and, contrary to international law, to annex land occupied in war and thereby preempt final status negotiations. In December 2003, the UN General Assembly requested a ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legality of the wall.
The Palestinians began to prepare their case, and in light of our historical and legal responsibility for Jerusalem, Jordan offered to assist them. Civilized nations settle disputes through the law, and we were determined to present the best case possible. We recommended to the Palestinians that they engage Professor James Crawford of Cambridge University, a recognized expert in international law, and the Jordanian team engaged the services of Sir Arthur Watts, a distinguished British lawyer who formerly had been the legal adviser to the Foreign Office.
In February 2004, assisted by our permanent representative to the United Nations, Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad, the Palestinian and Jordanian teams presented their case to the ICJ, arguing that Israel had no right to build a wall, or anything else, on territory occupied illegally in the 1967 war. On July 9, 2004, the court ruled by a majority of fourteen to one, with the dissenting vote cast by the American judge, Thomas Buergenthal, that the wall violated international law, saying, “The construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law.” The ruling further stated that Israel should stop violating international law and that it should pull down the existing wall and compensate Palestinians for damage caused by its construction. The Israeli government ignored the ruling, and Prime Minister Sharon ordered construction of the wall to continue.
Throughout history, from the Warsaw Ghetto to cold war Berlin, walls built to divide or imprison people have never proved strong enough to stand against the tide of human hope. In the end, Israel cannot gain the security it seeks by imprisoning the Palestinians in a ghetto of their own construction, or by re-creating the Berlin Wall in East Jerusalem. The security that all Israelis and Palestinians crave most, that of a normal life, can be achieved only by tearing down the barriers that separate them and learning to live in peace.
The war drums continued to beat throughout the spring and summer of 2002. I returned to the United States in the spring, and on May 8 again saw President Bush at the White House, where I continued to stress the importance of restarting the peace process. The month before, I had pointed out in a letter that we had been “instrumental in building consensus for the Saudi initiative, which had been translated into a collective Arab commitment to end the conflict with Israel, guarantee its security and establish normal relations between all Arab states and Israel.” This effort to line up the Arab world behind a plan for peace was threatened by Israeli actions. I urged Bush to work for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, which they had taken almost complete control of by then, and to press for the restarting of negotiations.
But the president seemed to view Arafat as a failed leader, and kept stressing his inability to deliver on his promises. He also bemoaned the fact that Sharon, by attacking Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah and keeping him a virtual prisoner, had increased Arafat’s domestic support. “I don’t know who else can emerge,” he said. Bush said Sharon made a hero out of Arafat, who would remain on the stage. But he pointed to the need for ideas that would allow younger people to come out and lead.
I warned the president that there was a false impression of quiet in the region and that a great deal of anger was simmering under the surface. The temporary period of quiet, I said, was due to the hope generated by Powell’s visit the previous month and America’s subsequent efforts to restart the peace process, but more violence could easily erupt if there was no movement in the next few months. I restated the position that political change would depend on a political settlement with a timeline and a Palestinian state as an outcome.
The president listened but stressed his desire to avoid what he saw as the mistakes of the Clinton administration in focusing too much on the details of finding a solution to Jerusalem and forgetting about Israel’s security concerns. “I can imagine how Sharon feels when he starts his meeting with me with the news of a suicide bombing,” he said. The tragic events of 9/11 had understandably given the president greater empathy with other leaders whose people were targeted by suicide attacks. But it also obscured the administration’s grasp of Palestinian suffering. Then the president told me that he still had his eyes on Iraq.
President Bush continued to criticize Arafat, notably in a speech he gave on June 24, 2002, when he set out his policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. He began by stating his commitment to a two-state solution. “My vision is two states,” he said, “living side by side in peace and security. There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror. Yet at this critical moment, if all parties will break with the past and set out on a new path, we can overcome the darkness with the light of hope.” “But,” he continued, “peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.” In return, Bush said, the United States would support a provisional state of Palestine pending negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians on borders and other issues, with a settlement envisaged in three years.
The idea of “leaders not compromised by terror,” sadly, was one that would be hard to implement—on both sides. In American eyes, the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, was compromised by terror. But in Palestinian eyes, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was equally compromised by his role in the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. In the Middle East, everyone was stunned by Bush’s comments. Arafat had represented the Palestinian people, for better or worse, since the 1970s. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his bold partnership with Rabin and Peres. How could the U.S. administration imagine that it could sweep him under the table? Sharon harbored an old animus against Arafat and had decided to lock him into his compound in Ramallah. But what I did not want was for the U.S. administration to take the same line.
In April, to try to revive the stalled peace process, we floated the idea of a “road map,” a set of specific actions accompanied by a timeline that could be used to measure progress by both sides. On a visit to Jordan in early June, William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, said he thought the idea of a detailed action plan with benchmarks was a good one and promised to promote it inside the U.S. government.
Many in the Bush administration, however, continued to be obsessed with Iraq. The desperate situation in Israel would be relegated to the back burner, with disastrous consequences.
Israel supported the approaching war. By constantly conjuring an imminent threat in the public’s imagination, Israeli politicians have managed to keep their citizens in a state of perpetual alarm. This approach has its risks, because it can easily be exploited by those seeking short-term political gain. That is not to say that Israel does not face real threats. But the most effective way to neutralize these threats would be to do the one right thing: negotiate a lasting peace with the Palestinians. If Israel were to do so, it would be recognized by the entire international community, and accepted by the Muslim world. Sadly, many decision-makers inside Israel are ideologically opposed to this. Others are unable to quantify, and therefore to understand, the long-term gains that peace would bring.
Since the 1960s Israel has tried to play the United States against the countries in the Middle East that it has perceived as its biggest threat. In 1967 the Israelis made the argument to the United States that they would have to strike first against Egypt because it was preparing to attack them. In the run-up to the 2003 war they encouraged the United States to launch war on Iraq. Israeli politicians tried to portray Saddam Hussein as a strategic threat to Israel’s existence. At the same time in the United States a group of neocons with administration ties played up the threat to America, fanning the flames of war. Iraqi expatriates, with personal interests in mind, joined in, feeding the government of the United States with inaccurate and exaggerated information.
On July 29, 2002, concerned that the march to war in Iraq was gaining momentum, I gave an interview to the Times of London. “Ask our friends in China, in Moscow, in England, in Paris,” I said. “Everybody will tell you that we have concerns about military actions against Iraq. The international community is united on this . . . Military action against Iraq would really open a Pandora’s box.” I criticized the neoconservative members of the Bush administration, saying they were “fixated on Iraq. . . . You can talk till you’re blue in the face and they’re not going to get it.” The United States was now irrevocably heading down the path to war.
Many leaders in the Middle East stayed away from Washington to express their displeasure with the Bush administration’s policies. But I thought it was important for me to go to Washington regularly to attempt to influence the debate and remind the Bush administration of the importance of moving forward on the establishment of a Palestinian state. I went back again at the end of July, traveling to Washington via Europe, where we discussed the rising tensions between the United States and Iraq with President Jacques Chirac of France in Paris and Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. I knew that my plain speaking would not be welcomed by some in Washington. But Jordan is an old friend of America, and we would be doing the United States no favors by hiding our concerns at such an important moment.
In preparation for my visit, I asked my foreign minister, Marwan Muasher, to prepare a draft of a proposed road map for peace that we could discuss with the president. He reported back that he and Bill Burns had made great progress but that Condoleezza Rice, who was then the U.S. national security adviser, was dead set against the idea, believing it was a “nonstarter.” Rice never gave a rationale for her objections.
I told Marwan that no matter what she thought, we would present our proposal to the president. When I landed in the United States I discovered that my candor with the European press had provoked an angry reaction inside the administration. I was welcomed on arrival by a call from Condoleezza Rice, who said, “The president is very upset with your statement.”
“I’m just saying in public what I heard from Chirac and Blair,” I said. “So don’t shoot the messenger.”
The morning of August 1, 2002, I met President Bush at the White House. Our main agenda item was the peace process, particularly the concept of the road map to move the process forward and reach a two-state solution. Normally the president greeted me warmly, but this morning he was quite stiff and formal. As we walked into the Oval Office, he was drinking a Coke with plenty of ice. Crushing the ice cubes between his teeth as he spoke, he said that he was upset about my recent newspaper interview outlining the risks of war. But President Bush and I had developed a good personal relationship and he warmed up as the meeting progressed.
Giving his views on Iraq, he said that there was a huge amount of hyperventilating about Saddam. He said we were facing a historic moment and that he did not want people thirty years from now to say that President Bush and King Abdullah had the opportunity to forge a lasting peace but did not do it. “We should not be threatened by thugs,” he said.
I reiterated my opposition to war and then said, “Mr. President, if you’ve decided to go to war in Iraq just be straightforward and tell your friends.”
His reply was firm. “I haven’t made that decision yet,” he said. “When I do, you will know.” Then he said he had to deal with the Europeans, who did not understand that what was happening in Iraq was a crime against humanity. He said he would not allow it to go on any longer.
Then we moved on to a discussion of the peace process, and I asked Marwan to present the concept we had come up with in Amman. “We need to assure people of our seriousness,” Marwan said. “We need a road map that starts with security and institutions, and addresses the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories, but that also outlines the remaining steps to be taken going forward until mid-2005, so that Palestinians know exactly what they are getting, and so the international community can gain more support for their work on security.”
“I thought I made that clear in my speech,” the president said, referring to his controversial remarks on June 24. “If it wasn’t clear, we are willing to work with you on outlining these steps,” the president added. He said he had no problem with what we suggested and that after improving security and building institutions, issues such as occupation, settlements, and Jerusalem would be dealt with.
“We can take the speech and translate it into steps,” interjected Bill Burns, who was also in the meeting. The president agreed and called the meeting to an end. Condoleezza Rice later approached Marwan and reversed her earlier opposition to the road map, saying that the United States could work something out with Jordan. By December the road map draft was completed. The new initiative was eventually launched in mid-2003.
The larger meeting gave way to a smaller tête-à-tête in a side room off the Oval Office. But before that, the subject returned to Iraq. At one point President Bush said, “You and I have two great fathers, and we both believe in God, and we have an opportunity to do the right thing.” The president spoke as if going to war against Iraq was a religious duty.
My brother Ali was with me and we were both surprised to hear the president invoke religion as a factor in his decision. Bush’s statement gave us a clear impression that, despite earlier assurances, he had already made up his mind to go to war. Back in Jordan, when I met with senior officials to brief them on the visit, I said, “We’ve got to prepare. This war is going to happen.”