Meanwhile, the scene in the Palestinian territories was getting more problematic. Tensions between the Fatah-led PNA and the Hamas government were on the rise. The uncomfortable cohabitation between the two groups ended in violence on June 14, 2007, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip after bloody confrontations with Fatah supporters and security forces.
A few months later, on November 27, the Bush administration made a final major push to reinvigorate the peace process by convening an international conference at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. The road map of 2003 had brought little progress. Though it clearly identified steps to be taken by the Palestinians and Israelis, the road map was not being implemented and the two sides kept accusing one another of not fulfilling their obligations.
The United States invited forty-nine countries and international organizations to the conference in Annapolis, with the purpose of setting in motion a continuous process that would result in the establishment of a Palestinian state. Among the attendees were Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, as well as the secretary-general of the United Nations and foreign ministers of the Arab League’s Arab Peace Initiative follow-up committee, which included Jordan. Also attending were representatives of the Quartet, a four-member group consisting of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations, which had been set up in Madrid in 2002 to help overcome obstacles facing the peace process.
In an address to the conference Bush said, “We meet to lay the foundation for the establishment of a new nation—a democratic Palestinian state that will live side by side with Israel in peace and security. We meet to help bring an end to the violence that has been the true enemy of the aspirations of both the Israelis and Palestinians.” He said that both Israelis and the Palestinians would have to make tough choices to achieve peace and that he believed leaders on both sides were ready to tackle the major issues and move toward peace.
The conference ended with the announcement of an agreement that raised hopes for a settlement. Abbas and Olmert agreed to immediately implement their respective obligations under the road map and to form a mechanism, led by the United States, to monitor its implementation. The two sides committed to engage in vigorous, ongoing, and continuous negotiations, and to make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008.
Direct negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis followed. They tackled the final status issues of borders, Jerusalem, refugees, and security, with a view to delivering a final settlement. The talks, which proceeded on the understanding that “nothing is agreed until all is agreed,” appeared to be making some headway, especially on the essential issue of borders. The discussions were thorough and detailed, and the two sides exchanged maps and were negotiating the percentage of land to be swapped within the context of a final agreement. But the talks lost momentum in July when Olmert’s authority was undermined by charges of corruption that forced him to announce his resignation.
Abbas’s authority was also undermined by Hamas’s electoral victory, which had opened another front. The 2006 elections had divided the Palestinian leadership, leaving Gaza under the full control of Hamas and the West Bank under Fatah’s control. Gaza was in continual confrontation with Israel until Egypt succeeded in brokering a truce in June 2008. Popular pressure was mounting for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. But that would prove an extremely difficult task.
In hindsight, a Palestinian election in which Hamas took part created more problems than it solved. And, as with the Iraqi elections the previous year, sometimes the democratic process throws up surprises.
Chapter 25
The Mask Slips
I
raq’s first general elections were held one year before the Palestinian elections, on January 30, 2005. Parties were competing for seats in a Transitional National Assembly, which would draft a new constitution to be submitted to the Iraqi people. The likely victory of Shia political parties backed by Iran had led to talk of a strengthening of Shia power throughout the region. Iran was thought to be providing money and support to one or more of these parties, and many in the region feared that it was plotting to stage a behind-the-scenes takeover of Iraqi politics. The Sunni community in Iraq, unwilling to trust a process that they believed was being rigged to marginalize them, decided to boycott the elections. This proved to be a big mistake.
Just over a month before the election I was interviewed on
Hardball with Chris Matthews
on MSNBC. Matthews asked me my opinion of the upcoming Iraqi election, and in particular the implications of a radical Shia victory. I said:
The worst outcome is, you don’t have a secular state. In other words, the new government is strongly represented by those who might have support from Iran. We hope that’s not the case. As you are aware, there’s an issue of the Sunnis; we want them to go to the elections, we want them to be part of the process. If they’re not, then there could be more difficulties.
In those days I often expressed my concerns about the area covering the old Levant and the Fertile Crescent, an area stretching from Syria and Lebanon to Iraq and Iran. During that interview with Chris Matthews, the image of a crescent popped into my head as a good metaphor for the potential spread of Iranian influence. “If it was a Shia-led Iraq that had a special relationship with Iran, and you look at that relationship with Syria and Hezbollah and Lebanon,” I said, “then we have this new crescent that appears that will be very destabilizing for the Gulf countries and for the whole region.”
After that interview, all hell broke loose. I was criticized by many people for being anti-Shia. The Iraqi politician Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Shia party SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), who had spent many years in exile in Iran, called the idea of Iranian influence in Iraqi politics “ridiculous.” But by then no one doubted that Iran was actively meddling in, if not guiding, Iraqi politics.
The controversy illustrates some of the difficulties of speaking to the media. I was talking politics, not religion, but my comments were deliberately distorted. My concern was that some Iranians were trying to invoke sectarian sentiments to serve their own agendas, thus creating conditions that could lead to Sunni-Shia confrontations across the Muslim world. I accept and respect the Shia as one of the legitimate branches of Islam and strongly believe that it is not acceptable to judge people according to their faith. Shias have made an enormous contribution to Arab and Muslim culture as well as to the defense of the Arab nationalist cause, and they have been loyal to their countries, whether in Lebanon or Iraq. I never meant to suggest that they would, by virtue of their faith, automatically align with Iran—only that the Iranian government would manipulate the situation to its advantage and foment divisions. In fact, Iraqi Shia fought valiantly in defense of their country in its war with Iran in the 1980s.
Contemporary Shia thought covers a broad spectrum of beliefs. At one end are some of the most conservative thinkers in the Muslim world, and at the other some of its most liberal. Iran is the home of some visionary clerics, who are leading the Middle East in addressing certain social issues. When we in Jordan were looking at different ways of tackling birth control, we turned to Iran to understand how religious authorities there support contraception, a sensitive subject in the Arab world. The late Lebanese Shia cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah believed that women should have equal rights and play a role equal to that of men in society. So clerics can be a force for positive change, but they can also be reactionary.
My fear was that some in the Iranian regime were setting in place the conditions for a devastating sectarian conflict that could speedily spread from Beirut to Bombay. Across the centuries, some of the most violent moments in human history have been preceded by politicians’ decisions to use religion to justify a war or political interest. From the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition, great cruelty and suffering have often been imposed by those with the divine conviction that they are in the right.
Speaking in the name of God can all too easily serve as a justification to suppress debate. Putting yourself on a moral and spiritual pedestal allows you to condemn any challenger as morally bankrupt. And this absolutist view becomes dangerous when it is combined with politics. Suddenly, your political opponents become not merely people with differing values and ideas about how to organize society, but enemies of God.
I wanted to point out the risk of this potential new sectarian conflict. Unfortunately, the controversy over my interview generated more than hostile words.
On Christmas Eve 2004, a tanker truck packed with explosives heading for the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad blew up, destroying a nearby house and killing nine people. Subsequent investigations revealed that the attack had been planned by a certain well-known Shia political group with support from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. My hopes that my visit to Tehran the previous year would lead to improved relations between Jordan and Iran literally went up in smoke. This was the second attack on our embassy in Baghdad. The first, in August 2003, was a car bombing by Sunni extremists linked to Al Qaeda. Now we had also been attacked by Shia extremists linked to the Iranian government. In the Middle East, moderates have no shortage of enemies.
As the New Year began, people across Iraq were getting ready for the elections. I asked my people to prepare an analysis, based on what we were hearing and seeing, of the Iraqi political situation for President Bush, who had just been reelected to a second term. To keep it simple, I asked them to use a traffic-light system. They put together a large chart with three colored columns, in which they placed pictures of thirty Iraqi politicians, organized by party and affiliation. In the green column were the Interim Government’s prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and his supporters, as well as the Kurds—people who were moderate and with whom we shared the same values. The red column was made up of people who were allied with Iran and working to promote Iranian influence inside Iraq as well as Sunni extremists. And the yellow column comprised people who shifted in their allegiances but whom the international community could work with, like Nouri Al Maliki, of the Shia Al-Da’wa party, technocrats and businessmen, and some of the more conservative Sunni tribal sheikhs.
We also gave the American president and his staff a detailed plan for reconstruction in western Iraq to help bring the Sunnis back into the political process. It was crucial that the tribal sheikhs not become hardened in opposition—Iraq could not survive without the Sunnis onboard. We were concerned that the traditional tribal instincts of the region would take over, and that all groups would begin to fight for political power and influence. Our goal was to make sure the Americans understood that if there was to be any hope of stability in Iraq, it would depend on having a government that was inclusive and representative of Iraqi society. To my shock, not all American officials agreed with this logic. A senior American general did not waste any time in brushing aside our argument that the Sunnis’ involvement in the political process was essential for the stability of Iraq. He was adamant that the Sunnis were America’s enemies in this war and said that if they did not behave themselves, the United States would crush them militarily. Such an alarmingly simplistic view of the situation was very disconcerting.
Our plan outlined how to use social and economic assistance to provide political support to Iraqi tribal leaders in western Iraq. As we shared a common border, this was an area of Iraq we knew well. Some of the larger tribes had members in both eastern Jordan and western Iraq. In one area there was a run-down phosphate plant. We suggested that if the United States could help get that factory up and running again, this would create jobs, thereby providing a pocket of stability, which could in turn serve as a base for local tribesmen to fight back against Al Qaeda in Iraq.
U.S. defense secretary Rumsfeld took bits and pieces of our plan, focusing mainly on security and the creation of tribal militias. But the administration did not pay much attention to the economic and political recommendations, treating the occupation and administration of Iraq primarily as a military undertaking. They liked the idea of using the tribal militias to fight Al Qaeda, but they were far less interested in providing them with economic support so that they would become representatives of the central government in remote regions of Iraq.
By now, the Americans were not the only ones encountering problems in Iraq. In the south, the British were also struggling. The British Foreign Office has a deep knowledge of the Middle East, and its diplomats were known for their insight into the region and experience in dealing with its complicated and interconnected issues. But surprisingly, when the British went into the south, they seem to have been blind to the potential for problems from Iran. With Iranian surrogates fomenting unrest and Revolutionary Guard units being sent across the border, the whole place blew up in their faces. In some places you could hear Farsi spoken more often than Arabic. The British could have used fewer Whitehall bureaucrats and more people with deep cultural and historical knowledge of Iraq, especially as the Iranians began to make a stronger play for political influence in the south.
In the run-up to the elections, Iranian agents were determined to influence the result, supporting those Shia parties affiliated with Iran with money and resources. A large influence in Iraq where U.S. troops are spread across the country could be extremely useful for the Iranians in any future confrontation with the United States.
In the January elections, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a coalition of Shia parties, won a majority of the seats in the Transitional National Assembly, and one of its leaders, Ibrahim Al Jaafari, replaced Ayad Allawi as prime minister. Ahmad Chalabi’s party failed to win a single seat. The assembly fulfilled its main mandate of drafting a new Iraqi constitution, and Iraqis, voted again in December to elect a new parliament for a four-year term. The UIA again won the majority of seats and Jaafari was again chosen as prime minister. But he was forced to step down amid criticisms of ineffectual leadership. He was replaced by Nouri Al Maliki in April 2006.