The Secretary (19 page)

By now the flight attendants were rationing the food. All the meals were usually prepared
on the plane and the air force crew always packed all the supplies they needed before
departure, keeping perishables on dry ice or in cool storage on the plane. They rarely
resupplied during the trip because they didn’t want to risk serving anything that
might give passengers an upset stomach. For very long trips, the crew made arrangements
in advance to resupply in countries along the way—even American bases at some of our
refueling stops were not necessarily equipped to provide meals for forty people on
short notice.

When they had left Washington, the crew expected two country stops and five legs total.
They had prepared for the exact number of lunches, dinners, and breakfasts on our
route. We were now on our way to the fifth country, and there were going to be eight
legs total until Washington. And all the times had been turned upside down—the snack
and dinner on the way out of Islamabad had become a dinner and a breakfast. The breakfast
on the way out of Morocco had become a lunch on the way to Egypt. The rest of the
meals required ingenuity and serious forward planning. We still had two seven-hour
flights before we arrived home. On our six-hour flight to Cairo, we were reduced to
eating a thin cheese sandwich and about five tablespoons each of canned tomato soup.
There was no more wine to lull our discontent. Clinton came to the back of our plane
and handed out chocolates she had gotten from her hotel in Marrakesh.

Sitting in the front cabin, Paul, the plane team line officer with no team, was delirious
with fatigue. When he had heard Cairo was next, he had reconciled himself to never
going home. Marrakesh was a nine-hour flight across the Atlantic to Washington. Instead
we were now flying five hours east to Egypt. “It’s a good thing the earth is round,”
thought Paul. “Everything is always on the way to somewhere else.”

Clinton spent a few hours speaking to President Hosni Mubarak and Foreign Minister
Aboul Gheit, explaining why she believed that Bibi’s offer was worth seizing upon.
But mostly she pressed them to give Abbas the backing that he so needed to make the
difficult choices on the road to peace.

On our sixteen-hour journey home, and in the following weeks in Washington, I pondered
the drama I had seen unfold and the disappointment it had caused. I only learned later
of the details of Clinton’s conversations, but I still wondered whether one of the
reasons countries and people were so often disappointed in the United States was their
unrealistic expectations of what the United States should and could do. Governments
everywhere that instinctively and narrowly pursued their national interest somehow
expected the United States to suspend the pursuit of its own interests to please them.
The Arabs wanted the United States to ditch the Israelis; the Israelis wanted the
United States to bomb Iran; the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted Obama
to wait with him for the Shiite messiah; Pakistan wanted to be given Afghanistan on
a gold platter; India wanted the United States to say it could have Kashmir; Japan
wanted Washington to make Beijing go away. Countries seemed to forget that the United
States had different layers of overlapping interests it needed to align.

I also saw a clear dissonance between the reality of American power, whether hard,
smart, or soft, and what people believed was in America’s power to achieve. The sometimes
bizarrely optimistic attitudes of American officials themselves and their belief in
their own ability to get things done only fed that perception. It had always been
so, but now American influence was being challenged in unprecedented ways in a world
spinning faster than ever before.

*   *   *

Weeks later, I was sitting in my dark cubicle in the Building reading an interview
with Obama by Joe Klein in
Time
magazine when one sentence about the stalled Middle East peace talks at the very
end of the page caught my eye. “If we had anticipated some of these political problems
on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.”
13

I was perplexed. Even as a seasoned journalist walking the corridors of power in Washington,
or seeing Hillary get skewered for her comments on China, or watching Jeff in full
damage-control mode in Morocco, I still struggled sometimes to accept that American
officials were just human beings. But it was astounding to me that the president of
the United States had not expected that a sixty-year-old conflict would be difficult
to resolve and that he had not appreciated the impact his words would have on the
hopes of people in the region.

Obama was not the only president who had walked into the Oval Office convinced that
the authority of his position combined with the power of his own persona were enough
to move heaven and earth. Sometimes they could, when all the stars aligned, but often
presidents left the White House more or less frustrated.

“The people can never understand why the president does not use his supposedly great
power to make ’em behave,” President Harry Truman had once complained. “Well, all
the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering,
kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”
14

Around the world, people thought the same. They expected an American president to
push a button and make things happen, because he wanted it, because they wanted it.

Washington’s dilemmas in the Middle East date back to a chain of decisions made by
President Truman starting in 1947. After the ailing president Franklin Roosevelt died
in April 1945, Truman, his vice president, moved into the White House. He was facing
an election in November 1948 and his ratings were dismal. Meanwhile, the British Mandate
over Palestine was due to expire in May 1948 and Britain was going to turn over the
territory to the UN. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British had already promised
the Jews a national home in Palestine, as long as nothing prejudiced the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities on the land. So, with a deadline
looming, a UN plan was drawn up to partition the land into an Arab State and a Jewish
state, by which Palestine would be divided between Arabs and Jews.

Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, was opposed to the plan. He argued that
the move would endanger supplies of Arab oil and jeopardize the Marshall Plan for
the recovery of post–World War II Europe. The State Department’s head of Near Eastern
Affairs, Loy Henderson, Jeffrey Feltman’s early predecessor, also repeatedly argued
against support for a new Jewish state. The State Department received hundreds of
letters requesting that Henderson be sacked for being too pro-Arab. The White House
and the State Department were at odds. During a meeting at the White House, David
Niles, Truman’s political advisor, turned to Henderson, who was once again arguing
against support for partition, and said: “Look here Loy, the most important thing
for the United States is for the president to be re-elected.”
15

Truman was annoyed by the pressure that Zionist groups were putting on him but he
needed their votes. And he had been blunt about it when he explained his position
about the partition plan to American ambassadors posted in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon,
and Syria. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who
are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs
among my constituents.”
16

After much debate, the White House endorsed the UN partition plan during a UN Security
Council meeting in November 1947. Jews everywhere were elated, Arabs warned partition
was war. There was still another six months before the plan would be implemented and
the State Department continued to look into other options, including the possibility
of a temporary UN trusteeship of Palestine. Despite the domestic politics, Truman
did not say whether, come the time, he would recognize the new Jewish state resulting
from the partition plan. But on May 14, 1948, the day that the Jewish state was to
be declared, there was still no alternative to partition or to recognition by the
United States. So Truman signed a typed-up statement recognizing the new state. He
crossed out the words “Jewish state” and instead wrote “State of Israel.”

Ever since, America’s relationship with Israel has been bumpy, evolving from mere
sympathy to full support with billions in military aid, often tinged with annoyance
or guilt. The two countries have clashed many times, particularly about the Israeli
construction of settlements on occupied land. Some of the dynamics between the United
States, Israel, and the Arabs that were established in the 1940s persist today, exacerbated
by years of habit. As with family dynamics, the players struggle to find new ways
to interact with one another.

In the Arab world, the impact of Jewish voters in the United States and the power
of the pro-Israel lobby are often described in a sweeping statement as a conspiracy.
Arabs raise their hands up in the air and accuse America of being unfair while despairing
at their own powerlessness. But just like in 1948, raw politics are at work in a system
susceptible to strong single-issue agendas, such as Israel, but also health care and
guns. While liberal American Jews often dilute their energy to lobby for a wide range
of issues from the environment to education, many right-wing Jews in the United States
focus single-mindedly on shielding Israel from any criticism whatsoever, and they
can lose track of the bigger picture—what does it mean not only for America’s long-term
national security interest but also for Israel’s?

*   *   *

As I delved deeper into the fiasco of the Obama administration’s efforts at peacemaking
in the Middle East in 2009, I found there was more to it still than just American
politics, an overconfident president, and complex dynamics between Arabs, Israelis,
and America. Human interactions between players in Washington added a whole new layer
of complication.

In May, when Hillary had stood in her blue pantsuit next to the Egyptian foreign minister
at the State Department, she was unconvinced by her own tough words about the settlements.
She knew settlements were a problem, but she didn’t believe that making this the focus
of the strategy for peace was wise. There was no plan B if Netanyahu said no. Inside
the White House there was a belief that making Israel stop settlement construction
was the quickest way to bring everybody to the negotiating table and then get to the
finish line fast—after all, the rough outlines of a peace deal had long been known
to all. This was why Obama made clear to Bibi, during their first meeting in May 2009,
that a settlement freeze was imperative. Even the call for “no natural growth” wasn’t
new. Mitchell himself, in his report in 2000, had specifically mentioned it as an
issue. While White House advisors like Rahm Emanuel were gung ho about pushing Bibi,
the public tone was still subtle and the exact way forward had yet to be decided on.
But Hillary picked up on the combative mood inside the White House and combined it
with her own forceful speaking to overdeliver for her boss in public with a maximalist
position. She was focused on showing loyalty to the man whose advisors still doubted
she was on their team. Her words tied Obama’s hands. The president didn’t want to
undercut his own secretary of state, a former First Lady whose popularity matched
his own and who was relentlessly campaigning for America on his behalf. After winning
the election, winning Hillary over onto his team was Obama’s second most satisfying
victory and he couldn’t undo that.

Both Obama and Clinton were also keen to project a united image to the world and avoid
a repeat of the public sparring that had so marred the Bush administration. Powell
was always watching his back while Condoleezza Rice and the defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld contradicted each other in public. The infighting further tarnished America’s
reputation and credibility.

So there were no retractions, no immediate public readjustment of the position that
Hillary had stated so forcefully. Obama only reinforced her words when he next spoke
about settlements, because deep down he believed it was time for Washington to show
tough love toward Israel. The new standard stayed out there, taking on a life of its
own, and crucially it provided a convenient cover for the two key protagonists in
the drama. Abbas was the most moderate Palestinian leader Israel had ever had to deal
with but he always worried he would be branded a traitor to the cause and didn’t want
his legacy to include the sin of signing away any bit of Palestinian land, even for
peace. Bibi was risk averse as well, unable to accept that a Palestinian state could
be created under his watch.

With an Israeli and a Palestinian leader who didn’t want to make peace anyway, it’s
hard to tell whether a different approach from Washington would have produced a different
outcome in the thankless, decades-long task of Mideast peacemaking, but the Obama
administration’s Middle East peace efforts would not recover from this false start.
For months the administration tried to adjust the trajectory it was on, but even Hillary’s
statement in Jerusalem about Bibi’s unprecedented offer wasn’t enough to unblock the
situation. When Abbas and Bibi finally agreed to sit down in the same room at the
end of 2010, their positions were so far apart that the negotiations faltered within
days.

Throughout 2009, Clinton and Obama were also learning to work together. All year,
she had labored to gain the trust of the West Wing. Clinton wanted to erase the legacy
of the bitter campaign by showing deference to the president and avoiding all impressions
that she had her own agenda or was pushing her own policies onto the table. She kept
her head down in Washington, developing her vision for her foreign policy as secretary
of state, learning the details of the issues and the workings of the Building. In
meetings at the White House, she was eager to sound supportive of the president, acting
like a participant and not a leader.