Rice’s Hurdles on Middle East Begin at Home
By HELENE COOPER
The New York Times
August 10, 2006
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — As fighting was breaking out last month between Hezbollah and Israel, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked through the night at her guest quarters on Russia’s Baltic coast to draft America’s response to the unfolding crisis.
The strategy she outlined that night, the eve of the Group of 8 meeting, dispensed with traditional diplomatic flourishes. It included no call for an immediate cease-fire and expressly stated that Israel had a right to defend itself.
The approach, which President Bush approved the next morning and has served as the basis for American strategy during the crisis, was more than a policy blueprint. It was also Ms. Rice’s answer to opposing camps within the Bush administration. Ms. Rice, one senior administration official said, “staked out a position that was sufficiently unlike the usual State Department” approach to satisfy conservatives in the government, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.
As Ms. Rice has struggled with the Middle East crisis over the last four weeks, she has found herself trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties at home.
Washington’s resistance to an immediate cease-fire and its staunch support of Israel have made it more difficult for Ms. Rice to work with other nations, including some American allies, as they search for a formula that will end the violence and produce a durable cease-fire.
On her recent trips to the Middle East, Ms. Rice was accompanied by two men with very different outlooks on the conflict: Elliott Abrams, senior director at the National Security Council, and C. David Welch, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Egypt who is assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.
Mr. Welch represents the traditional State Department view that the United States should serve as a neutral broker in the Middle East. Mr. Abrams, a neoconservative with strong ties to Mr. Cheney, has pushed the administration to throw its support behind Israel. During Ms. Rice’s travels, he kept in direct contact with Mr. Cheney’s office.
One administration official described how during the trip — including a July 29 discussion in Ms. Rice’s Rabin suite at the David Citadel Hotel, with its panoramic view of Jerusalem’s Old City — Mr. Welch and Mr. Abrams served as counterfoils, with Mr. Welch arguing the Arab view and Mr. Abrams articulating the Israeli stance.
Ms. Rice selected Mr. Abrams for the National Security Council staff in 2002 when she was national security adviser. His return to government service was unexpected. After President George H. W. Bush pardoned Mr. Abrams in 1992 for his role in the Iran-Contra affair during the 1980’s, Mr. Abrams said he would never work as policy maker again.
State Department officials say that Mr. Abrams serves as a buffer for Ms. Rice with some neoconservatives who are critical of her policies. “The genius of Elliott Abrams is that he’s Elliott Abrams,” one senior administration official said. “How can he be accused of not sufficiently supporting Israel?”
Several State Department officials have privately objected to the administration’s emphasis on Israel and have said that Washington is not talking to Syria to try to resolve the crisis. Damascus has long been a supporter of Hezbollah, and previous conflicts between the group and Israel have been resolved through shuttle diplomacy with Syria.
Two weeks ago, Ms. Rice instructed Stephen A. Seche, the chargé d’affaires at the United States Embassy in Damascus, to approach Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem in Damascus. The two met, but Mr. Moallem “gave no indication that they would be moderately constructive,” a senior administration official said, and there have been no overtures since.
The tensions in the region and within the administration have left Ms. Rice visibly weary and she has at times spoken in unusually personal, emotional terms. After the meeting in her suite, Ms. Rice, Mr. Abrams, Mr. Welch and Richard Jones, the United States ambassador to Israel, had dinner with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. There, Ms. Rice showed a rare flash of impatience with him. When Mr. Olmert responded to her request to suspend airstrikes for 48 hours by saying that Israel had warned residents to evacuate, Ms. Rice shook her head, according to two American officials.
“Look, we’ve had this experience, with Katrina, and we thought we were doing it right,” she reportedly said. “But we learned that many people who want to leave can’t leave.”
Though Ms. Rice was not directly involved in the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, she told colleagues last summer that she had been appalled at the slow reaction and had urged Mr. Bush to do more to alleviate the hardship of residents, many of them black, who were trapped in the flooded city.
Ms. Rice got the suspension she sought from the Israelis, but it proved short-lived. Her plane had barely left Israeli airspace when Israel resumed aerial strikes, though the bombing slowed for 48 hours.
Ms. Rice has been sharply criticized by some conservatives for pushing Israel too far to end its military operations in Lebanon. “Dump Condi: Foreign policy conservatives charge State Dept. has hijacked Bush agenda,” read the headline July 25 in an online version of Insight Magazine, published by The Washington Times.
“She’s being hammered by those who believe that this crisis will only be resolved by a strategic victory by Israel, backed by the United States,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who was a senior adviser for Arab-Israeli relations at the State Department under the last three presidents. “That belief says that unless Hezbollah is handed a strategic retreat, the war on terror will suffer a huge defeat.”
But, Mr. Miller said, “she’s also being hammered by the Europeans and Arabs for what they believe to be her inactivity.”
The popular image of Ms. Rice as America’s impeccably clad, composed, dashing diplomat — an image she and her aides have encouraged — has given way to a more somber figure struggling, like many of her predecessors, to resolve a Middle East conflict.
Ms. Rice’s carefully scripted talking points have sometimes fallen flat. Her comment that the Israel-Lebanon war represented the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”— coming at a time when television stations were showing images of dead Lebanese children — sparked ridicule and even racist cartoons. A Palestinian newspaper, Al Qud, depicted Ms. Rice as pregnant with an armed monkey, and a caption that read, “Rice speaks about the birth of a new Middle East.”
She became angry when a reporter asked her, after Israel’s promised 48-hour suspension of airstrikes ended 36 hours early, how she felt when she found out. “I have had more questions about how I felt,” she said. “The question is what we do. And what we did was to seek clarification from the Israeli government about whether or not they were adhering to the agreement here.”
Before leaving for her trip to the Middle East, she told an acquaintance, with a tone of resignation, that every secretary of state, sooner or later, had to mediate a dispute in the region. “Now, I guess it’s my turn.”
The New York Times
August 10, 2006
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — As fighting was breaking out last month between Hezbollah and Israel, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked through the night at her guest quarters on Russia’s Baltic coast to draft America’s response to the unfolding crisis.
The strategy she outlined that night, the eve of the Group of 8 meeting, dispensed with traditional diplomatic flourishes. It included no call for an immediate cease-fire and expressly stated that Israel had a right to defend itself.
The approach, which President Bush approved the next morning and has served as the basis for American strategy during the crisis, was more than a policy blueprint. It was also Ms. Rice’s answer to opposing camps within the Bush administration. Ms. Rice, one senior administration official said, “staked out a position that was sufficiently unlike the usual State Department” approach to satisfy conservatives in the government, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.
As Ms. Rice has struggled with the Middle East crisis over the last four weeks, she has found herself trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties at home.
Washington’s resistance to an immediate cease-fire and its staunch support of Israel have made it more difficult for Ms. Rice to work with other nations, including some American allies, as they search for a formula that will end the violence and produce a durable cease-fire.
On her recent trips to the Middle East, Ms. Rice was accompanied by two men with very different outlooks on the conflict: Elliott Abrams, senior director at the National Security Council, and C. David Welch, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Egypt who is assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.
Mr. Welch represents the traditional State Department view that the United States should serve as a neutral broker in the Middle East. Mr. Abrams, a neoconservative with strong ties to Mr. Cheney, has pushed the administration to throw its support behind Israel. During Ms. Rice’s travels, he kept in direct contact with Mr. Cheney’s office.
One administration official described how during the trip — including a July 29 discussion in Ms. Rice’s Rabin suite at the David Citadel Hotel, with its panoramic view of Jerusalem’s Old City — Mr. Welch and Mr. Abrams served as counterfoils, with Mr. Welch arguing the Arab view and Mr. Abrams articulating the Israeli stance.
Ms. Rice selected Mr. Abrams for the National Security Council staff in 2002 when she was national security adviser. His return to government service was unexpected. After President George H. W. Bush pardoned Mr. Abrams in 1992 for his role in the Iran-Contra affair during the 1980’s, Mr. Abrams said he would never work as policy maker again.
State Department officials say that Mr. Abrams serves as a buffer for Ms. Rice with some neoconservatives who are critical of her policies. “The genius of Elliott Abrams is that he’s Elliott Abrams,” one senior administration official said. “How can he be accused of not sufficiently supporting Israel?”
Several State Department officials have privately objected to the administration’s emphasis on Israel and have said that Washington is not talking to Syria to try to resolve the crisis. Damascus has long been a supporter of Hezbollah, and previous conflicts between the group and Israel have been resolved through shuttle diplomacy with Syria.
Two weeks ago, Ms. Rice instructed Stephen A. Seche, the chargé d’affaires at the United States Embassy in Damascus, to approach Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem in Damascus. The two met, but Mr. Moallem “gave no indication that they would be moderately constructive,” a senior administration official said, and there have been no overtures since.
The tensions in the region and within the administration have left Ms. Rice visibly weary and she has at times spoken in unusually personal, emotional terms. After the meeting in her suite, Ms. Rice, Mr. Abrams, Mr. Welch and Richard Jones, the United States ambassador to Israel, had dinner with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. There, Ms. Rice showed a rare flash of impatience with him. When Mr. Olmert responded to her request to suspend airstrikes for 48 hours by saying that Israel had warned residents to evacuate, Ms. Rice shook her head, according to two American officials.
“Look, we’ve had this experience, with Katrina, and we thought we were doing it right,” she reportedly said. “But we learned that many people who want to leave can’t leave.”
Though Ms. Rice was not directly involved in the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, she told colleagues last summer that she had been appalled at the slow reaction and had urged Mr. Bush to do more to alleviate the hardship of residents, many of them black, who were trapped in the flooded city.
Ms. Rice got the suspension she sought from the Israelis, but it proved short-lived. Her plane had barely left Israeli airspace when Israel resumed aerial strikes, though the bombing slowed for 48 hours.
Ms. Rice has been sharply criticized by some conservatives for pushing Israel too far to end its military operations in Lebanon. “Dump Condi: Foreign policy conservatives charge State Dept. has hijacked Bush agenda,” read the headline July 25 in an online version of Insight Magazine, published by The Washington Times.
“She’s being hammered by those who believe that this crisis will only be resolved by a strategic victory by Israel, backed by the United States,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who was a senior adviser for Arab-Israeli relations at the State Department under the last three presidents. “That belief says that unless Hezbollah is handed a strategic retreat, the war on terror will suffer a huge defeat.”
But, Mr. Miller said, “she’s also being hammered by the Europeans and Arabs for what they believe to be her inactivity.”
The popular image of Ms. Rice as America’s impeccably clad, composed, dashing diplomat — an image she and her aides have encouraged — has given way to a more somber figure struggling, like many of her predecessors, to resolve a Middle East conflict.
Ms. Rice’s carefully scripted talking points have sometimes fallen flat. Her comment that the Israel-Lebanon war represented the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”— coming at a time when television stations were showing images of dead Lebanese children — sparked ridicule and even racist cartoons. A Palestinian newspaper, Al Qud, depicted Ms. Rice as pregnant with an armed monkey, and a caption that read, “Rice speaks about the birth of a new Middle East.”
She became angry when a reporter asked her, after Israel’s promised 48-hour suspension of airstrikes ended 36 hours early, how she felt when she found out. “I have had more questions about how I felt,” she said. “The question is what we do. And what we did was to seek clarification from the Israeli government about whether or not they were adhering to the agreement here.”
Before leaving for her trip to the Middle East, she told an acquaintance, with a tone of resignation, that every secretary of state, sooner or later, had to mediate a dispute in the region. “Now, I guess it’s my turn.”
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 9:07 AM
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