I've finished reading Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine. The book basically tracks the War on Terror from the viewpoint of sources in the CIA -- George Tenet is the more/less tragic hero of the story, and evidently a major source. I'll have more to say on this, including various sections I marked, in a later post. For now I just want to start with a couple of quotes that involve Bush's Israel policy. They are especially noteworthy these days.

The first quote is background for an April 2002 meeting between Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah and Bush in Crawford (pp. 104-105):

Relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Unitd States were in tatters. The Saudis had been stewing for more than a year, in fact, ever since it became clear at the start of 2001 that this administration was to alter the long-standing U.S. role of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to something less than that. The President, in fact, had said in the first NSC principals meeting of his administration that Clinton had overreached at the end of his second term, bending too much toward Yasser Arafat -- who then broke off productive Camp David negotiations at the final moment -- and that "We're going to tilt back ward Israel." Powell, a chair away in the Situation Room that day, said such a move would reverse thirty years of U.S. policy, and that it could unleash the new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Israeli army in ways that could be dire for the Palestinians. Bush's response: "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things."

This faith in the clarifying power of force has long since become a Bush trademark, and seems more than anything else to be the common bond between the Bush and Sharon/Olmert regimes. It's noteworthy that this was Bush's attitude before Sharon took office and sent the IDF into Palestinian territories seeking not just to crush the Intifada but to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and the last vestiges of the Oslo Peace Process. In other words, Bush gave Sharon the green light, and he did it precisely because he believed that Israel should use such force.

Suskind then goes into some background on the US-Saudi relationship, which I won't bother quoting, not least because it's rather off base. This then leads to the relationship between the Saudis and the first President Bush, leading up to a dinner with Bush and Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's long-time ambassador to the US, and consequently to the relationship of Bush père et fils (pp. 106-107):

The discussion between the elder Bush and the Saudi princes was wistful, largely about a world washed away by 9/11, and also a generational passage. Privately, the current President had railed against his father's alliances, and his mistakes. Living, and leading, in reaction to his namesake was a guiding principle. In a defense of his tilting toward Israel, for example, Bush told an old foreign policy hand, "I'm not going to be supportive of my father and all his Arab buddies!"

Next up was a dinner meeting with Abdullah and a rather passive, noncommittal Cheney. Finally, the meeting with Bush at Crawford (pp. 109-111):

The Saudis had specific demands. Abdullah had recently offered his own peace plan: a two-state solution, a recognition of Israel by the Arab world -- and, also a nonstarter about the return to the 1967 borders, leaving East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Arab state, and a host of things he expected in terms of the crisis on the West Bank. The United States, now deep into the "war on terror," had its own set of issues. Though Saudi Arabia was home to fifteen of the nineteen hijackers -- and to bin Laden -- the kingdom was being less than cooperative, barring the United States from interviewing the families of the hijackers and blocking efforts to trace terror finance, most of which tracked through the country's labyrinth of charities and hawalas. First, though, the Saudi started on their list -- a long one, which included the United States distancing itself from Sharon, and acts that would support the Palestinians.

Bush listened, but not really. This was not where he wanted to be. He was marking time. "Let's go for a drive," he said to Abdullah, after a few minutes. "Just you and me. I'll show you the ranch."

And they marched off, in midsentence, to Bush's pickup truck, leaving behind a phalanx of slack-jawed advisers with what one later called "monarchy blues" -- a realization, as he described it, that ideals of representative government fade at moments like this into a feeling that things haven't changed all tha tmuch since foreign affairs were the affairs of kings -- how they got along, or didn't, determined the fate of nations."

Bouncing in the cab of the Chevy pickup -- Bush, wearing a suit and tie for the visit of a foreign leader, Abdullah in a tweed jacket over his gown -- they seemed to get along just fine. Bush loves doing this: showing the 1,600-acre ranch, cutting this way and that over the central Texas scrub in teh pickup, making snap decisions on which path to take, where to go first, and last. There are seventeen varieties of trees. He pointed them out, told Abdullah of his love of the land, his desire for peace. They stopped and talked at one of Bush's favortite spots. They saw a wild turkey.

Then, after an hour or so, they were back for lunch. And everyone settled at a long table on the glassed-in porch -- Colin, Condi, Andy Card, Cheney, Bandar, Bush, Saud, Abdullah, and Jordan -- and Bush asked Abdullah if he could say a prayer. Abdullah nodded, and Bush prayed, and then they ate beef tenderloin and potato salad, brownies and ice cream.

Abdullah, dabbing his lips, snapped to attention as the brownies were cleared -- as though he'd lost track of what had brought him here -- as did Bandar and Saud. They had eight items on their list. They needed deliverables -- something to bring back to the roiling Gulf that would ease the Arab world. Would Bush back up his words with actions? Was he on Sharon's side, or was the United States still interested in supporting its Arab friends? Was America any longer the region's honest broker?

But the discussions could get no traction. The Saudis wanted pressure on Sharon to release Arafat from confinement in Ramallah. Saud went over possible steps the United States could take. Bush stared blankly at them. They went down the items. Sometimes the President nodded, as though something sounded reasonable, but he fofered little response.

And, after almost an hour of this, the Saudis, looking a bit perplexed, got up to go. It was as though Bush had never read the packet they sent over to the White House in preparation for this meeeting: a terse, lean document, just a few pages, listing the Saudis' demands and an array of options that the President might consider. After the meeting, a few attendees on the American team wondered why the President seemed to have no idea what the Saudis were after, and why he didn't bother to answer their concerns or get any concessions from them, either, on the "war on terror." There was not a more important conversation in the "war on terror" than a sit-down with Saudi Arabia. Several of the attendees checked into what had happened.

The Saudi packet, they found, had been diverted to Dick Cheney's office. The President never got it, never read it. In what may have been the most important, and contentious, foreign policy meeting of his presidency, George W. Bush was unaware of what the Saudis hoped to achieve in traveling to Crawford.

Suskind errs in referring to the Saudi peace plan as a nonstarter. The border alignments the Saudis proposed are precisely those mandated by UN Security Council resolutions following the 1967 war. Those are the basis of the international law that governs resolution of the war, and nothing has changed in that regard. Helena Cobban has a good summary of this in a recent post that also covers how international law applies to the recent escalation of hostilities. Her key points bear repeating here:

But the bigger question here, in my mind, is that all these conflicts have now gone on so long, and have so many very tangled sub-themes and potential triggers for escalation by either side, that surely it is time to get the whole darned conflict between Israel and neighbors finally resolved. That means the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Syrian-Israeli conflict, and the Lebanese-Israeli conflict.

This is indeed do-able. If it is done, basically, on the basis of international law, then nearly all the parties to the conflict know what this is and are ready to go ahead and do such a deal. On the Arab side, all the Arab governments have signed onto the Beirut Declaration of 2002 -- and the most recent Hamas-Fateh agreement then endorsed all its main points.

The only party that is not basically ready to resolve the conflict on the basis of international law -- that is, with Israel withdrawing from just about all of the land it captured in the 1967 war -- is that portion of the Israeli public that still clings to the chauvinistic dream of a Jewish Greater Jerusalem that stretches from the Old City just about right down to the Jordan River . . . an outcome that would be unacceptable to the Palestinians in two major ways: it denies any meaningful Palestinian role or presence in Jerusalem, and it slices a huge wedge out of the West Bank, dividing what remains potentially for use by a Palestinian state into two.

The Beirut Declaration of 2002 referred to here is Abdullah's plan -- the same one he presented to Bush. So Cobban is slightly wrong here: Israel is not the only party opposed to so simple, straightforward, and obvious a deal. Bush is another party opposed. Or perhaps we should say Cheney is the one opposed, since he was the one who trashed the plan. Bush merely lacked the attention span of one of those turkeys he enjoys pointing out -- and by not caring, not understanding, by his ignorance and his gut faith in the clarifying power of force, he missed an opportunity that could have set the US in a far superior position in the Middle East, establishing a bit of credibility he sure could have used in Iraq. Instead, we've since seen what comes of his alliance with Israel, of his commitment to force and against justice.