Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East

Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Dipomacy in the Middle East By Martin Indyk Simon and Schuster 2009, $30, pp. 512

Osama bin Laden is famously reported to have said, “You Americans have the watches, but we Arabs have the time.” It is a lesson Martin Indyk learned the hard way, and this shrewd if somewhat belated memoir of his years as a senior official in the Clinton Administration and as ambassador to Israel trying to help refashion the Middle East spares little of the diplomatic pain he endured. It is likely to be too detailed for most readers (many of the events are 15 years old and already have been closely examined elsewhere),? but for those fascinated by the ins and outs of the region and the repeated missteps of American policymaking it is worth reading. It is substantive, self-critical and, as a bonus, well written.

An Australian academic who came to America to spend a sabbatical year at Columbia University in 1982 and never left—he founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy two years later—Indyk was brought aboard the Clinton campaign team as a Middle East policy advisor in 1992. One August evening, prepping the presidential candidate for a meeting with the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, Indyk told Clinton that the moment was ripe for revolutionary change in the region. The Soviet Union had collapsed, Saddam Hussein had been defeated and for the first time all of Israel’s Arab neighbors were talking to the Jewish state. If the United States got behind the new Israeli leader, great things could emerge.

“I boldly predicted that if Clinton put his mind to it, he could achieve four Arab-Israeli peace agreements in his first term as president,” Indyk writes of what he told the candidate, who was devouring selections from the buffet. “Clinton, who had been listening intently, stopped his ravenous eating, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘I want to do that.’”

Indyk doesn’t specify which four treaties he had in mind but it seems clear that he meant agreements with the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Well, he got the Jordan part right. There was a treaty with the Palestinians, negotiated in Oslo in 1993, and for much of the rest of that decade a widely shared assumption that it was irreversible. Even after the 2000 Camp David summit failed, many assumed that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations would limp along rather than explode. Israelis were still buying potatoes in Jenin, eating lunch in Jericho and having their cars fixed in Nablus. Palestinian and Israeli police were on joint patrols. But it took only a few months for it all to unravel. The bulk of this volume is a blow-by-blow account of what went wrong on the Palestinian track on the West Bank and with the Syrians and Iraq. By analyzing such failures, Indyk provides a revealing inside look at American relations with the rest of the region.

He is not the first to offer such an account. In fact, one may vainly hope that he is the last. His colleagues on the American peace team—Dennis Ross, Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron Miller—have already published books going over this ground, Clinton himself dealt with it in his memoir and a number of Israeli politicians like Shlomo Ben Ami and Yossi Beilin and Israeli and foreign journalists have done so as well. In addition, the events themselves did not exactly go unexamined at the time. While Indyk does offer some fresh revelations regarding disputed negotiations and individuals, the broad picture is unchanged.

For example, regarding the debated question of why the 2000 Camp David negotiations failed when they seemed so close to success, Indyk agrees with the vast majority of his American and Israeli colleagues that the blame lies largely with Yasir Arafat. He acknowledges stylistic insensitivities of Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He points to failed American preparations and the need to hurry before the Clinton Administration’s time ran out (there was that bin Laden nostrum on clocks and time). But for Indyk it ultimately all came down to Arafat. As he writes of the failed talks, “Arafat had been seeking an escape route from the moment he arrived at Camp David.”

Indyk seeks to mitigate a shortage of disclosures by taking a more analytical tone than his predecessors and injecting throughout the book a series of lessons learned by hard experience. This device is only partly successful since the lessons come in only two varieties: where did we fail and how might we do better next time. And while the failures are thoughtfully and even poignantly laid out, the advice, aimed at the incoming Obama Administration (which Indyk may join), is a bit hazier.

This is partly because so many of the problems can be best described as unintended consequences of complex relationships. Indyk himself points out that even statesmen who are keenly attuned to the forces of history fail to foresee the impact of their actions and policies. Henry Kissinger was surprised that détente with the Soviet Union made Egypt feel ignored, leading President Anwar Sadat to launch war in October 1973; Clinton did not realize that, by pushing Syria to make peace with Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians would seek to get there first; as a result, the Syrian talks fell apart. And President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not grasp that by focusing on North Korea and the Palestinians, they would inadvertently help relaunch Israeli-Syrian negotiations; at the time, Washington did not want Israel to negotiate with Syria because it was trying to isolate Syria.

What to do about all these unforeseen developments? First, understand that everything in the region is connected, Indyk says, meaning that Israeli-Palestinian peace would do a lot to bring Arab governments like Egypt and Saudi Arabia on board in an effort to curb Iranian nuclear ambition. While this advice has long been proffered by analysts, it seems especially valid now that, in the view of the United States, all of the conflicts converge around the question of how to minimize Iranian influence. Having greatly strengthened Iran by attacking its two fiercest enemies—the Taliban and Saddam Hussein—the United States is now squared off against a country on the verge of building a nuclear weapon and one with keen influence over Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinians. So defanging Iran is now Washington’s central goal and ending the conflict over Israel, Indyk and others argue, would greatly aid it in that pursuit.

Indyk says that the Middle East is a uniquely difficult political environment for the United States because of the resistance of Arab leaders to change, the fractiousness of Israeli politics, chronic Palestinian dysfunction and the vulnerability of any political process to terrorism. He urges the new administration to make its goals more modest and its assumptions more realistic than those of the outgoing Bush Administration: peace and democracy everywhere.

Still, Indyk cannot deny himself the effort to pursue just that. He offers suggestions—mostly sensible and thoughtful ones but also some that seem based more on hope than experience—about how to build a two-state solution.

He says Washington has let Israel off the hook too often on continued settlement building and that next time a settlement freeze must mean a real freeze, including inside settlement blocks. He urges the creation of an international authority to secure Jerusalem’s holy basin with the religious sites in the hands of the relevant religious bodies and no sovereignty inside for either Israel or Palestine. He wants the Palestinians to give up the right of return to their former homes inside Israel in exchange for Israel yielding its claims to the Arab parts of Jerusalem.

On relations with Hamas, Indyk wants the ceasefire extended and, on the basis of a Hamas agreement to reject violence and respect previous accords between the PLO and Israel, to push for a united Palestinian policy. He argues that by pursuing the Syrian negotiations at the same time, the Palestinan talks will go better because Hamas will worry about its Damascus base. Finally, on land disputes between Israel and Syria to the northeast of the Sea of Galilee, he suggests Syrian sovereignty but a “peace park” under international supervision.

All this will be hard to achieve, he admits. Yet, “the combination of vital interests and opportunities to do good is likely to be as irresistible to future American presidents as it was to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.” So fasten your seatbelts. Another bumpy ride seems about to start.

Ethan Bronner is Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.