Middle East Shuttler Christopher Hangs Up His Track Shoes

by Eugene Bird

Asked where the Middle East peace process would be today if George Bush had won the 1992 election and re-appointed James Baker as secretary of state, one Arab-American leader responded: “The process would have been largely completed by now. There would be a Palestinian state and the Israelis would be out of Lebanon and beginning to come down from the Golan to implement a peace treaty with Syria.”

When the Washington Report asked Baker on Dec. 5 to comment on that statement, he laughed and initially said that he would not. Immediately afterward, however, before an audience of 500, he criticized the policies of outgoing Secretary of State Warren Christopher and State Department Middle East peace adviser Dennis Ross as not adhering to the principles of Madrid, meaning land for peace, and emphasized that Jewish West Bank settlements are an “obstacle to peace,” as described by six successive U.S. administrations, and not just a “complication” as they have been described by the Clinton administration.

These are harsh words for President Bill Clinton and outgoing Secretary of State Warren Christopher. But they are accurate, considering the present reality of a peace process in shambles, American Jewish leaders excusing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from any responsibility for it and instead harping on every failure of the Palestinian Authority, and a Republican Congress now heavily suspicious of the Palestinians and of Yasser Arafat, the only Palestinian leader who has ever signed an agreement with Israel.

What everyone in Washington knows, but few dare to say, is that the stage was set for the colossal failure of the Clinton-Christopher Middle East policies by the appointment of officials with deep attachments to Israel to the key positions in the State Department and the National Security Council.

We Never Go Public

Explaining U.S. silence on Israeli deviations from U.N. Security Council Resolution 242’s land-for-peace formula and the Oslo accords based upon it, one State Department press officer claimed that the U.S. had a policy separate from Israel on settlements, on Jerusalem, and even on the Golan, “but unlike the Europeans, who go public all the time, we have maintained our credibility with both parties by not going public; we are the only one whom both sides trust.”

That is a mantra repeatedly cited by the State Department. Unfortunately, it is not true. Under Clinton and Christopher, the U.S. has lost credibility with the Palestinians, the Syrians, and America’s two principal Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There has been an almost complete rupture between Assad and Christopher, and Netanyahu has treated Christopher like a hired hand with whom he has little need to deal.

Perhaps from the beginning Christopher was immobilized by a vigorous Israeli lobby and a president totally unwilling to criticize Israel, either publicly or privately. Clinton’s refusal to use the bully pulpit the way that Bush did forced his secretary of state to be cautious, even to the point of being servile, toward Netanyahu. There was no bottom line below which the U.S. could not be pushed on the issue of settlements, Jerusalem and the maintenance of timetables solemnly agreed to in the Oslo I and IIagreements.

Rudderless, the Middle East peace process grounded on the shoals of U.S. and Israeli domestic politics and remains beached as the New Year and Madeleine Albright, Christopher’s successor, approach. True, a diminishing number of the 60-odd working groups established to discuss practical problems on the ground between Israelis and Palestinians continue to meet. But nothing much happens, and each week a new confrontational announcement by the Israeli government further precludes the possibility of salvaging anything of the vessel launched with so much hope at Madrid in 1991 by the Bush administration.

Things Are No Better Elsewhere

Nor are other U.S.-Middle East relations in better repair. The Clinton administration has managed to generate sympathy for Iraq not only among our former coalition allies in Europe, but even among the Arab states of the Gulf most impoverished by Saddam Hussain’s wars against Iran and Kuwait. Israeli troops still occupy southern Lebanon and Syria dominates the rest. And countries all over the world are lining up to do business with Iran’s Islamist government.

Warren Christopher’s Legacy

So what is there to show on the positive side? One thing is a Palestinian Authority that meets a lot of the requirements already of being a state and, according to U.S. international lawyer John Whitbeck, should declare itself a state right now. But the PA is trapped in its six Bantustans without free access to the outside world. It has no real assets except the overwhelming support of world opinion, and it is burdened with the responsibility of governing 2.5 million souls inside an Israeli occupation that remains brutal and unforgiving.

I Am Too Old, Mr. President

When he was first approached by Bill Clinton, Christopher told the newly elected president that he felt he was too old for the task. Seven hundred thousand miles later (one-third of which were logged on 24 Middle East trips), Christopher seemed at the Cairo economic summit to be as tireless and as ready to continue as at the beginning of the administration. He holds the record for travel by a secretary of state. Despite that personal investment, however, he failed to force his president to recognize that in the Middle East no one gains from losing momentum. Gains are made only by speeding up the process.

Ironically, when Warren Christopher became secretary of state in 1993, he was better prepared for the job than either the theatrical Henry Kissinger or consummate insider Lawrence Eagleburger. Christopher had been deputy secretary of state during the rough years of the Carter administration. As a Stanford-trained lawyer with years of experience on commissions dealing with Southern California’s problem-plagued cities, he was an experienced negotiator.

He seemed perfect for a Clinton team that inherited a Middle East peace process that had accustomed Arabs and Israelis to meeting face to face. More important, by their confrontation with Israel over loan guarantees, Bush and Baker had maneuvered the defeat of Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud government and its replacement by the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. The two Israeli leaders came in believing that to regain U.S. support they had to trade land for peace. Further, the incoming National Security Council advisers let it be known that Christopher would carry out faithfully policies made in the White House, just as had been the case with Bush and Baker. The self-effacing Christopher seemed ideal for such a role.

But, from the beginning, the Clinton administration began talking about downgrading foreign policy except for economic and trade matters and concentrating on domestic policy. So who, exactly, would be making those White House foreign policy decisions?

Hostage Hang Up? Probably Not

Regarding the Middle East, Christopher had had his seminal experience 12 years earlier in negotiating the release of American hostages in Iran. Christopher had seen Cyrus Vance resign over the Iran and Palestine issues, and he knew that his own inability to extract the hostages from Tehran before the 1980 presidential elections may have been a prime cause for the defeat of Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign.

Christopher’s Baggage

As in 1980, the 1992 failure of U.S. Middle East policy again could have marred Clinton’s re-election campaign. But Dole was no Reagan, and Clinton’s September and October difficulties with Israel’s new prime minister were successfully soft-peddled.

Some say Christopher’s frustrating experiences with hostages in Iran and Lebanon explain his four-year refusal to end the ban on American travel to Lebanon. He looked back at the mortal bruising Carter took on the Iranian hostages and said, “Never again.”

And some observers think this mindset was why Christopher bought the explanation by Israelis that they needed Lebanese territory to prevent attacks by the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah militia. To other U.S. observers, however, it seemed apparent that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon was the cause of the continued cross-border incidents.

A Continuation of Bush-Baker?

In fact, from the beginning Christopher and the White House set out to continue the Bush-Baker policies, but without incurring the wrath of the Israel lobby. That is why they never pressed Israel publicly on either the Palestinian or the Syrian tracks.

One former close colleague during the Carter days evaluates Christopher personally as a “proud man, dedicated to working for the president, not himself, but with a strong tendency to work a problem to death.” Noting that “the criticisms of him must hurt very much,” the same source says that efforts by professionals on his staff to get Christopher to take stronger policy stances often failed. The source cited a case in which an imaginative and muscled approach by the U.S. wended its way up to Christopher, only to be turned down with the marginal comment, “This is not me.” That was an honest statement, but it may serve as an epitaph for Middle East peace in our time.

Another explanation for the aura of weakness that emanated from Christopher’s Middle East efforts was the media intimidation launched against him from the time he assumed office. Some of his cruelest critics, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer, and A. M. Rosenthal, are the chief flacks for Israel in the mainstream U.S. press.

Although Warren Christopher seemed to pay little mind to their attacks, the fact that they strongly opposed the peace process probably was not lost on him.

Equally important were the shafts sent his way by Henry Kissinger and other pro-Israel critics in the Republican establishment. They quarreled in a high-level way with his policies in Bosnia, China and Russia, but did not criticize his stewardship of the Middle East peace process, even when it slowed to a halt.

His weakness on Israel bought peace with its American media apologists, but it is on his failure in the Middle East that he may be judged most harshly by history.

Warren Christopher undoubtedly will have something to say in defense of his “closet diplomacy” style in the Middle East when he writes his autobiography. Only time will tell how much was the fault of his president, and how much was his own fault for not convincing the president to change his personal mindset. In the meantime, procrastination and failure to force Israel to live up to its solemn commitment to land-for-peace will be the hallmark of the Christopher–Clinton Middle East peace effort.