- Read entire article here - http://www.esquire.com/print-this/iranbriefing1107
-
- * Bush sent a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf.
-
- * U.S. troops started to arrest Iranians living in Baghdad,
accusing them of working with insurgents.
-
- * Bush accused Iran of "providing material support"
for attacks on U.S. forces, a formulation that suggested a legal justification
for a preemptive attack.
-
- * Senator Jim Webb of Virginia pushed through an amendment
requiring Bush to get congressional authorization for an attack.
-
- * Colin Powell broke his long silence with a pointed
warning. "You can't negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give
us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start.' "
-
- * Even Henry Kissinger started giving interviews on
the need to "exhaust every possibility to come to an understanding
with Iran."
-
- "From inside the White House, Leverett was hearing
a scary scenario: The Russians were scheduled to ship fuel rods to the
Iranian nuclear reactor in Bushehr, which meant the reactor would become
operational by this November, at which point it would be impossible to
bomb -- the fallout alone would turn the city into an urban Chernobyl.
The White House was seriously considering a preemptive attack when the
Russians cooled things down by saying Iran hadn't paid its bills, so they
would hold back the Bushehr fuel rods for a while.
-
- That put things into a summer lull. But by August, tensions
were rising again. U.S. troops in Baghdad arrested an official delegation
of Iranian energy experts, leading them out of a hotel in blindfolds and
handcuffs. Then Iran said that it had paid its bills and that the Russians
were ready to deliver the Bushehr shipment. In Time magazine, former CIA
officer and author Robert Baer quoted a highly-placed White House official:
-
- "IEDs are a casus belli for this administration.
There will be an attack on Iran."
-
- __________
-
-
- " Finally, it was a bitter-cold day just after Thanksgiving
and Leverett was on a family trip to the Washington Zoo, standing in front
of the giraffe enclosure. The White House patched through a call from the
foreign minister of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, who said that Rice had just
told him the road map was off. "Do you have any idea how this has
pulled the rug out from under us, from under me?" Muasher said. "I'm
the one that has to go into Arab League meetings and get beat up and say,
'No, there's going to be a plan out by the end of the year.' How can we
ever trust you again?"
-
- On Monday, Leverett went straight to Rice's office for
an explanation. She told him that Ariel Sharon had called early elections
in Israel and asked Bush to shelve any Palestinian plan. This time Leverett
couldn't hide his exasperation. "You told the whole world you were
going to put this out before Christmas," he said. "Because one
Israeli politician told you it's going to make things politically difficult
for him, you don't put it out? Do you realize how hard that makes things
for all our Arab partners?"
-
- Rice sat impassively behind her broad desk. "If
we put the road map out," she said, "it will interfere with Israeli
elections."
-
- "You are interfering with Israeli elections, just
in another way."
-
- "Flynt, the decision has already been made,"
Rice said."
-
- ___________
-
-
- "The secret negotiations with Iran continued, every
month for another year.
-
- Leverett plunged right into a dramatic new peace proposal
floated by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Calling for "full
normalization" in exchange for "full withdrawal" from the
occupied territories, Abdullah promised to rally all the Arab nations to
a final settlement with Israel. In his brand-new third-floor office at
the Old Executive Office Building, a tiny room with a very high ceiling,
Leverett began hammering out the details with Abdullah's foreign-policy
advisor, Adel Al-Jubeir. When Ariel Sharon said that a return to the '67
borders was unacceptable, Al-Jubeir said the Saudis didn't want to be in
the "real estate business" -- if the Palestinians agreed to border
modifications, the Saudis could hardly refuse them. Al-Jubeir believed
he had something that might actually work.
-
- But the White House wasn't interested. Sharon already
rejected it, Rice told Leverett.
-
- At the Arab League meeting, Abdullah got every Arab state
to sign his proposal in a unanimous vote.
-
- The White House still wasn't interested.
-
- Then violence in the Palestinian territories began to
increase, climaxing in an Israeli siege of Arafat's compound. In April,
Leverett accompanied Colin Powell on a tour that took them from Morocco
to Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon and finally Israel. Twice they crossed
the Israeli-army lines to visit Arafat under siege. Powell seemed to think
he had authorization from the White House to explore what everyone was
calling "political horizons," the safely vague shorthand for
a peaceful future, so on the final day Leverett holed up in a suite at
the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem with a group of senior American officials
-- the U. . ambassador to Israel, the U. S. consul general to Jerusalem,
assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs Bill Burns -- trying
to hammer out Powell's last speech.
-
- Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone
from the White House. "Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about
a political horizon," he said. "Those are formal instructions."
-
- "This is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying.
"It's bad policy and it's also humiliating for Powell, who has been
talking to heads of state about this very issue for the last ten days."
-
- "It doesn't matter," Hadley said. "There's
too much resistance from Rumsfeld and the VP. Those are the instructions."
-
- So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell
to step aside.
-
- Powell was furious, Leverett remembers. "What is
it they're afraid of?" he demanded. "Who the hell are they afraid
of?"
-
- "I don't know sir," Leverett said.
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