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4 How the Saudis stole a march on the
US By Alastair Crooke and Mark
Perry
Palestinian Authority advisers Saeb
Erakat and Yasser Abed Rabbo arrived in Washington
at the beginning of February confused and
uncertain. Their mandate from Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, was to
talk to State Department officials about US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's upcoming
visit to Ramallah, where she was planning to hold
a three-way meeting with Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert and the Palestinian president about
restarting the peace process.
But beyond
that, neither Erakat nor Abed Rabbo had a clue
about why Abu Mazen had insisted they travel to
Washington. They
weren't alone. In the
immediate wake of their visit, State Department
officials wondered aloud why the two had even
bothered to come: "The real question for both men
was the same," an official familiar with the
Erakat-Abed Rabbo meetings remarked, "and that was
- what the hell are you doing here?"
The
same confusion was apparent at the White House,
where National Security Council (NSC) official
Elliott Abrams - the architect of US policy in the
Middle East - was growing increasingly irritated
with Rice's attempt to restart Israeli-Palestinian
talks. Abrams, supported by officials in the
Office of the Vice President, had consistently
argued that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a
morass better left in the hands of the Israelis.
That viewpoint was clear from the first days of
the administration of President George W Bush,
when Vice President Dick Cheney knocked down any
attempt to re-engage with Israelis and
Palestinians.
A Republican Party stalwart
describes Cheney's views in blunt terms: "People
would come to Bush and say we have to get focus on
the peace process, and Cheney would sit there and
say, 'Mr President, don't do it. These people have
been fighting for 50 years. To hell with them. And
look at what happened to [former president Bill]
Clinton when he tried. It just got worse.' And
Bush would nod his head and that would be the end
of the discussion."
The NSC's concerns
over Rice had deepened with reports that she had
gone directly to Bush on a number of
foreign-policy issues, circumventing both Abrams
and Cheney. While it is traditional for a US
secretary of state to confer directly with a
president, Abrams, Rice and State Department
official David Welch (the assistant secretary for
Near Eastern affairs) had formed a seemingly
unbreakable triumvirate on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
In the wake of the Hamas
election victory last year, the three had authored
a program supporting Fatah cadres in the West Bank
and Gaza opposed to the Hamas government and
successfully recruited Arab governments to join in
a program of shipping lethal and non-lethal aide
to anti-Hamas Fatah militias (see No-goodniks and the Palestinian
shootout, Asia Times Online, January
7). Now it appeared to Abrams that that program
was being sidetracked; not only was Rice talking
about restarting the peace process with Abu Mazen,
but the US Congress had put US$86 million of aid
to Fatah on hold over fears that some of the
materiel could be used against Israel.
Even more disturbing, the NSC had been
monitoring reports that Hamas leader Khalid
Meshaal and Abu Mazen were on the verge of forming
a unity government - a government that Bush had
explicitly warned Abu Mazen against during his
meeting with the Palestinian president in October
on the sidelines of a United Nations Security
Council meeting.
Abrams had cause to be
concerned. In the two weeks prior to Erakat's and
Abed Rabbo's journey to Washington, Abu Mazen had
been talking to Meshaal about accepting an
invitation that the two meet in Mecca to sort
through their differences. The invitation was the
result of an initiative authored by Saudi Prince
Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi King Abdullah's national
security adviser and the former Saudi ambassador
to Washington.
King Abdullah agreed with
Bandar - it was time for Saudi Arabia to intervene
in the Palestinian conflict. As a result, in
mid-January, Abdullah sent an unnamed emissary to
Damascus in Syria to talk with Meshaal and to
inform the Syrian government of the Saudi king's
efforts, which were aimed at ending the incipient
Palestinian civil war and the US-authored economic
blockade of the Palestinian government.
Meshaal and Abu Mazen also talked about
the initiative directly by telephone. When
contacts between the two inevitably became public,
Abu Mazen was worried that his aides would
undermine the initiative. Erakat and Abed Rabbo
were two such officials. Abu Mazen knew he would
have to get them out of the way before the Mecca
meeting. What better way to do that than to send
them to Washington?
Erakat and Abed Rabbo
were the least of Abu Mazen's worries. The
Palestinian president was worried that Mohammad
Dahlan, the 46-year-old Gaza Fatah activist who
had been the recipient of most of Washington's
largesse, would also sidetrack the issue, or
worse: if a unity government appeared inevitable,
Abu Mazen worried, Dahlan would work to make
himself a part of it. The key piece of evidence
for this was the fact that Dahlan's mentor -
former Yasser Arafat adviser Mohammad Rashid - was
telling the Israeli and Palestinian press that
Dahlan was not only not opposed to the formation
of a unity government, but that it was his idea.
Rashid is a wily political operator of
considerable skills, but after Arafat's death
while president of the Palestinian National
Authority in 2004, he was sidelined. The access he
had had to the Palestinian political environment
was suddenly ended. He had no special relationship
with Abu Mazen and he got the feeling that he was
no longer welcome inside the Palestinian political
establishment. Dahlan was feeling the same
pressures, particularly from Abu Mazen partisans
who viewed him as a political upstart. "Who does
this guy think he is?" one of Arafat's confidants
asked just weeks after the Palestinian Liberation
Organization leader's death, when Dahlan was
making a bid to head the Palestinian security
services. "He's nothing but a lieutenant-colonel."
Coming in from the cold was difficult for
Rashid and Dahlan, but both men did their best to
insinuate themselves into Abu Mazen's inner
circle. Dahlan was the first to make his presence
felt, even before Arafat's death: he insisted on
accompanying Abu Mazen to the Bush-Abu Mazen
meeting in Aqaba in June 2003, where he impressed
US officials as young, competent, pro-American and
pro-peace.
Dahlan also made it clear that
he was not only tough enough to rebuild the
shattered Palestinian security services, but that
he welcomed US advice on how to do so. He quietly
distanced himself from Arafat, a fact noted by
Arafat partisans inside of the Fatah central
committee. US officials came away from Aqaba
impressed by his dedication; he seemed a perfect
next-generation Palestinian leader.
Rashid, meanwhile, had sent a personal
emissary to the US and Europe to talk with people
who were close to Abu Mazen and to officials of
Fatah's central committee. "The word from this guy
was, 'Listen, Rashid wants to get back on the
inside, is there
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