Mideast Diplomacy, Dissected

THE MUCH TOO PROMISED LAND

America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace

By Aaron David Miller

Bantam. 407 pp. $26

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided in 2006 to get serious about trying to shape a legacy in the Middle East, she asked the State Department historian's office for reports on past U.S. efforts to strike an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. She received a stack of papers three feet high.

As a State Department official for nearly two decades, Aaron David Miller was present for many of those negotiations; during the Clinton administration, he was a top aide to chief Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross. Now, he has distilled his experiences into a book that is both a memoir and a diplomatic history.

One of the book's strengths is that Miller was seldom the most senior official in the room. He describes himself as the Nick Carraway of diplomacy, a reference to the narrator who was more of a bystander than a central character in "The Great Gatsby." If Miller had been secretary of state or national security adviser, he might have used his memoir to maintain or restore his reputation. But he does not have to worry much about history's judgment on him personally. And so he has the freedom to recount the many mistakes he and other American diplomats made.

Miller candidly describes how U.S. policy tilted, in subtle and not so subtle ways, toward the Israelis and how, especially in the Clinton years, the U.S. peace team failed to consider other points of view. Many Clinton officials have blamed Yasser Arafat for refusing to accept the deal presented to him by Clinton at Camp David, but Miller argues that the United States also was at fault, because "not a single senior-level official involved with the negotiations was willing or able to present, let alone fight for, the Arab or Palestinian perspective."

Miller brings an eye for detail to his book, recalling bits of color such as a dying Arafat wearing slippers from an Israeli luxury hotel, and a stunned U.S. diplomat plunging his hand into a bowl of hummus when a secretary of state used an obscene expression in conversation with an Arab president. Miller also fills the gaps in his own experience with interviews with three former presidents, nine secretaries of state (including Rice), four national security advisers and nearly 150 other U.S. and foreign officials and lawmakers. He weaves many of the interviews into his narrative but also lets the key players -- such as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker and former president Jimmy Carter -- speak for themselves. The result is often amusing as well as illuminating.

Baker, for instance, says he succeeded as secretary because he worked for a president who would back him up even if he was wrong. "Look at poor Colin," Baker added, referring to Colin Powell. "I told him his first year, Colin, you need to go in there and say, 'Sir, this is not what I signed up for,' because they needed him a lot more than he needed them. His problem was spelled D-I-C-K" (as in Cheney).

Some of Miller's blunt assessments are bound to irritate his former colleagues. He is complimentary of Kissinger, Baker and Carter -- men who he felt brought the right mix of negotiating skills and evenhanded toughness to the Middle East problem. He is especially admiring of Baker, one of his former bosses. Miller suggests that if President George H.W. Bush had won a second term, Baker might well have forged a peace deal between Syria and Israel. But Miller is highly critical not only of the current President Bush -- for doing so little until recently -- but also of Bill Clinton, who probably devoted more time than any other president to resolving the conflict. (Clinton apparently suspected Miller's negative judgment, because he was the only ex-president to refuse his request for an interview.)

In Miller's telling, Clinton "inherited the most promising environment for Arab-Israeli peacemaking in the history of America's involvement in the issue" but made a mess of it, particularly at the end of his term, when he held a rapid series of high-level summits. "To hold three summit meetings within six months and fail at every one is not an easy task," Miller dryly notes. He credits Clinton with an astonishing mastery of detail and empathy for both Arabs and Israelis. "But empathy alone was not enough," Miller writes. "Clinton lacked Kissinger's deviousness, Carter's missionary focus, and Baker's unsentimental toughness."

Miller describes Clinton as falling under the spell of Israeli prime ministers and then breathlessly pursuing a final peace deal with little preparation: "Had the president been more realistic and less willing to be enlisted in the service of well-intentioned but grandiose schemes, we might have pursued other goals that were less politically sexy but also contained fewer dangers to our national interests and credibility." For instance, even though Clinton was trying to pressure Arafat to accept a deal, he made no effort to enlist Arab support -- necessary to give Arafat political cover -- until nine days into the pivotal Camp David summit. At that point, the Americans suddenly realized Israel's Ehud Barak was willing to cede some sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem. Thus began a mad scramble to obtain an Arab buy-in, with Clinton speaking at length with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah -- only to conclude afterward that Abdullah "had never looked at a map of Jerusalem in his life." Clinton's spectacular failures, Miller asserts, made it easier for Bush to walk away from the issue for seven damaging years.

To some extent, Miller is probably too harsh on Clinton and too complimentary toward Baker. After all, Baker succeeded in convening only a single meeting -- the Madrid conference -- and we can merely speculate (as Miller does) about whether he could have built on that successfully if his boss had been reelected. Clinton, by contrast, was trying to achieve an actual peace deal. Even today, most experts agree that any likely peace agreement will look very much like Clinton's proposal for settling the conflict, still known as "the Clinton parameters." It is not his fault that he was succeeded by a president who was determined to ignore the groundwork laid by his predecessor.

Miller concludes with his prescriptions for a successful negotiation, including a more evenhanded approach by the United States and a commitment to make the issue a genuine priority. None of these ideas is particularly surprising or unique; the value of the book is its rich and colorful history of past negotiations, and Miller's sharp-edged analysis of what went wrong and right.

Memo to the secretary of state: The next time you head off to Jerusalem, throw out some of those briefing papers to make room for this book in your briefcase.