More process than peace

The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, by Dennis Ross (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 840 pp., $35)

THE Arabs have had every chance to be free and prosperous, taking their due place in the modern world. Instead they have fought interminably with themselves and their neighbors, wasting in gun smoke and death what ought to have been golden years. Great-power rivalry during the Cold War acted as a partial clamp on the endemic violence. Now the United States alone has to weigh the gravity of each breakdown of law and order, and decide whether to let things rip in the Middle East or intervene as arbiter.

The mainspring of so much endemic violence is the absolutism that goes deep into Arab history and culture. The centuries of Islam up to the present reveal no trace of genuine constitutionalism. In all spheres the spoils go to the strong. Invading Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein was behaving like any Arab absolute ruler of the past. But a chain of events was started whereby an American-led coalition would overpower him, and one day impose constitutional procedures on Iraq.

One of Saddam's propaganda successes was to link his occupation of Kuwait with the Israeli occupation of Arab territories. This is to compare apples with oranges. Saddam believed he was seizing more spoils, while in fact Israel occupied territories solely in self-defense from Arab armies invading across them. What Arabs and Muslims really think of Israel is an open question. Many evidently admire the constitutional example it sets, but some certainly focus on it all their imagined grievances and resentments against the West. No American president can ignore grievances and resentments of this kind, enfolding as they do the United States as the embodiment of the whole West. After the liberation of Kuwait, and as a follow-up to it, the first President Bush brought Israelis and Palestinians together at the Madrid conference. Nothing came of it, but the symbolism of the occasion encouraged President Clinton, and he was to spend a lot of his time and political capital in pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

Dennis Ross was offered a senior Middle East position on the staff of the National Security Council and joined the White House in 1986. He describes himself as coming of age politically in the Sixties, with a belief in public service instilled by the Kennedy brothers, and also in the general supremacy of peace, love, and brotherhood. Working with Secretaries Baker, Christopher, and Albright, he was to be, in his words, "the architect of policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict in the first Bush administration and the lead negotiator in the Arab-Israeli peace process throughout the Clinton administration."

Occasionally he mentions his wife Debbie and the kids, and snatched games of golf, tennis, or basketball, as much as to say that he could have been leading a sane alternative existence. In fact he was a man immersed in his work to the point of obsession, as evidenced now by his exhaustive recall of everything he was caught up in. The Missing Peace fascinates, bores, bewilders, and instructs, all at the same time. In the chattiest prose, this book at one level is a popular manual for Washington negotiators, with its summaries of strategy papers, non-papers, position reports, back channels and front channels, and its debates over the merits of process versus substance.

The trick for anyone in his position is never to run out of ideas and suggestions, and to expect to spend many nights on end without sleep. But the reader has to keep in mind the Shlomos and Muhammads and other players referred to by first names only; and he has to make what he can of acronyms of the diplomat's trade like MOU (Memorandum of Understanding), CBM (Confidence Building Measures), and SOGI (Signals of Good Intentions). Whole passages come out as brain-twisters. Abrief example, selected at random: "Madeleine effectively argued that Arafat had three options: (1) no summit, lower-level negotiations, and basic paralysis; (2) a summit that created the chance for an agreement; (3) the traditional Palestinian approach of seeking a Pyrrhic victory of getting a limited third FRD." Actually Ross's guidelines prove to be quite simple: Don't lie, and make sure to understand exactly those needs that the parties cannot compromise.

On the Arab side, peace-making involved President Hafez al-Assad of Syria and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. These two believed the worst of each other, quite rightly. Assad might have been prepared to exchange the captured Golan Heights for peace, but he insisted on extending the Syrian border right up to the Sea of Galilee, creating a possible claim to its waters. More spoils, in short, but he stopped trying to gain them when he had the more important business of assuring his son's succession as president of Syria. Head of a movement rather than a state, Arafat was in a weaker position. Unable to gain any concession from Israel unless he gave something in return, he hoped to manipulate Clinton into pressuring Israel to give him everything he wanted. Egregiously he flattered Clinton as a great friend and a great man. Another Sixties believer in peace, love, and brotherhood, Clinton always gave him another chance.