Tested by Zion Read Free

and his cronies in Fatah and the PLO? How would the reduction in terrorism, which Bush had made a prerequisite for progress, come to pass? And what roles would other states, Arab and European, play? For that matter, what role would the State Department play, after the arresting cameo on June 24 – not just Powell but also Rice and Rumsfeld appearing with the president as he spoke? The evolution of Bush's thinking had threatened not only Arafat and his coterie but also Powell andhis, because Bush had rejected the traditional State Department approach. The “peace process,” involving endless negotiating sessions with Arafat, had been declared bankrupt. Was it now to be U.S. policy to cheer for Palestinian reforms – or to impose them? The administration had no answers on June 24.
    Yet one motivation for involvement in Israeli-Palestinian issues had been the coming confrontation with Iraq – by the time of the June speech, only nine months away. It was easy to argue, then, that silence and inactivity could not be the follow-on to the June speech, and it was not hard to persuade the president that some tactic or program was needed. For whatever other actors had in mind, the president was sincere: He believed he had found a formula, indeed the only workable formula, for achieving Middle East peace. If there were good ideas about how to make this experiment work, he was fully open to them. The potential vacuum was soon filled by several parties, beginning with Quartet activity at the United Nations, then involving more nations and international institutions like the World Bank, and finally coalescing around the production of a “Roadmap” toward Palestinian statehood.
    On July 16, Powell convened a meeting of the Quartet he had formed in Madrid the previous winter. The meeting endorsed not only the approach Bush had taken in his speech but also his timeline: “Consistent with President Bush'sJune 24 statement, the UN, EU and Russia express their strong support for the goal of achieving a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement which, with intensive effort on security and reform by all, could be reached within three years from now.” That would mean a Palestinian state by mid-2005. The Quartet statement also spoke of a new Task Force on Reform that would work under its auspices and produce a “comprehensive action plan” for Palestinian reform.
    For the State Department, such activities were a bureaucratic imperative. Seen from across the river at the Pentagon, the invention of the Roadmap had less to do with the Middle East than with Washington politics. As Douglas Feith described the initiative, “It got turned back to the State Department, and [Deputy Secretary of State] Armitage, with his colleagues, invented the Roadmap to retake the ground that he had lost in the June 24th speech. I remember having people at the State Department say to me, the purpose of the Roadmap is to win back in operation what was lost at the strategic level in the fight over the June 24th speech.” 1 In the NSC, there was no doubt that “the Roadmap was the State Department's baby,” as Rice's then-deputy Steve Hadley put it. 2 For Vice President Cheney's staff, the concern was not bureaucratic but programmatic: His foreign policy advisor Eric Edelman worried that “people who didn't like this – like the State Department – just wanted to walk away from that June 24th speech before the ink was even dry.” 3
The Roadmap to Peace
    In fact, the State Department had not invented the Roadmap but had only seized on the idea after several other governments brought it forward. Oddly, the idea appears to have come first from Denmark, which was taking its six-month rotation as leader of the European Union during the second half of 2002. During that summer, Danish Foreign Minister Moeller visited the Middle East and presented to the Israelis a short draft, a three-chapter version of the Roadmap whose first chapter dealt with security.
    The