Interventions (38 page)

There was another way for the Shab'a issue to be resolved: if Syria and Lebanon bilaterally demarcated their borders. But Syria made no move to do this, since it would have further signaled its departure from Lebanon and raised new questions about Hizbollah's weapons. As these somewhat arcane but important issues were being discussed, a full-scale war broke out across the Blue Line.

L
EBANON
: T
HE
2006 W
AR AND
R
ESOLUTION
1701

I have recounted in the prologue many aspects of my diplomacy during the thirty-four-day war between Israel and Hizbollah in July and August 2006. It brought together almost all the elements that make the Middle East so volatile and was a potent example of the symbiotic relationship between the secretary-general and the Security Council during a major international crisis.

The international split that developed in the Council was captured in one's choice of adjective to describe the goal of international diplomacy—was it an “immediate” or a “durable” end to the violence? Those who used the first appellation thought that the longer the war went on the more Lebanese and Israeli civilians would be killed, Hizbollah strengthened, Siniora's government weakened, and Israel and its Western allies tarnished. I was perhaps the most vocal and visible advocate of this view throughout the war, and many European and Arab leaders and non-Western Council members had the same opinion.

The other camp wanted to give Israel time to “complete the mission” and argued that there could be no stop to the war until the “underlying cause,” by which they meant Hizbollah's arsenal, was addressed. Bush and Blair headed this camp, with some tacit Arab supporters who wished to see Hizbollah dealt a blow—along with the Israelis, of course.

While I agreed that the crisis could not be resolved on the basis of a simple return to the status quo, I drew a clear distinction between a cessation of hostilities, which was immediately achievable if the will was there, and the political and security package required for a longer-term cease-fire. I did not see how Israel's bombing Lebanon for weeks on end would cause strategic damage to anyone other than the Lebanese government. I condemned Hizbollah's provocation in starting the war and its barrage of rockets that terrorized Israel, often fired from within civilian population centers. I also condemned Israel's excessive use of massive firepower against targets that often seemed to have little to do with Hizbollah itself.

Within hours of the crisis breaking, I decided to send a high-level mission of three senior envoys to the region. Rice urged me to place the mission within the 1559 framework, including Hizbollah's disarmament, but this could never be a goal achieved during or by Israel's offensive, no matter how long it went on. Even if Israel bombed Lebanon for months, Hizbollah would still be on the ground at the end of it and still part of the Lebanese government, and both it and its regional backers would have to be part of the solution.

Israeli prime minister Olmert initially told me he probably would not have time to meet the mission, reflecting his hubris during the early days of the conflict that he would not need a ladder to climb down from the crisis. Eventually, he met the mission, and they also visited Beirut. The envoys developed key elements of a package that could secure a cease-fire, including return of the captured soldiers, an expanded peacekeeping force to support the Lebanese government in extending its control over the south, and an international conference to endorse a delineation of Lebanon's international borders, resolving all disputed areas, including Shab'a farms. The subsequent Council negotiations, conducted by the Americans and the French, led to agreement on resolution 1701, which was finally adopted on August 11. I was disappointed that it took a month for this resolution to be agreed to while the fighting dragged on, and felt justified in dressing down the assembled foreign ministers in the Council when the resolution was passed:

I would be remiss if I did not tell you how profoundly disappointed I am that the Council did not reach this point much, much earlier . . . [The Council's] inability to act sooner has badly shaken the world's faith in its authority and integrity.

But even the adoption of the resolution would not bring the fighting to an end. That task fell to me. I knew from my peacekeeping experience that the language of 1701 calling for an “immediate” cessation of hostilities was not sufficient. I had urged the Americans and the French to insert a date and time in the text. John Bolton, who for all his bravado had never been responsible for a single soldier in his life, ignored this advice.

Eventually, I finalized the cessation directly with Olmert and Siniora. The Israelis wanted another sixty hours, with Olmert assuring me that they would not use this period to take “offensive measures” but to get Israeli troops in a position to “defend themselves” given the vulnerability that any withdrawing force faces. With Rice's help, I brought Olmert down from his sixty hours, and he agreed to a halt at 7:00 a.m. on Monday, August 14. Siniora also delivered his government's agreement, including Hizbollah, to this deadline. I confirmed this in writing to both prime ministers, together with a list of do's and don'ts to define what a cessation meant—essentially augmenting 1701 under my own authority by an agreement with the parties.

—

D
espite Olmert's assurance, Israel went on the offensive in those last three days, including dropping untold cluster munitions that would continue to kill Lebanese men, women, and children long after the guns fell silent. Misleading the secretary-general was not an Israeli offense alone: when I called Bashar al-Assad to urge him not to resupply weapons to Hizbollah, he said quite plainly that Syria did not supply
anything
to the movement. Both he and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave me their commitment to support 1701. I was under no illusion that this commitment would mean a great deal on the ground. But it was better to have a commitment they could be judged against than not to have any at all. The same applied to the Israelis.

A central element of the 1701 package was a stronger and reconfigured UNIFIL with a much tougher mandate and the right troops. The United States initially wanted to remove UNIFIL and insert a multinational force—something the Israelis had insisted on at the outset of their campaign. I knew this would never come together practically and would not work in Lebanon—and I noticed that those countries urging a multinational force were not the ones ready to provide troops. One thing on which everyone agreed was that it was the responsibility of the Lebanese, not the international presence, to disarm Hizbollah—as Rice acknowledged to me, the United States had not sought to disarm the Taliban, and had let the Afghans lead. The United States eventually accepted that a reconfigured UNIFIL was not only the right choice but the only available one. Washington rightly insisted on the strongest possible mandate, as it was clear that UNIFIL in its old guise could not respond to the situation. The lead would be taken by the French, with other Europeans contributing, but also with non-Europeans in the mix.

There was precious little confidence once 1701 was passed that the cessation of hostilities would hold or that the troops would be forthcoming. The end of the violence simply began a new phase of my work. Getting the troops pledged and on the ground, and ensuring that the Lebanese army deployed south of the Litani River, would be essential if Israel was to pull back behind the Blue Line for the second time in six years.

I pushed the Europeans hard to come up with the credible backbone of a force. To their credit, they delivered—eight thousand troops were pledged in a meeting I held with European leaders in Brussels in late August. To complement them, I reached out to Muslim countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Turkey in a successful bid to supplement the force.

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T
he devastation in parts of Lebanon was immense, and I was determined to get the Israeli air and naval blockade of the country lifted as soon as possible. But the Israelis would not move until assured that appropriate internationals would be in place, while the internationals would not commit until the Israelis moved. Before I had a deal, I gambled by basically announcing that the blockade would be lifted, which generated the momentum necessary. Sometimes I had to risk failure in order to succeed.

Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni was particularly upset when I proposed to bring in Malaysia, objecting that they had no diplomatic relations with Israel. I thought this was over the top, and I went ahead—not least because I had specified that they would be deployed to a position not directly facing Israeli troops. The war drove home Israel's vulnerability in an increasingly volatile region and ended with none of its stated goals being achieved. I appointed a German intelligence agent who eventually finalized a prisoner-swap deal under my successor, returning the bodies of the two Israeli soldiers for Lebanese prisoners still in Israel. He subsequently was asked to help out with an Israeli soldier captured in Gaza, in contacts between Hamas and Israel quietly facilitated by the UN. Such necessary negotiations are a reminder that slogans about never talking to terrorists do not survive encounters with the real world—in the Middle East or elsewhere.

Resolution 1701 put new burdens on the United Nations for the security of both Lebanon and Israel, and the region as a whole. I am proud of what we achieved in the months after the war before I left office in December. Despite incidents since, the calm along the Blue Line has held. As I look at our role in Lebanon over the years of my tenure, I can say that we helped get Israel out of Lebanon twice, Syria out as well, supported national dialogue, and strengthened our peacekeeping role.

These were all necessary steps if the Lebanese state was to begin to assert itself. But they were clearly not sufficient to ensure Lebanon's long-term stability. While we have helped stabilize the situation, neither the Security Council's interventions, nor my own, were able to address underlying issues. Lebanese national dialogue generated important areas of consensus but did not lead to significant progress on Hizbollah's weapons. Syria's and Iran's commitment to 1701 was important, but it did not stop their rearming the movement. Our strengthened peacekeeping alongside the Lebanese army has reduced the visibility of armed players in the south, but Hizbollah remains a potent presence and exercises today a kind of veto over the Lebanese government. For its part, Israel did not fulfill its side of the 1701 bargain by moving creatively to help Siniora on Shab'a, and it continued its provocative daily overflights into Lebanese airspace. In my trip through the region after the war and my reporting to the Security Council, I emphasized that 1701 was “not a buffet, but a fixed menu”: we had to try to advance on all the issues lockstep and not allow the parties to pick and choose. But if true stability is to be achieved, the answer lies not in peacekeeping or in crisis diplomacy: it lies in the pursuit of a genuinely comprehensive Middle East peace.

R
EFLECTIONS ON
P
EACEKEEPING AND
P
EACEMAKING IN THE
M
IDDLE
E
AST

Every violent eruption with which I had to contend—from the Palestinian intifada and Israeli Operation Defensive Shield to the Lebanon war and constant crises in Gaza—struck a blow at the very idea of peaceful coexistence and mutual security that is essential if the Arab world and Israel are to one day live in peace. Equally, each partially conceived or unimplemented political initiative—from Oslo to the roadmap to Gaza disengagement—eventually discredited the very concept of a negotiated peace for both peoples. The only winners to emerge from this litany of failure have been those who seek to perpetuate the conflict—militants and radicals, whether they fire rockets at or launch suicide bombs into Israeli towns, or subjugate Palestinians in the West Bank while taking their land.

The lessons are clear: the only solutions will be found in politics, not violence; and in comprehensive solutions, not partial approaches.

The challenge facing the UN in the region was—and is—to try to catalyze such solutions, in circumstances where the UN as an institution has traditionally been sidelined from the process. By initiating the creation of the Quartet, I hoped to combine the legitimacy of the UN, the political power of the United States, the financial resources of the EU, and the regional prestige of Russia into an amalgamated diplomatic force—one in which I held the gavel and acted as de facto chair. Doing so helped set a clearer international consensus on what a solution would look like, and what it would take to achieve it. Yet as I have discussed in this chapter, the failure of the Quartet to insist on the basic principles of the roadmap robbed the body of some of its vitality, limiting its ability to shift the dynamics between the parties. I alluded to my own frustration at the end of the Lebanon war, when I told the Council that “the various crises in the region must henceforth be addressed not in isolation or bilaterally but as part of a holistic and comprehensive effort, sanctioned and championed by this Council, to bring peace and stability to the region as a whole.”

—

I
n the years since I left office, we have witnessed a devastating Israeli offensive in Gaza against rocket attacks and a civil war playing out among the Palestinians themselves. One thing has remained largely constant: the daily creation of facts on the ground by the Israelis. The only ray of hope has been the state-building efforts of the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, proving beyond all argument that there is at least in the West Bank a Palestinian partner ready to walk the hard road of peace.

Deeply distrustful of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinians are pursuing alternative options for a political way forward—from seeking UN membership for a State of Palestine to increased popular protest against the occupation. The reflexive U.S. reaction against any Palestinian utilization of the UN showed just how charged the issue has become in U.S. domestic politics, and robs the international community of real leverage. After all, what better way would there be to give both parties an incentive to make progress than to acknowledge the importance of the Palestinian membership application and indicate that it will be taken up and decided, whether affirmatively or negatively,
after
a further effort to negotiate the final terms of a settlement?