In My Time - Dick Cheney [200]
That night at the King David Hotel, in a room overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told me he wanted to help General Zinni, that he wanted to secure a ceasefire and get back to negotiations. He was willing, he said, to begin reducing the Israeli presence in the West Bank, but he needed Arafat to take steps of his own. And he left no doubt that he would respond to further terrorist attacks with an iron fist. Sharon was a tough old soldier who had fought in Israel’s war of independence in 1948, the Suez war in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. He didn’t mince words, and I believed that ultimately peace would only come through a strong leader like Sharon. He would drive a tough bargain, but his word counted—and he would defend his nation against terrorists and extremists who had no interest in peace.
As the hour for my departure from Israel approached, there was still no agreement from Arafat. I said I’d be more than willing to come back the following week. I would make a special trip to see Arafat if he met Zinni’s conditions. Instead, one week after my return to Washington, on March 27, 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, during Passover Seder, and killed thirty people. In the days that followed, Prime Minister Sharon sent Israeli army units deeper into the West Bank to hunt down the terrorists responsible.
From Israel, I headed to Turkey, a country that had long been a friend of the United States. Turkey had stood with us in Korea and, as a NATO member, been an invaluable ally during the Cold War. We had major military facilities at Incirlik Air Base, from which we had conducted operations during Desert Storm and in the aftermath, when we provided humanitarian relief to Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. But by 2002 a worrisome change was under way, and my visit with Turkish leaders, though cordial, was far different from the one I had made in 1990, when we were seeking allies to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In fact, all of my visits in the region were different this time. All of our friends were nervous. But something deeper was happening in Turkey. In November 2002 the Islamist AKP party would win a majority in parliament, making Recep Erdogan, leader of the party, prime minister the following March. The newly elected parliament would reject our request to deploy the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division through Turkey when it came time to begin operations against Saddam Hussein, and we would ultimately send it through Kuwait.
In general, I think we failed to understand the magnitude of the shift that was taking place in Turkey. The significance of an Islamist government taking power in one of America’s most important NATO allies was in a sense obscured because of all the other challenges we faced. Today, Turkey appears to be in the middle of a dangerous transition from a key NATO ally to an Islamist-governed nation developing close ties with countries like Iran and Syria at the expense of its relations with the United States and Israel.
As I ended my trip and headed for Washington, I thought about what I would report to the president. As I saw it America had to pursue three broad objectives in the region simultaneously: vigorously prosecuting the war against terrorism, confronting Iraq about its support for terror and pursuit of WMD, and managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I did not believe, as many argued, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the linchpin of every other American policy in the Middle East. I saw instead a complicated region in which issues are interrelated and couldn’t be compartmentalized. We did not have the luxury of dealing with them sequentially, waiting until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved before we dealt with the threat that terrorism posed to the United States.
It would have been wrong to push the Israelis to make concessions to a Palestinian Authority controlled by Yasser Arafat, who we knew was supporting, encouraging,