Frank Braun interviews Fernando Henrique Cardoso about the role of China's space program and whether Brazil is becoming a "Chinese client state."

The Journal sat down with Edward Mortimer, Special Assistant and speechwriter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for a candid discussion of the rationale behind Annan's proposed UN reforms, Kofi Annan's leadership style, the prospects for successful passage of a UN reform package, a new Human Rights Commission, and the Oil-For-Food Scandal.

Mortimer: The Secretary General is quite careful not to lay down precisely what form the reforms will take. This is something that he thinks the member states have to decide among themselves. His point is essentially that the present composition of the Security Council effectively was decided in 1945 and was intended to reflect geo-political realities of that time. Its authority is being gradually eroded because people in the world feel that it is unrepresentative.

The Secretary General thinks that the reforms should take the geo-political realities of today into account, that they should give more representation to developing countries without making the Security Council less efficient or less able to make decisions. There is a certain tension between those objectives. He didn’t lay down specifically how the objectives should be reached. Instead he appointed a high-level panel of international experts – Brett Scowcroft was one of them, as you may know.

They came up with two models: Model A, which would have six new permanent members, one from Europe, two from Asia, one from Latin America, two from Africa. But, they would not have vetoes. Alternatively, you could have a category of semi-permanent members – countries that would be elected for four-year terms and then would re-eligible. At the moment, the nonpermanent members hold two-year terms and you cannot have two consecutive terms. So this would have sort-of-big powers or medium-sized powers, not already permanent members, elected by the membership to longer terms and if they perform well then that could be rolled over from four years to four years. It would be a sort of halfway house. The Secretary General has not opted between those two recommendations. He says that the membership should consider both and they should take a decision.

It would be better if it was taken by consensus, but as has been discussed for a long time now, if you can’t reach a consensus that shouldn’t be an excuse for not making a decision. You may know that to amend the charter of the United Nations, you need a two thirds majority, including the five existing permanent members of the Security Council. There could be a vote and indeed some countries are calling for a vote, as early as May or June. The Secretary General thinks if that’s the only way to do it, it is better to do it by a vote then not do it at all.

Journal: What is Kofi Annan like?

Mortimer: He is a very nice, gentle person, maybe even too nice. Sometimes he forgets that he is the Secretary General and perhaps doesn’t turn people down when perhaps he should. He has a way of making you feel at ease and that he is on your side, which I think is a very important quality in a Secretary General. In fact, he has a paperweight on his desk that says “The key to being a diplomat is letting the other guy have it your way.”

Journal: What is the basis for choosing Security Council seats by continent?

Mortimer: I think that obviously the whole idea of the United Nations is based on geographical balance. It says that even in the Charter in Article 101, or something, that they should be chosen on merit, but also with regard for geographical balance.

[Consults tattered pocket UN Charter]

Yeah, it’s Article 101, that’s right: “Paramount consideration should be given to in the employment of the staff and in the determination of the conditions of service shall be the necessity of securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity. Due regard shall be paid to the importance of recruiting the staff on as wide a geographical basis as possible.” That’s something I think everyone recognizes as important - that all the different parts of the world should feel represented and that they have a say in the United Nations.

If you want to be specific, there were certain countries considered to have a right to be permanent members, but they needed to find a formula – they didn’t want to name the country. They rather cleverly found a formula which sort of balanced. It would allow for Germany, India, Brazil, Japan, and… two countries in Africa.

Journal: What are the likely results of China’s current reaction to the Japanese UN bid?

Mortimer: I think that there candidates for membership about which some other countries have strong reservations. As usual, China has reservations about Japan, Pakistan has reservations about India, the U.S. has reservations about Germany. I think some Latin American countries have reservations about Brazil. I think that is probably the reason why there are two options on the table. The membership is going to have to make up their mind.

It is no secret that China isn’t very comfortable with Japan becoming a permanent member. On the other hand, they seem to be now quite happy with the idea of India becoming a permanent member. The United States have spoken in favor of Japan becoming a permanent member, although they haven’t committed themselves on Germany. If a member actually imposes a veto, then it may be blocking the countries it wants to block, but it also may be causing great annoyance to other countries with which it wants to keep good relations.

My hunch is that the U.S., China, and Russia would probably be quite happy not to have any new permanent members but none of them want to cast the veto preventing that. I think that with two-thirds of the membership in favor of any given proposal, any of the permanent members would think very carefully before vetoing it. It’s a pretty invidious position to put yourself in to say “well, I am the country that is going to stand in the way of what two thirds of the members of the United Nations want”.

There is a lot of maneuvering going on. Everybody is claiming that the most number of countries is committed to their point of view. Its something like opinion polls: you add them up and they come to more than the total. So obviously some countries are being quite coy about which way they would vote if it came to a vote, saying certain things to people on both sides of the argument.

Journal: What would happen if a vote doesn’t end up working come September?

Mortimer: There would be no agreement. It’s the way of the United Nations – everyone has to decide what their priorities are and it may be that you can get some of these other reforms without that one. But I think that a lot of people see a reform here which most of the world wants, it’s been in discussion for a long time. There’s probably a better chance of doing it now than there has been in some years or than there’s likely to be for some years. So, I’m certainly very much impressed with the way this argument has come alive. A year ago people would have said to you, “oh Security Council reform, we’ll be arguing about that until 3005”. This may even turn out to be true, but now a large number of countries are considering it very seriously and they are behaving as though they expect to see it.

Journal: How will the proposal for the new human rights commission affect the UN’s ability to respond to human rights crises? Would there have been a different result in Darfur?

Mortimer: In Darfur, it is probably as much up to the Security Council as it is to the Human Rights Commission. The Security Council has been very slow to accept its responsibility, but I think things have improved. They have now agreed to impose sanctions on the people responsible for human rights in Darfur and to refer the situation there to the International Criminal Court. There are 51 or 52 people who were identified by an international commission, which the Secretary General has handed over to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. And I think there is a general agreement that the African Union force on the ground should be strengthened, both in numbers and in its mobility and its capacity. Where there are actually African Union forces, people are safer, but there are not nearly enough. It’s a very large territory.

The power is in the Security Council and in organizations that have military capacity, like NATO and maybe the European Union now. They would have to be prepared to do more and to enable the African Union has to spell out what exactly it needs. But I think we’re moving in the right direction. For the Human Rights Commission, the Secretary General is proposing is that it be replaced by a council; a higher-level body. It would be directly elected by the General Assembly, unlike the present commission which is elected by the Economic and Social Council, making it sort of a third-order body. The present commission only sits six weeks of every year, the Secretary General is suggesting a sort of permanent existing body which could meet any time to deal with a crisis. Instead of just picking a few cases to discuss, which tends to be done very much on political grounds, and also in a kind of tit-for-tat way – you point your finger at me, so I’ll point a finger at you – they should really review how all members of the United Nations are living up to their human rights obligations.

But that’s not going to limit confrontation. I think human rights is always going to be a sensitive subject. There will continue to be some serious arguments, but these need to be conducted on a more objective basis, unlike the very subjective and arbitrary way that it is now being done.

Journal: Would it continue to have the element of thematic reports, or would it only report on specific countries?

Mortimer: It would continue to do both. I don’t think that there is any objection to that aspect of the Commission’s work. The intergovernmental aspect, that the countries represented and the way they interpret their mandates, is a source of concern. I am not saying that all the Special Rapporteurs are of equal quality. There are some who produce quite provocative reports, but I think that having an expert who is not nominated by any one government but has a mandate to perform for the United Nations most would agree is very useful.

Journal: And the Commission members would all be democracies?

Mortimer: It would be very difficult to have actual criteria for membership. I think that supposedly any country that runs for membership should undertake to observe human rights and I think that the members, in deciding which countries to vote for, try to consider how those countries fared in the review process. That’s one of the virtues of having a review process for all of the countries. One shouldn’t make what he is trying to create is a sort of club of the virtuous, that we’re the goody-goody countries and we’re going to sit in judgment on the rest of you. I think there has to be a recognition that nobody is perfect, that sometimes human rights are not observed because of ill will, but also because of a lack of capacity by the country or government concerned. We should all try to help each other raise the standards of human rights. It should be in that spirit that countries offer to serve on the new council, if they agree to create a new council.

Journal: Has U.S. pressure affected the UN’s definition of state sovereignty versus individual rights?

Mortimer: I don’t think it has been only the U.S., this is something that has changed with the times. In 1945, when the United Nations was founded, states were very powerful, it might have been the peak of the power of states vis-à-vis citizens. War has tendency to deliver power to the states because, well, nobody likes war being conducted by private citizens or private companies. It’s the one thing that even libertarians are willing to concede to the states. If there is going to be war it should be the state that declares and wages war. By the mid-twentieth century, war required a total effort from a society and kind of licensing the state to organize many aspects of life. That’s one of the reasons why states, in 1945, were so powerful. The main problem of international order seemed to be regulating the relations between states. Although if you read the Charter, even then you will see that quite a lot of attention was given to human rights, to individual rights. You had Hitler’s Germany, which had completely trampled on individual rights.

But certainly if we look at what happened in the 60 years since then, international life has become much, much more complicated. In 1945, if I wanted to cross the frontier of course I would need a passport; now in many parts of the European Union I don’t. There might not even be anybody at the frontier to stop me. Even in the late ’60s and early ’70s, if I wanted to travel outside the United Kingdom, I remember that when to buy foreign currency I would have to have the amount of foreign currency I bought stamped on my passport - it was rationed by the government. I don’t think there’s any way a government could do that now. All I have to do is get out my keyboard and press a few buttons, and if I have millions of dollars, millions of dollars would go round the world before you could cross this room. So it’s a very different kind of world we’re living in now. The media also, sending images around the world in a matter of seconds. We could see the Cardinal coming out and announcing the new Pope at that same time as the people in St. Peter’s Square.

The most unfortunate parts of the world states are, by and large, weak or where they have collapsed. That’s where you find banditry, civil war, sometimes genocide. The state is still important, but it is not enough to regulate the relations between states. There needs to be some sort of role in international affairs for the private sector, for civil society, and there must be concern for people and not just governments. That’s why one of the reforms the Secretary General is advocating is that more countries accept responsibility to protect their citizens. If you have a case where the state is clearly failing to do that, people are being massacred in large numbers, or ethnically cleansed or whatever, then there is a responsibility of the international community as a whole. The body that really should be assuming that responsibility on behalf of the international community is the Security Council because under the Charter it has the primary responsibility for international peace.

Journal: There’s talk of ending the peacekeeping missions in the former Yugoslavia and replacing them with EU membership. Does the UN believe that will work?

Mortimer: I can’t say exactly what the UN believes because it would have to be the subject of specific decisions by intergovernmental bodies. I wouldn’t say that the Secretariat has a settled view on that question; I think it is probably a matter of phasing. As a matter of fact, the UN is no longer playing a role in Bosnia. The European Union has taken over. Only in Kosovo is there still a UN administration, because there is no agreement on the eventual political status of Kosovo. As you know, most of the population there wants it to be an independent state, but the minority wants it to remain part of Serbia and Montenegro (or Serbia, without Montenegro). The Security Council, and the international community has not formed a definitive view on that yet. It is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Once you’ve decided which states are sovereign in the Balkans, should they become members of the European Union? The European Union seems to have the role of absorbing that part of Europe, and most of the people in those states would like to in due course, be members of the European Union. But there are a lot of constraints and a lot of requirements that have to be fulfilled in order to function as a member of the European Union, so this isn’t something that will; necessarily happen quickly. I think it may take a varying amount of time. Of course, Slovenia, which was part of Yugoslavia, is already a part of the European Union. Perhaps Croatia will be the next one ready.

But this is not really my business as the UN. As a European I am very interested. As a journalist, before I was a UN official, I used to cover that part of the world quite a lot. I do think that European integration is in the long term a very important factor for stability in that part of the world. The UN is never happier than when it doesn’t have to worry about a certain part of the world.Insofar as the European Union and NATO stabilizing a part of the world previously very unstable, and there is less for the UN to do, nobody could be happier than us.

Journal: How did Kofi Annan react to charges of wrongdoing levelled against his son?

Mortimer: It is clear that the committee that is looking into the Oil-For-Food scandal is not satisfied with all the answers it got from Kojo Annan on some issues, particularly about how much money he was receiving, and so they would like to further interview him. It seems that he didn’t keep his father fully in the picture about this relationship, and his father thought that he would work for this company up until the end of 1998, and then he quit. It then turned out that in fact Kojo had continued to receive money from them under various headings. As the Secretary General said, he was surprised and disappointed when he found out. It is obviously unpleasant for any parent to find that your child hasn’t been completely straight with you.

Journal: Is the current reform tour a response to charges that the UN has become less relevant because of recent events including the Iraq war?

Mortimer: I don’t think that it has become less relevant. There are ways in which it could be more relevant and ways in which it might become less relevant if it is not changed. In some respects the Iraq crisis is a crisis of expectations, because if you think about it, certain people were disappointed in the UN. For one, people who supported the war were disappointed because they thought that it was a war fought to enforce Security Council resolutions and that the Security Council didn’t agree to enforce its own resolutions. In the other category, probably more numerous in the world as a whole, was the view that this was a war that was not authorized by the Security Council, and were disappointed that the UN was not able to stop it.

If you look back at the history of the UN, you would see that it would say well actually the Security Council’s record of enforcing its own resolutions is not that good. Also regarding the UN’s record of preventing wars, although it is difficult to know for sure whether you’ve prevented something, the UN certainly has not prevented all wars. There have been quite a lot of wars during the UN’s existence. It’s interesting that people on both sides of this argument seem to expect the UN to deliver this time. Their frustration in a way is a reflection of that expectation. The Secretary General’s reaction is to identify our conflicting expectations.

Maybe we should think it harder about what we expect from the United Nations, and what we expect from each other, particularly about the rules involving use of force. The right of self-defense is pretty clear to most people. You probably know Article 51 of the Charter says if there is an armed attack against a member of the United Nations, that state has an inherent right of self-defense, at least until the Security Council deals with the matter. Most lawyers think would say that doesn’t mean you literally have to wait until the other side has fired the first shot. If it is clear that an attack is imminent you can make a preemptive strike. An example many people cite is Israel in 1967, when Israel actually fired the first shot but most people don’t feel that Israel was the aggressor. It’s another thing when you say “I think there’s somebody a long way away who may be planning to attack me, or may be developing weapons which could be used to attack me, or may be giving weapons to non-state actors who might attack me”. And I think that probably most of the UN membership would feel, in such a case, what is needed is a collective decision, rather than one state sending its armed forces halfway around the world to deal with it, because then it becomes very easy for almost any state to use that kind of pretext. In a way that takes us back to the kind of world we had before the UN was set up.

In this report of the high-level panel, they suggested some guidelines or criteria for use of force and when the Security Council should authorize or mandate the use of force by member states. The Secretary General has been very cautious in his own report. All he has done has been to list these basic principles and say that the Security Council should perhaps pass a resolution setting out these principles and expressing its desire or intention to be guided by them when faces that kind of decision. It seems that the United States is not happy with even that, so I don’t know whether such a resolution will be passed. Maybe not in the near future. We’ll see.

Journal: Are there opportunities in UN reform to restart work on the Millennium Goals?

Mortimer: Well I think that the Millennium Goals, by and large, are not things that can be done by the UN. They can be done by an institution. We are talking about massive changes in the society of developing countries. A lot of the work has to be done by the people and the governments in those developing countries. But, what most people who have really studied the issue recognize is that quite a large number of developing countries, especially in Africa, are not going to be able to do it by themselves. They do have to adopt the right policies and the right priorities, but they also need help from the outside world, in the form of financial assistance, reasonable trading arrangements, debt forgiveness. Generally, they need help building up their capacity. There can be a sort of perfect level playing field for trade, but some of these countries, without the basic infrastructure in place, and without settlement of some on-going conflicts, cannot produce anything to export. The idea that everybody can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is not quite true. These countries need an international system which is supportive.

That’s really what that part of the Secretary General’s report is about. It suggests, for instance, that all donor countries commit themselves 0.7% target for Gross National Income to Official Development Assistance. Most of them will take some time to get up to that level, but since the MDGs are meant to happen in 2015, you need a kind of front-loading mechanism, something like what Gordon Brown has suggested: an international finance facility. You need some quick wins. You could pick a few areas, like one is providing chemically treated bed nets for kids in Africa which could save millions of lives from malaria. That’s something that’s relatively cheap, and it could be done like in a year. And you also need to fast track certain things, and you could find more than you probably think, countries that have got the right policies in place now. You should make sure they get the aid straightaway. And that can have a sort of exemplary effect. If you can show that it can work in the countries that have the rights policies, then this will encourage others to do it. So these are the kind of things, so it is not mainly about the institutions of the UN. It is about getting governments and companies, maybe also the international financial institutions, regional development banks, and so on, and governments and civil society in developing countries to agree on their priorities and act on them.

Ambassador Barbara Bodine: It’s been very interesting in the two years since I left. Many of my views have gone from high heresy to almost cliché. One of the basic problems we’ve had with the reconstruction in Iraq was that we had no plans for post-conflict Iraq. The troop levels were micromanaged by the civilians in OSD. Tony Zinni, who was the CINCENT before Tommy Franks, estimated in his invasion plan for Iraq (which he was adamantly opposed to and was very famous for calling it the “Bay of Goats”) that it would take somewhere around 500,000 troops. Not so much to defeat the regime—most people thought that it would crumble very quickly—but to handle law and order, security and stabilization. The pattern has been around the world that it does take more troops to stabilize than to defeat. As we know, OSD had exactly the opposite view.

One person no one has heard from—it will be very interesting when and if he finally decides speak—is General Shinseki, who said it would take several hundred thousand troops and was very publicly dismissed by Paul Wolfowitz as wildly off the mark.

So we went in with 130,000 troops to try and secure a country the size of California. Iraq is not the size of Rhode Island. It’s the size of California. I don’t know what the police force is for Los Angeles County, but my guess is it’s probably 130,000 or higher.

There was within DoD this Alice–in-Wonderland idea that we didn’t need more troops because there wouldn’t be a stabilization problem. We didn’t need a postwar plan because there was not going to be any reconstruction that needed to be done. We were going to go in, there was going to be a decapitation, and the entire rest of the body—I guess like a chicken with its head cut off—was somehow going to keep operating. And I don’t think chickens do that for very long.
The Iraqi bureaucracy—the two million people in the bureaucracy—would all be in their offices waiting for us. I’m not kidding! Waiting for us to show up, at which point the machinery of government would start to move once again.

What they thought was going to happen with traffic cops and regular crime was not at all clear. Somehow that would continue to operate. We would have to kind of tinker a little bit on a few things. But we were going to be gone by August. The civilian reconstruction would be largely over by August. When I was there, even in May of ’03, our military had an accelerated redeployment plan. They believed they were going to leave a little quicker. Liberators, roses and sweets, they honest to God believed it.

Now they say, “We couldn’t have anticipated any of those problems.” There isn’t a single major problem that happened in Iraq that was not only anticipatable, but anticipated. And there wasn’t a single major mistake made without somebody saying, “You really don’t want to do that.” Not just the troop levels: things such as the insurgency. There were a lot of us who were saying, “Look, the Iraqi army will fold. They’re not going to fight. They recognize superior force. But you’re going to end up with an insurgency.”

The example that we used was the Iran-Iraq war. The Iraqis went into Iran very, very quickly, took over what they called Arabistan, and held it for two and a half years. And the Iranians finally got themselves organized in about two and a half years. They pushed the Iraqis back to the border in a matter of weeks. When the Iraqis got to the border, they stopped, turned around, and you had six years of trench warfare—some of the most God-awful warfare anyone’s seen since World War I. Those were Shia and Kurds and Chaldeans and Turkomens and Assyrians. They weren’t fighting on the border because they loved Saddam and they weren’t even fighting because they feared Saddam. They were fighting because they didn’t want the Iranians in their country. Now if that’s how they’re going to react to the Iranians coming in, why on earth would you think that they’re going to accept us long term?

Getting rid of Saddam absolutely was a good thing. But the idea that we either didn’t have to be occupiers or that we would be accepted as occupiers was willful naivety that went against all of the literature that was out there: from the Army War College, RAND, almost every academic, a lot of people in the State Department, and the CIA. DeBa’athification was in some ways was just as damaging as demobilization: we got rid of every technocrat in the country. Basically, if you had a college education, and in some cases even high school, you were out. School teachers. Librarians. You can’t run a country if you’ve gotten rid of all of your educated people. And then we did demobilization. Again, how are you going to guard the borders of a country that large without the army? The one thing you could really count on the army to do would be to protect those borders. They’re going to keep the Iranians and the Syrians and everyone else out. The advice was, “Don’t do this. It’s not necessary.” Those decisions were taken in May 2003. And much of what we’re still suffering through is the result of those two cataclysmically avoidable mistakes.

Most of the questioning came from State and CIA, some parts of DIA. The Army War College did a study that predicted a lot of these problems. And there was also the very famous Project for the Future of Iraq, an NSC mandated program, 18 months, 5 million dollars. This wasn’t five people in the State Department getting together and coming up with their own plan. This was an interagency effort: Iraqis, Iraqi expats, people who had done post-conflict reconstruction in places like Bosnia and Timor. We had regional experts, we had people from the region, and we had post-conflict people in all of the departments. We came up with very detailed plan. Some parts of it were very well thought out. The demobilization and deBa’athification in particular was very, very strenuously worked out and argued. It was very good. Others, maybe not quite as good. But it was all there.

The decision from OSD when they were given the lead in late January 2003 was that they wanted no part in the Project for the Future of Iraq and they wanted no part in anyone who had been a part of the Project for the Future of Iraq: academics, Iraqis, U.S. government. If you had been in any way involved in the planning, you could not be part of the OSD effort. And people who were sent over to the OSD from the Project for the Future of Iraq were turned around and sent home. It lacked subtlety.

The OSD – specifically the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Kuwait - did develop the Unified Mission Plan. It’s about an inch thick, as opposed to about three or four feet of binders for the Future project. It’s 25 pages. It was written by a British colonel while we were sitting in Kuwait. It’s beautifully written—the English is just superb. It is basically an outline of tasks, but there’s no way you could call it a plan. And it was never shared interagency. When it was tabled at a staff meeting in Kuwait, the senior representative from USAID and I both asked if it had been shared in Washington. Has this been vetted interagency? What kind of ownership is there on this document?” And we were told, “They’re never going to see it.” Well, how do you get other elements of the government to—forget buy in—implement a plan that they’ve never seen, and they won’t see, and they’re not going to be allowed to see? The last version is stamped “working draft,” and dated 18 April. So yes, we had nothing that a reasonable person would call a plan.

She was recently profiled in the Economist magazine, dubbed "Daughter of the Enlightenment" by the New York Times, and named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2005.

Daniel Levy, a lead drafter of the (2003) Geneva Accords developed by a freelance team of Israeli opposition leaders and a team of Palestinians led by Yassir Abd-Rabbo, spoke at Brown University about the effects of the independent draft agreement on the peace process.

The Accords are interesting because they present the possiblity that independent practicioners and advisory bodies can influence actual negotiation processes through simulated agreements. The Watson Institute is currently examining the utility of simulations, regularly hosting conventions of the U.N. Security Council for negotiation scenarios and hosting symposia on War Gaming and simulated conflict management.

According to Levy, the high-profile simulated negotiations 'helped drive the actual peace process' that has intensified since the Palestinian elections by putting symbolic political and media pressure on both governments, as well as developing a practical draft document to serve as a departure point for further negotiation among interested parties.

The U.S. State Department and the United Nations semi-endorsed the draft after close scrutiny, declaring support for 'follow-up progress on implementation.'

The Accords also identified several areas of overlapping mutual interest between Palestinian and Israeli leadership, including withdrawal from Gaza, and the Accords spurred the Sharon government to move ahead with a unilateral disengagement peace plan as an alternative.

Read the Journal's interview with Daniel Levy below:

DL The background to what was quite an unusual thing to do—to produce a model peace agreement in extreme detail—was that a group of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators during the 1999 – 2001 attempt at reaching a permanent status peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians came out of that experience convinced that we had actually begun to develop the basics for whatever a peace agreement would look like: that it could be done and we were very close. Which at the time was very much in contradiction with the more widely accepted version of what had gone on and the narrative as to what was possible and what should go on.

The reality was that the negotiations had been discontinued. There was no longer a political negotiation process taking place between Israelis and Palestinians, and there was a sense that this would continue for some time and that we didn’t have time—that we should use this time where the officials were no longer trying to bridge the gaps and work through the issues, while things were still fresh in our minds from this 1999 – 2001, to conduct a very serious informal and nonbinding track to attempt at continuing the negotiations where they left off. And that’s partly why many of those involved had been the official negotiators.

There were other things that guided us. We were conscious of the fact that more prep work needed to be done with the publics, because everyone for many years had been saying, “Ah, there’ll be a two-state solution. Ah, there’ll be a two-state solution.” But we felt we had reached a stage where it wasn’t that the devil was in the detail. There was no more space for constructive ambiguity. We lived in such a transparent world that if coming back from negotiations the Israeli’s would say, “Oh we found a solution on issue X.” And the Palestinians agreed to this and the Palestinians said, “We found a solution on issue X.” And the Israelis agreed to Y, and X and Y weren’t the same thing, or X and Y was a fudging of language, then people didn’t want to hear it. We needed constructive clarity; ambiguity would reach the stage where ambiguity was destructive in terms of what was required. So we wanted to provide that clarity. We felt that we had to come forward and say to the publics that this is what it entails.

Another lesson we’d learned, as I’d mentioned, was that the negotiators were not up to the job. The negotiators themselves hadn’t done the prep work on all sides. There had been a lot of track to stuff that had gone on prior to 1999 that had fed into the official peace talks. There was a paper drawn up in 1995, with which I was involved as a kind of a background policy person, between Abu Mazen, now the Palestinian president, and Yossi Balen. It was called the Balen – Abu Mazen agreement of 1995, which was far less detailed than Geneva. We saw the extent to which the understanding reached as a framework agreement by Balen and Abu Mazen and the teams who worked on their behalf in ‘95 had acted as a kind of semi-official guide to some of the negotiators. And we felt that we had to rework some of those ideas, because some of the ideas were never put to the test in the negotiating room. Apparently it had fallen a little bit short, new ideas had emerged, and we needed to go into more detail.

So for all of those reasons we did this and we also felt that we needed to be a bit more clear to the world in terms of what we were asking of the international community, because as the negotiations proceeded, some new ideas came up in terms of the multinational role in helping to resolve some aspects of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. We thought that it would be good to pre-prepare the international community so they would be more able and ready to step up to that role.

BJWA You mentioned the need for preparation on both sides. The [Geneva] plan has been critiqued by many as largely an intellectual exercise, largely an academic plan. If all parties were rational actors, and if there were a sense of willingness on both sides to acquiesce, this would be an ideal solution. But where is that willingness? Without such willingness, what role does this plan have in the peace process?

DL I’d almost turn the question on its head and ask, without such a willingness, can there be a peace process? I think we have had occasions in the past where the parties have come to the table with a pretty realistic take on what needs to be done. And I think and hope that that will be the case again in the future. I think without that you won’t be able to actually get to a resolution of the conflict and I think it’s not something that’s fantastical and not doable. I think it’s something that’s very doable.

To kind of draw you into the exercise of the negotiations themselves: One of the interesting things when we were negotiating was that part of the negotiations would be, “This is our position, these are our needs, this is what makes sense for us.” Both sides accepted as a legitimate negotiating argument, “I need this to market to my own public.” So we were taking these things into consideration. It wasn’t just, “Let us pretend we are Martians. We’ve come down and you can play the role of Israeli. You can be Israeli Martians and you can be Palestinian Martians and now let’s kind of,”—or better, an analogy that you’re more familiar with at the moment: Vulcans. “Everyone’s a Captain Spock and this is just a rat.”

We weren’t doing that at all. These are people who lived in the heart of the conflict, and live in our society. That’s why it was Israelis and Palestinians. That’s one of the unique things about Geneva. It wasn’t people from the outside. It was people who for years had won or lost political elections on the Israeli side and won or lost political support on the Palestinian side by virtue of advocating positions that at certain times they could carry the public with them and certain times they couldn’t. So sometimes we literally argued. We said, “Okay. Bottom line, is there security overriding logic in this? No. It’s an aspirin that I need for my public and without this I’m not going to be able to sell the deal.” And the other side would say, “If you’re going to go on that, I need these kinds of backups, these guarantees, because this would fly with my public.” And that was quite a lot of the game.

BJWA What about this plan lends itself to success, when the others—partition plans such as those the British proposed in the ‘30s, and the initial ‘47 plan, the Oslo Accords, Camp David—have failed?

DL This is the first detailed Israeli – Palestinian attempt to say this is what it’s going to have to look like. Obviously the things that preceded 1948 were all while the area was still under various mandates, in the time of empires and colonies. The mandatory powers or the United Nations were suggesting the plans. The conflict has had its own trajectory. Initially it wasn’t an Israeli – Palestinian conflict in as much as it was Israeli – Arab. An independent Palestinian movement for national liberation only emerged in the 1960s. One can see the late 1980s, and especially 1988, an important watershed, when the PLO for the first time recognized the two-state solution and began a dialogue with the then U.S. administration.

So I think that with various time lags and catch-ups and with one side being ahead of the curve at one time and the other side being ahead of the curve at the other, we’ve been kind of nervously dancing around the fire of what the two-state solution should look like for over a decade, perhaps closer to two decades. We didn’t invent this out of thin air. We took what had gone on in the negotiations, what the Clinton Parameters had suggested. Because the bizarre thing about the 2000 negotiation experience was, first you had a summit of leaders in July at Camp David, hosted by Clinton, Barak, Arafat. Then in December, about five months later, Clinton put his parameters on the table. And then, in January, you had the senior officials, but not the principals, negotiating at Taba. But my take on it is it should have been in the reverse order. When you listen to it, it’s quite wild. It makes more sense to say, first of all we send senior negotiators to try and breach the differences. Then the major third party honest broker, the U.S. administration, puts its ideas on the table. Then based on those ideas the principals come to that table. That is actually how it should have been done.

BJWA Then this is an attempt to take a different perspective, predicated on the fact that the main problem with the prior negotiations were these nitty-gritty details—sort of a trepidation about entering into this very vivid picture about what the two states would look like.

DL Well, not really. Because we’d gone beyond that. We began to go there and it was prematurely suspended. I was a negotiator at Taba, and what happened at Taba isn’t that we reached a dead end in terms of the negotiations. We reached a dead end in terms of the political timetable we were working according to, because it was two weeks out from Israeli elections and Barak basically said it was too late. And we lost credibility even within our own party and the Intifada was going on. The closing statement of Taba, which was the last official permanent status negotiations in January 2001, says the parties were never closer and we could resolve this in a short period of time.

And we took that at face value. Everyone else said, “Ah, you know, that’s what you say at the end of a negotiation.” We took it at face value and said, “Okay. Let’s test it.” Because we couldn’t be accused of what we always accuse the other side of, which is being stuck in the box of your own thinking. You know, you’re convinced of your case and you don’t challenge it. We had to prove it, after what had happened. We had to prove it to ourselves first of all, by the way. I would even say that Geneva was born of a very selfish act, of testing whether we were dreaming and bullshitting ourselves by saying it was possible.

So we took exactly where we got to in Taba. Of course as things emerged over three years, some theses had to be changed because the reality on the ground was changing. But we took that and tried to spin it out into a detailed agreement. And you said, “very nice, academic, sit on the shelf.” What we’d very consciously done is said, “No, we’re going to go out and campaign for this. First of all, we’re going to make it available to everyone.” And we did something unprecedented in Israel. Life in Palestine is different; they did something parallel. I’ll mention what it is in a minute.

We did something unprecedented in Israel. We mailed to every Israeli household the full text of the Accord with the maps: a hugely expensive enterprise. Israel’s a small place. You won’t think it sounds like that much, but there are over a million households in Israel. We sent a copy of the Geneva Accord to every single household. We said, “Judge for yourself. Throughout this peace process, no one ever put you in the picture. This is transparent. We’re putting you in the picture.” The Palestinians distributed it as an insert to daily newspapers, as there’s no daily mail system there. And we went out and actively educated and campaigned for the content and for the adoption of this kind of an approach. We very consciously said, “This isn’t supposed to collect dust on the shelves.”

We think it’s going to be an unavoidable point of reference to the extent whereby, when Condoleeza Rice had her Senate Confirmation Hearings a couple of weeks ago, she said, “There has to be a viable Palestinian state.” And senator Lincoln Chafee of here [Rhode Island] turned around and said, “When you say viable, would you mean something along the lines of the Geneva Accord?” And she had to respond to that. And we feel that it’s now become an unavoidable point of reference and perhaps the most prominent point of reference for anyone who is thinking about what a permanent state solution would look like.

BJWA Many critique the Oslo Accords as a tactical or strategic change in terms of the Palestinian mindset. Had the Palestinians actually accepted a two-state solution, in terms of not just wanting the complete eradication of Israel? Or was it actually a strategic change? Making a detailed map is one thing, but how do you ascertain that the motives on both sides are genuine?

DL Yes, and the question is asked on the flip side. Was Oslo just another way of maintaining the Israeli occupation and the Israelis haven’t really come to terms with it? But to your question, it’s always difficult to go into the realm of the psychology of actors in any kind of process. I think that the key principals who were involved in the beginning of the Oslo process and who were involved in the 1999 – 2001 attempt at a permanent status negotiation and in the Geneva initiative, and in other things, have been genuine in what they’ve come to the table trying to achieve. I think Rabin understood where it needed to go. Peres understood where it needed to go. I think Arafat at the beginning understood where it needs to go and accepted that, although his behavior raises the most question marks. Nonetheless, I’ve said what I’ve said and I stick by it. I think it could have been done with him. I certainly think that’s the case of the key Palestinian negotiators who have pursued this process. I think it was true of Barak and I certainly think it was true of the Geneva Initiative negotiators.

Neither side is a monolith. Bibi Natin Yahu, who was elected as Israeli Prime Minister in 1996, opposed the Oslo Accord and had voted against the Oslo Accord in the Israeli Parliament, just prior to the election, said, “I want to continue the Oslo process.” Did he genuinely intend when he accepted Oslo as something he would continue to implement that he was leading towards a two-state solution and an end of occupation? My sense would be no. So I think it’s not a monolith on either side. I’m sure there are Palestinians who are using this as a way of furthering a very different goal and I think there are Israelis who pay lip service to the peace process as a way of furthering a very different goal. In the specific of the Geneva Initiative—

BJWA Not even something as a specific goal, but in terms of accepting partition as a concept—

DL No, which is a specific goal. We’re going to divide this land. Israeli domination of the West Bank ain’t gonna be. Palestinian control of everything at the expense of Israel ain’t gonna be. Look, if the Palestinians were playing it tactically, see, they’d say, “We’ll take a bit at a time. First, we’ll get back as much of the West Bank as we can, then a bit more of the West Bank. Then hopefully we’ll have all of the West Bank. But then we’ll go on for our struggle to get back the rest of Israel.” If that were the case then I would say why didn’t they accept Camp David?

I think the seriousness of the Palestinian commitment to a viable two-state solution was partly what guided them in rejecting a nonviable offer made by the Israelis. Do you see what I’m saying? If someone didn’t really care, if someone wasn’t serious about ending this, saying, “This is the red line. That’s it, now we move forward. We’re not in conflict with you any more.” If they weren’t so serious about it they’d say, “Fine we’ll accept this solution. Anyway, we were never going to come to terms with the Jews. Anyway we’re going to carry the war against them, so now let’s have the war against them for 80% rather that 20% of the territory.” So I think the seriousness of ending the conflict meant you had to get it right.

Now those who were involved in the Geneva Initiative have taken very serious domestic risks by lining up behind this. And they’ve gone out to their own public and said, “Hey, we’re telling it like it is. You can’t have it both ways. Either you want a negotiated solution to the conflict and a two-state solution—and that means making certain concessions on the refugee issue; that means we’re not going back home.” And that’s what the Geneva Initiative authors have come out and said. Or, “we can fight to our last drop of blood to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” But the two don’t go together. You can’t say you’re in favor of a two-state solution and say you’re in favor of an unlimited right of return of Palestinians. And that was a very, very important belated signal to tell the Palestinian public.

BJWA Yassir Arafat’s line consistently throughout the Second Intifada was that, “I don’t have control over Hamas. I don’t have control over these terrorist factions.” You either take that at face value, either he doesn’t have control, or he and the Palestinian leadership don’t want to or don’t care about reigning in these terrorist actions. And the same applies to the extreme Israeli side. Because the Palestinian Authority is a different entity than the state of Israel, there are certainly different things that you can expect in terms of how to rein in these various factions. How do you make things on par with one another? And how do you negotiate with a leadership that has uncertain control over his populace?

DL The short answer is you can’t, of course. Right down to the most banal things. In our negotiation of course it was writ large because they were not negotiating opposite an official side. Just the very logistics of conducting such a negotiation was that you would always have to ask for a permit for the Palestinians to be able to leave the territories to come to the negotiations. But even when it’s official negotiations, like now—there are the beginnings of official contacts—the Palestinians have to go through Israeli checkpoints. They’re dependent on the goodwill of the Israeli side to even come to the meeting. This has a dynamic that obviously feeds problematically into how the negotiations are conducted. This is one of the reasons why, I think, quite often bigger negotiations were conducted outside the region. Just to get away from that.

But I think the more important point you make is this huge asymmetry. Now we are not talking about two state actors, with a clear sense of what the Palestinian sovereignty is, with its own control of its territory, etc, with clear sources of power. That doesn’t exist; it is an asymmetry. I would say it’s a line in the sand where Palestinian control of Palestinian affairs begins and ends and where Israeli control of those affairs begins and end. I mean, we have a Palestinian Authority. There is a Palestinian Minister of Transportation. What does it mean? It’s a joke. What does it mean that there’s a Palestinian Minister of Transportation when there are 723 Israeli obstacles to freedom of movement in the West Bank? And that the Transportation Minister can do zero about that, when there are 760 kilometers of road on the Palestinian side that can’t be used by Palestinians? I mean, you begin to see the dimensions of this asymmetry.

I think what it means is that one has to be realistic. It’s not that one has to be easy on them, or forgiving, but realistic in terms of what they ask. You know, as the Israeli side, better than anyone else, what the limitations are and what they are permitted to do. Recently, just to give you a sense of the proportions of the lunacy of it sometimes, for a long time during the Intifada, any armed Palestinian would be considered a target, so the Palestinian police, the security apparatus, were not allowed to carry weapons, visible weapons, or they’d be a target for the Israelis. So okay, “Clamp down on the Palestinian militant groups, but you’re not allowed to carry weapons.” I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Monty Python. There’s this fabulous sketch. “He attacked me with a bunch of grapes, or he attacked me with, you know, a peach.” How are they supposed to clamp down? So now you’re back to a situation whereby the Israelis recognize that the Palestinian security forces are going to have to be armed in order to someway be a preventive tool in terms of asserting their authority. So what it takes is a) an understanding of the limitations and b) an Israeli willingness to make this work.

BJWA It strikes me that, immediately following Arafat’s death, there seems to be a rebirth in the peace process, whereas the argument before his death was that perhaps he was legitimately attempting to check the various Palestinian militant groups. But it seems that Abu Mazen is now showing signs of being able to do that. Does this suggest that Arafat was, in fact, not doing everything that he could do?

DL I prefer less to dwell on the past in terms of what the Arafat contribution was. We had a meeting with president Abbas two days after his inauguration as Palestinian President last month, and one of the participants—in fact, I think it was a Palestinian participant at the meeting, not President Abbas himself—made the very poignant and witty aside during the meeting that on the Palestinian side, they have to do everything to convince the Palestinian public that what’s happening now is a continuation of the Arafat legacy. And on the Israeli side, they have to do everything to convince everyone that it’s in fact a complete discontinuation of the Arafat legacy. And there’s a lot to that, because I think that more important than what happened in the past is for the Palestinians to be able to sell what’s going to happen in the future as something that—

Look, I think that what happened on the Palestinian side was that there was an appreciation for Arafat as being someone who had put the Palestinian issue on the world map. He was the symbol of Palestinian national integration and he was apparently a very problematic interlocutor for peace, but also, which is more relevant for the Palestinians, not a fantastic CEO. And I think people on the Palestinian street began to feel that deeply.

So I think on the one hand there’s a big discontinuity in terms of how Palestinian affairs are going to be managed. But I also think that it would be legitimate, when the Palestinians do go for an agreed two-state solution, to say that he paved the way for that. I think it will be important for the internal legitimacy. But I also think that there’s some truth to that. I don’t think it’s a deeply revisionist act in terms of the position that Arafat began to adopt in the lead up to and post Oslo.

BJWA In recent weeks the Bush administration has said that it likely would be actively engaged, though from the sidelines—not as engaged as it was, for example, at Camp David in 2000. But at the same time, they realize that America needs to be more engaged than it was during the first months of the first Bush administration. What do you personally believe should be the level of American participation this time around as compared to the past?

DL My short answer to that is that seriously handling this issue does not look kindly on those who only want to be half involved. You’ve got to expend political capital, and political currency, and time and energy on this. And some of the early signs of the second George W. Bush administration are quite encouraging, that there’s an understanding, as you’ve said, that they were too hands off and they were too limited in their involvement. I hope that that understanding goes a little further and that it actually goes into the realm of understanding.

I think that they adopted an approach of conflict management and I’m not sure that this conflict lends itself to being managed so easily. My question is, have they switched disks and understood that it requires conflict resolution? Unless you have a horizon of conflict resolution, your conflict management strategy is destined to failure. We had the laughable—if they didn’t lead to so many deaths and loss of life in Israel and Palestine—examples during the first administration of the Zinni mission. They appointed a special envoy called Zinni, General Zinni. And I don’t think he had enough backing, I don’t think he had enough of a mandate and he came home. And then they appointed Ambassador Wolf to oversee the roadmap implementation. And he went home again. There were those of us in the region who said, “Wait a minute. You’re not taking this seriously. This is not America carrying its weight.”

Now we have the appointment of General William Ward as a special Security Coordinator. This was announced by Secretary of State Rice during her first visit in the region. And I think it was significant that she came to the region so quickly after her appointment. And we’ve heard the extent to which this is being talked about as a very major plank in terms of the issues she’s going to be focused on. Now I hope it’s the beginning of a more concerted, consistent, not-getting-scared-away-from-this-too-easily, engagement.

I understand it’s not simple. There are a myriad of domestic political pressures that feed into American engagement on this issue because you can’t engage on this issue if you’re not willing to lay down the law to both sides at certain times. The analogy I draw is being a friend—and America is a friend of Israel and should continue to be a friend of Israel, and that’s important. But let’s take it down to our personal lives. If my friend’s absolutely blind drunk and about to get into a car and drive, then it’s my duty as a friend to say, “No you’re not. Don’t you dare do that! Give me those keys.”

And I think it’s the same with America and Israel sometimes. Sometimes Israeli policy can be very, very directly self-defeating. And it’s America’s role, not only as the honest broker, but also as Israel’s friend, to step up to the bat and say that sometimes.
And, I don’t see how America constructs a broader policy of engagement in the Middle East and a broader attempt to guarantee security, combat terror, and spread democracy without getting the kind of credibility on this issue that the first Bush administration desperately lacked. They were not credible in the Arab world because of the way they approached the Israel – Palestine issue, amongst other things, but in many ways this was a key underminer of US foreign policy credibility in the last four years. And the quote I wanted to read you was by Chuck Hagel, who at a World Affairs Council meeting on the 21st of January said, “U.S. reengagement in a revived Middle East peace process will be the single best action we can take for our public diplomacy in the Muslim world.” And I think Chuck Hagel told it absolutely right. And I don’t think one’s going to be able to carry forward with the broader agenda without taking something of a different pitch on Israel – Palestine.

BJWA In the past it seems that the Bush administration has been sort of grappling with the fact—whether they’re justified or not in believing this—that a much increased American influence in Israel and the region would actually turn off a lot of the Arab countries because they would see that as American interference. But I think that has been one of the concerns of the Bush administration, certainly in their first administration and it seems that they’re turning away from that more recently.

DL I don’t think it was a concern. I think the concern was, “We can’t do anything with this, we can’t run ahead of the parties, the parties aren’t ready, this is a political hot-potato domestically.” Let’s be honest. I think that was a major part of it. And I think there was a certain ideological affinity of some in the administration with the more retrograde, problematic elements within the Israeli political world. And I think there is a certain coincidence of outlooks which are very, very unhealthy towards achieving a lasting peace between some of the neo-cons and some of the hard-line nikudniks. And those factors, and other factors that feed into domestic politics were much more telling I think.

I think the other thing the administration needs to be convinced of is that you can get the Palestinians and Israelis on board for this. Now, what I would argue is, you’ve got the publics. The publics are ready. There’s huge fatigue after four years of Intifada. I think a lot of what’s going on at the moment is the public saying, “Enough. Screw you. Do whatever you have to do. And we’re sick of the dividers.” And in opinion polls, we see that the publics are ready for the deal. They need guidance.

But there were polls taken on Israeli and Palestinian sides last month, one by an institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one by Halish Kakhi’s research center—and he’s the preeminent Palestinian pollster. And it took the content of the Geneva Initiative, without calling it the Geneva Initiative, and asked in great detail, “Do you support each separate item and do you support the whole package?” And 64% of Israelis said they support the whole package, and 54% of Palestinians said the same. So the public is there. And I think the U.S. administration has to be convinced that you can take this forward towards a promising conclusion. And hopefully the circumstances would lend themselves to the administration being convinced of that now.