Desert Diplomat: Inside Saudi Arabia Following 911 by Robert W. Jordan & Steve Fiffer

Desert Diplomat: Inside Saudi Arabia Following 911 by Robert W. Jordan & Steve Fiffer

Author:Robert W. Jordan & Steve Fiffer [Jordan, Robert W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: HIS026010 History / Middle East / Arabian Peninsula, POL011010 Political Science / International Relations / Diplomacy, BIO010000 Biography & Autobiography / Political
ISBN: 9781612347417
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2015-06-30T16:00:00+00:00


8

What’s more improbable? Watching a Jewish U.S. senator and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia share verses from the Old Testament and Quran on Christmas Day? Or watching the director of the Central Intelligence Agency jump across a sofa and get into the face of a Saudi prince? Or threatening to resign one’s position as ambassador because your government won’t share important information with you? During my tenure, I was a party to all three of these head-scratchers—each of which had important implications in the Kingdom.

Let’s start with Joe Lieberman’s give-and-take with Crown Prince Abdullah during the senator’s ten-day tour of the Middle East. Although the next presidential election was more than twenty-two months away, the then-senator from Connecticut who had run for vice president in 2000 was a likely candidate for the Democratic Party nomination. And as we all know, likely candidates like to show their presidential chops by visiting Israel and the Arab states.

I confess I wasn’t terribly happy to learn that Lieberman would be coming to Riyadh on December 25. My first thought was, This means sixty of my people are going to have to give up their Christmas Day to host a guy who’s politically grandstanding? They would have to coordinate meetings, provide security and logistics, including transportation, and maintain full office capability in case of unexpected developments. My next thought was more diplomatic: Okay, this goes with the territory, so suck it up and do it.

Lieberman was coming to the Kingdom from Israel, where he had met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. According to news reports, he expressed support for Israel in its war on terrorism and in its right to self-defense. No surprise there, nor that he chose not to talk with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He did, however, meet with Saeb Erekat, who had previously been the Palestinians’ chief negotiator.

Lieberman and I spent much of Christmas Day with the crown prince. The senator told the Arab News the next day that he considered Abdullah’s March 2002 peace initiative a “missed opportunity.” He added that he had “made an appeal to the crown prince . . . to find a way to restate it.”1

The Arab Peace Initiative, aka the Abdullah Plan, unanimously ratified by twenty-two Arab states, bears restating here, particularly because an influential Jewish senator/would-be president appeared to be endorsing it. It read,

Emanating from the conviction of the Arab countries that a military solution to the conflict will not achieve peace or provide security for the parties, the council:

1. Requests Israel to reconsider its policies and declare that a just peace is its strategic option as well.

2. Further calls upon Israel to affirm:

I-Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.

II-Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.

III-The acceptance of the establishment of a



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