The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

where a firefight was going on. I suc- ceeded, and received a telegram from Roy Atherton, the NEA assistant sec- retary, congratulating me on this. But by the time it arrived, they were fight- ing again! That was the way it went, though. You’d work and work to hammer out a ceasefire or an agreement and get everyone on board, and then some- body would fire a shot and it was all over again. I have a framed cartoon showing a group of Lebanese politicians stand- ing around in a state of embarrass- ment, while a hand is sticking out from behind a curtain — holding a Parker pen that was labeled “The Godfather.” I’d persuaded this group of traditional political leaders — Sunni, Shia and Maronite — to agree on an informal compact by urging that if they agreed to stop fighting each other, the Israelis and Syrians would not be able to exploit them the way they had. And they agreed and signed, but five days later, the fighting started back up. Some of this is discussed in my book on diplomatic miscalculations, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East (Indiana University Press, 1993) and in an article I did for the Middle East Journal ’s Autumn 1996 issue. The most frustrating thing was try- ing to get the Lebanese Army to move into southern Lebanon to take over security. We thought we had it arranged, but then it was blocked by the Israelis and their local puppet, who really didn’t want them down there. FSJ : Speaking of Israel: did you ever have occasion to meet Ariel Sharon? RP : No; I did see him twice, once speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations and once in the Kremlin, in 1990, when we both happened to be visiting Moscow. But we’ve never spoken. FSJ : Do you think Ariel Sharon will ever make peace on terms accept- able to the Palestinians? RP: No. Any peace will come in spite of Sharon, not because of him. FSJ : Were you frustrated by the ban at that time on American diplomats dealing directly with the Palestinian Liberation Organization? RP : Not really; the ban was on formal contacts only. Our CIA folks in Beirut — Robert Ames, in partic- ular, who was later killed when the embassy was bombed in 1983 — dealt with the PLO all the time. At times we saw them as a positive influence in the civil war; they were more responsible than some of the Lebanese factions. But there wasn’t much they could do, so there wasn’t much substance to our dealings with them. FSJ: Did you disagree with the Bush administration’s initial reluc- tance to become engaged in the Middle East peace process? RP : Yes, I did. FSJ : And do you think the admin- istration’s “road map” is still viable? RP : Well, the ink is still on the paper, so I suppose it could be revived. But it looks pretty dormant now. FSJ : Are you a pessimist about a peaceful resolution of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict? RP : You know, Adlai Stevenson said that “Optimism is to a diplomat what courage is to a soldier.” Pessimists don’t make good diplo- mats. I am professionally optimistic that there is going to be a solution, but I must say that when I look at the details, I don’t see how it will come about. FSJ : Do you think the U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative has promise? RP : No, I don’t. I may be wrong, but the whole idea, it seems to me, is that we’re preaching to the natives, as though the problem is reform. That isn’t the problem: it’s people and land. Where do we draw the borders and what do we do about the refugees? There will be little American-spon- sored progress on democracy until we do something effective about Arab- Israeli peace. The initiative doesn’t deal with that; we’ve just sort of put that aside, but it’s the 900-pound gorilla in the room. Now, I’m out of touch: I haven’t been out there since 1997. And I haven’t talked to any Palestinians on the ground, so I may not know what I’m talking about, but I doubt it. FSJ : Do you see signs that Arab societies themselves are starting to recognize the urgency of reform and are willing to pursue that process? RP : Yes, I see some modest signs, even in Saudi Arabia. And that’s the only way reform will happen — from within. The idea that we’re somehow going to teach them the way is non- 56 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 “In the old days, when an assistant secretary came out to your post, that was really something. Today, someone at that level visits every three months or so, and they sneak in and out.” — Richard Parker