by David Crist
The new national security adviser, a puckish Anthony Lake, cautioned against trying to engage Tehran. His Republican predecessors had failed miserably in their search for the elusive Iranian moderate. Iran refused to moderate its anti-American stance or curb its support for terrorists, so why waste time trying to talk with an implacable antagonist?24 President Clinton focused on forging a peace between the Palestinians and Israelis rather than refighting his predecessor’s wars.
Clinton threw his efforts behind peace negotiations that had been jump-started by President Bush after Desert Storm. He achieved a public breakthrough in 1993 with an agreement, forged during secret meetings in Oslo between Palestinian and Israeli diplomats, that led to the dramatic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the South Lawn of the White House.
Martin Indyk shepherded the Clinton administration’s new Middle East policy. The London-born, Australian-educated forty-two-year-old Indyk arrived at the White House as the NSC’s senior director for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, having served as the research director for the pro-Israel lobbyist organization American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Before joining the administration, he had served as the first director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank sympathetic to Israel, whose intellectual rigor had earned grudging respect even from the rival Arabist policy wonks inside the Beltway. Indyk played a critical role in all of Clinton’s Middle East initiatives: he was an ardent supporter of the peace process and of building strategic alliances with moderate Arabs.
Shortly after taking office, Indyk headed a policy review for the president on both Iran and Iraq. It reconfirmed Bush’s policy of containing Saddam Hussein and included a new finding by President Clinton for the CIA to try to overthrow the Iraqi leader. However, Iran posed a different set of challenges. While the pragmatic Iranian president, Rafsanjani, had made overtures for better relations, Indyk believed the Iranian government showed no real signs of moderating its behavior.
“A consensus quickly emerged that Iran was the archetype of a hostile rogue regime—the most important state sponsor of militant Islamic terrorism,” wrote Indyk.25 Iran’s support for Hezbollah, its fatwa to kill author Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, its assassination of a former prime minister in Paris, its desire for nuclear weapons, and its regional ambitions all supported the diagnosis of Iranian recalcitrance.
Indyk never viewed overthrowing the Islamic Republic as a realistic option. “The revolution had succeeded in conferring on the clerical regime a legitimacy that nobody in Iran seemed willing or able to challenge,” Indyk wrote in his memoirs. The regime had legitimacy with the Iranian population, and there appeared to be no appreciable opposition inside the country.26 If there had been a robust opposition, no one in Washington would have known. The CIA was still recovering from the exposure of its entire spy network just four years earlier and had few new assets positioned within the country. The agency’s best information came from interviewing Iranian exiles living in Los Angeles, many of whom traveled regularly to visit family still in the old country.
Sanctions and isolation seemed the only logical way forward to Indyk. The United States would maintain its sanctions against Iran while pressuring other nations to join in Washington’s embargo. Eventually, Indyk and the president hoped, the Islamic Republic would realize the tremendous economic cost of its nefarious actions and would moderate its behavior, perhaps leading to a rapprochement.
The Israeli view of Iran dovetailed with Washington’s objectives. Indyk and the president’s special envoy for the Middle East, Dennis Ross, shared a similar view of Israel and the peace process. “We were both strong believers in the strategic importance of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, convinced that Israeli deterrence and the possibility of peace depended on never allowing a wedge to be driven between America and Israel,” Ross wrote in a 2004 book about the peace process.27 Both men fervently believed that peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors would promote American security, bringing stability and economic development to the region. The more we succeeded in brokering comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, the more isolated Iraq and Iran would become; the more effective we were in containing the destabilizing activities of these two rogue regimes, the easier it would be for Israel’s Arab neighbors to make peace with the Jewish state, Indyk explained. “It was a neat and logical design.”28
Indyk used his old think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as the forum to publicly reveal the results of his policy review as part of a wide-ranging speech describing the new American strategy for the Middle East. On May 18, 1993, at the institute’s annual Soref Symposium held at a Washington hotel, Indyk described the strategy as “dual containment.”29
“Our approach begins with the concept of independence between the eastern and western halves of the region.” The two were symbiotic, Indyk said. Containing Iran and Iraq would free the Arabs and Israelis to make peace. Then a unified Middle East would help strengthen the containment of Iraq and Iran.30
“Iran is fishing in troubled waters across the Arab world, actively seeking to subvert friendly governments.” Indyk singled out Iran’s attempts to scuttle the peace process through its support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and accused Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons and “seeking an ability to dominate the Gulf by military means.” To counter this, the United States would continue economic sanctions and pressure Europe and Asia to agree to both economic and military restrictions on trading with Tehran.
“If we fail in our efforts to modify Iranian behavior, five years from now Iran will be much more capable of posing a real threat to Israel, to the Arab world, and to Western interests,” Indyk warned.31
Harsh rhetoric by senior officials accompanied the new administration’s Iranian strategy. In a series of talks around Washington, the prim secretary of state, Warren M. Christopher, called Iran an “international outlaw” for its support of terrorism and its opposition to the peace process. Anthony Lake penned a confrontational article in Foreign Affairs that supported dual containment and advocated a strategy in which the United States would transform rogue regimes.32
Iran’s nascent nuclear program caused much tub-thumping in Washington. Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres predicted that Iran would possess the bomb by 1999, and said that “you can’t deter a fanatical terrorist state with nuclear weapons.” At the same Washington Institute conference, Republican Paul Wolfowitz echoed concerns similar to those of Indyk: “The Iranians are embarked on a long-term program to acquire nuclear weapons.” He added direly, “This problem is not yet with us in its nuclear form, but, if nothing else changes, it will be with us somewhere in the next five to ten years.”33
Many in official Washington shared Peres’s expectation of an Iranian bomb within a decade. During his confirmation hearing as the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993, Army General John Shalikashvili told the senators that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in eight to ten years, or between 2001 and 2003. His statement reflected current CIA predictions and was supported by a recent intelligence community estimate.34
The new Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had fewer reservations than Khomeini regarding the atom. The uncovering of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons program after Desert Storm and the seemingly permanent American military presence in the region no doubt contributed to Tehran’s decision to hasten its nuclear research.35 In 1991, Iran resumed its nuclear power program, looking for European and Chinese assistance. Tehran signed an agreement with China for construction of a power plant, and in 1995, after more than a year’s negotiations, it signed another agreement with Russia to complete the Bushehr nuclear power plant. But none of this constituted proof of a nuclear weapons program, and a 1992 inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found no evidence of a clandestine program.
While the CIA suspected Iran’s motives, intelligence remained scanty, and U.S. assessments of Iran’s nuclear
progress proved well off the mark. In 2002, when the U.S. government had predicted Iran would have the know-how to produce a weapon, the CIA was predicting Iran was yet another eight to ten years away from a nuclear weapon.
If the dire predictions about Iran’s nuclear program were inflated, those concerning Iran’s opposition to the Arab-Israeli peace process were deadly accurate. Iran viewed peace between Israel and the Arabs as a grave threat. It promised to unite both of Iran’s foes and leave the Persian country isolated, just as the Clinton administration predicted. While President Rafsanjani still hoped for a rapprochement with Washington, as onetime candidate for the Iranian presidency Hooshang Amirahmadi observed, “No Iranian government would allow their two enemies to unite or that alliance to develop.”36
The Iranian government viewed dual containment and the peace process as aimed squarely at overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Leaders in Tehran tended to see all American actions in the region through their own lens, and every new deployment of American forces in the Gulf was aimed at them. With thirty thousand American troops in the Gulf, as Middle East scholar and former CIA analyst Ken Pollack noted, “The radicals—and much of the Iranian populace—saw it as further proof of the malevolent designs and single-minded focus of the United States on Iran.”37
The tension escalated. Israeli aircraft attacked a Hezbollah training base, killing dozens of recruits and several Iranian advisers. Hezbollah and Iran bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, killing eighty-five and wounding hundreds more. Iran began cultivating Palestinian rejectionist groups, principally Hamas. A religious fundamentalist group with loose ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas had emerged during the Palestinian uprising in 1987 with a little help from Israel, which hoped it would undermine Arafat’s power. While the fundamentalists acknowledged and respected Yasser Arafat, they strongly objected to peace with Israel as an abandonment of Palestinian claims to their pre-1948 homeland. It was an unlikely union between Shia Iran and Sunni Hamas. Iran had never cared much for the Palestinian cause, and Hamas remained a local group focused solely on its problems with the Israelis. But as Martin Indyk said, the east and west halves of the Middle East were joined, only now by Iran too.
One of those dispatched by Hamas to Tehran to solidify relations was a twenty-seven-year-old chemical engineer, Osama Hamdan. The son of a refugee living in Gaza, with a close-clipped beard and a kind but forlorn expression, Hamdan arrived in Tehran in 1992 first as the deputy and then as the principal Hamas representative to Iran. He spent six years going back and forth from his home near Beirut to Iran as one of the main negotiators helping to foster Iranian political support for Hamas. Like many Arabs living in exile among the Persians, he found the Iranians supercilious. He played a key role in cultivating Iranian support for Hamas, convincing Iran of advantages to supporting them at the expense of Arafat’s Fatah Party. With a polished manner and fluency in English, Hamdan developed the persona of a rock star as he made the rounds of the posh hotels of the Gulf Arab cities. He contributed to developing legitimacy for Hamas among the Arab governments, whose natural tendency remained hostile to Islamist groups. As a security precaution, Hamas separated its political wing in Iran from the military, with Hamdan working the diplomatic side apart from other Hamas operatives arranging for weapons and explosives. Even so, Hamdan maintained a detailed, although passive, knowledge of their activities.38
Osama Hamdan held no illusions that Iran really cared about the Palestinian plight. He viewed it as a marriage of convenience. The ideological and religious ties that bound Hezbollah to Iran did not exist with Hamas.39
Support for Hamas afforded Tehran the means to strike at the Israelis and expand their influence beyond Lebanon. For Hamas, Hamdan noted, “Iran provides us the means to resist. If more countries supported our cause, no one would care about Iran, including us.”40
Over the next two decades, Iran provided both weapons and explosives to Hamas. The covert operatives of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Quds Force, developed an intricate network to flow arms to Hamas. Iranian ships sailed with secret stashes of weapons in their holds through the Red Sea, where the weapons were transferred to Sudanese smugglers paid by Iranian Quds Force officers. Traveling by convoys, they worked their way up through Sudan and Egypt, from which they would be carried into Gaza and the West Bank disguised in bags of concrete or other innocuous items. This allowed the group to wage a terrorist campaign in Israel that seriously undermined the peace talks and ushered in a hard-line Likud government that had as little interest in reconciliation as Hamas. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Guard nurtured its relations with the Sudanese, to the point that by 2008 discussions were under way to establish a Revolutionary Guard naval base in Sudan that would position Iranian naval forces to threaten the other great maritime choke point in the Middle East besides the Strait of Hormuz: the Suez Canal.
While Washington remained slow to grasp the reality, the strident American policy behind dual containment and Iran’s bloody response to the peace process had started a chain reaction that quickly found the two countries on the path to war again. Neither side understood how its actions were being perceived by the other. Miscalculation threatened to exacerbate the growing crisis.
The combination of the Iran-Iraq War and the swift American victory over Iraq during Operation Desert Storm influenced Iran’s military thinking. In the spring of 1991, military officers met in Tehran to discuss future requirements in light of both the recent war in Iraq and their own recent confrontation with the U.S. Navy. Although the attendees devoted much of the meeting to lengthy soliloquies about their heroic efforts during the Iran-Iraq War in fighting off the powers of global arrogance, the generals and admirals drew important lessons looking at the recent past. The naval officers concluded that their strategy against the United States had been sound, but they lacked the means to properly implement it. One lone missile from the Joshan had nearly knocked out the largest U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf. More small boats and missiles, they surmised, would have made the battle a costly one for the American navy.
The Revolutionary Guard believed that large conventional ships only played to the strength of the Americans. The ease with which the U.S. Navy dispatched the Sahand and the Sabalan provided graphic proof of the vulnerability of their capital ships. What had worked had been their attacks with small boats and mines. While these grew out of necessity, Iran had uncovered an asymmetrical means to strike back at the superior Americans. The Iranian navy opted for small boats and stealth to counter the United States. While fiscal shortfalls coupled with reluctance by the navy and air force to wean themselves from American hardware prevented any quick modernization, Iran concluded that improving its own military technology based on its new doctrine was important to competing with the U.S. military.41
Iran nearly doubled its arms purchases from 1990 to 1993. The Revolutionary Guard purchased one hundred Chinese bottom-influence mines. Its inventory of mines—many the same as those laid during the 1980s—grew to more than five thousand. At the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iran had no working antiship missiles in its inventory. While it tried to hide this by displaying nonfunctioning missiles at military parades, overcoming this shortage became a major effort. In 1995, the country acquired Chinese C-802 antiship cruise missiles, essentially the Chinese variant of the Exocet that Iraq had used so effectively against Iranian merchants during the tanker war. The following year, Iran purchased fast Chinese-built missile boats to carry this new missile. All of them went into the Revolutionary Guard’s inventory. In the next war with the U.S. Navy, Iran would not be caught with just one lone missile and some speedboats to send against an American cruiser. Iran would send a swarm of boats, outfitted with rockets, machine guns, missiles, and torpedoes, all designed to overwhelm the ship’s defenses.
Iran embarked on a massive ballistic missile program. Iran’s helplessness to prevent Iraq from punishing it at will dramatically affected the new supreme leader. Ira
n spent millions of dollars researching and building hundreds of its own missiles. Each generation grew more accurate with a longer range. The program’s backbone was a series of Shahab missiles capable of sending a twenty-two-hundred-pound warhead as far as Israel. Iranian defense minister Ali Shamkhani frequently characterized Iran’s strategy as one of “strategic deterrence,” aimed at both Iraq and Israel based largely upon Iran’s inability to respond to Iraq’s missile attacks in 1988.
Iran dug two huge tunnels under more than one hundred meters of dirt and rock to safeguard its stockpile of missiles from American precision-guided missiles. As a backup, the Revolutionary Guard built more than six hundred reinforced concrete bunkers, ringing the Strait of Hormuz, all designed to house Iranian mines or newly acquired antiship missiles. Spreading their facilities out made it difficult for the Americans to knock them out by air strikes.
Inside the Pentagon, Iran’s nuclear program and its weapons buildup indicated a new challenge to American preeminence in the Persian Gulf. A 1994 military assessment warned that Tehran now had the “ability to threaten shipping from virtually any location along the Iranian littoral.” Although the United States remained flushed with victory against Iraq, with a massive air force presence over Iraq, Iran had come back on the Pentagon’s radar as the next threat to American hegemony over the Persian Gulf. For the first time since 1988, CENTCOM dusted off its military plans for Iran, only this time the plans would not be directed against an invading Soviet army, but would outline the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
Twenty-One