by David Crist
The administration chose a meeting of the American Iranian Council in Washington, D.C., to get its message to Khatami. The organization’s president, Hooshang Amirahmadi, had lived for two decades in the United States and taught at Rutgers University. Animated and confident, he maintained a close rapport with the Iranian reform movement as well as with Khatami’s government. He lobbied for closer ties between the two nations. If Khatami wanted to listen, Amirahmadi’s group would be the best megaphone.
On March 17, 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stepped up to the podium as a keynote speaker before a day of panel discussions, including one to honor Christiane Amanpour.
“Spring is the season of hope and renewal; of planting the seeds for new crops,” said Albright to a riveted audience. “And my hope is that in both Iran and the United States, we can plant the seeds now for a new and better relationship in years to come.” She expressed regret for past American misdeeds, including tolerating the shah’s repression, and indicated Washington’s willingness to meet with Iranian officials without preconditions.43
Ayatollah Khamenei responded a week later during a speech before Shia pilgrims at a holy shrine. “The confessions of American crimes are of no use to the Iranian nation,” he said dismissively. As for talks with Washington, the supreme leader called the idea “deceitful,” intended to “set the stage for more enmities and to regain its former interests in Iran.”44
Clinton decided to throw a Hail Mary and try to use his considerable interpersonal skills to talk directly to Khatami. Both presidents were scheduled to speak at the United Nations General Assembly. After Clinton spoke, he agreed to stay and listen to all of Khatami’s speech in the hopes that the two would bump into each other afterward on the assembly floor. It was an unscripted gamble, but Clinton was desperate to start the thaw before he left office. After Khatami’s talk, Clinton loitered around the assembly hoping to meet Khatami. But the Iranian president’s advisers worried about an unscripted meeting at such a senior level, and Khatami did not have the supreme leader’s blessing to meet with Clinton. So he had his aides spirit him out a different way to make sure he would not meet the American president. Clinton’s last overture had flopped.
In three years Iran and the United States had swerved from open hostility to hopeful accommodation. The election of President Khatami portended an end to twenty years of hostilities. A pragmatic Bill Clinton repeatedly tried to seize the opportunity, starting with modest steps at easing trade and travel restrictions and leading to increasingly bolder initiatives designed to extend a hand of friendship to Iran. While Khatami may have wanted to reciprocate, the hard-liners controlling the other apparatuses of power—the parliament, Guardian Council, Revolutionary Guard, and supreme leader—all conspired to undermine his policy. Khatami served two full terms, but each year his authority and independence eroded, and he was unable to grasp Clinton’s extended hand. In the end, Khatami proved to be no revolutionary. He was not willing to run against the will of the very government he had spent his professional life supporting.
“In the end, rapprochement failed because Iran was unwilling to move forward,” said Ken Pollack. “But the Clinton administration’s attempt was the right thing to do. The animosity remained because the other side wanted it.”
The outgoing Clinton administration recommended that the two nations should be talking to each other, despite the disagreements and without preconditions. “Iran has a critical role in questions of regional stability and security, and cannot be ignored,” wrote Edward Walker, the outgoing director for Near Eastern affairs at State, in a memo for the new administration.45 But President Bush would make his own decisions.
Twenty-Two
AN ATROCITY
Initially, senior military officers welcomed the new Bush administration. The breadth of experience coming in with the Republicans impressed many in uniform. “It appeared to me to be an extraordinary group of talent,” said Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, then head of operations for the Joint Staff, of the new Bush national security team. Tall and thin, with a forthright, monotone persona, Newbold applauded the return of Colin Powell and Richard Armitage to run the State Department and the respected former defense secretary Dick Cheney as vice president. They seemed to be harbingers of a remarkable team at the helm, guiding the foreign policy of the United States into the new millennium. Although the chairman, General Hugh Shelton, and the other Joint Chiefs respected President Clinton, he was not overly popular with the officer corps due to his moral lapses and evasion of the Vietnam War. During the campaign, George W. Bush called for a stronger military that would not squander its power on nation building: “Our military is meant to fight and win war,” Governor Bush said during the second presidential debate with Vice President Al Gore.1 Few within the uniformed services seemed to notice the fact that many of those coming in with the Republican administration—including the new president—had shown the same penchant as Clinton for avoiding their generation’s war in Southeast Asia.
The new secretary of defense hit the Pentagon like a whirling dervish. With slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, at seventy-four Donald Rumsfeld was the oldest man ever to run the Defense Department, but he possessed the energy and drive of a man half his age. Rumsfeld was a tenacious bureaucratic infighter; his management style was to take charge and force everyone else out of his way, even if he really didn’t have the faintest idea of what to do. Rumsfeld also shared a widespread suspicion within the new Republican administration of the loyalty of the military leadership, all of which had been appointed by the Democrats. General Shelton spent months trying to convince Rumsfeld that he was beyond partisan politics and would support him as much as he had his predecessor.
One of the top items in the new secretary of defense’s in-box carried over from the end of the Clinton administration: a military plan to attack Iran. On October 12, 2000, the American destroyer USS Cole sat moored, refueling, off the port of Aden, Yemen. A small white boat approached the anchored ship. The two men aboard waved at the U.S. sailors and then detonated hundreds of pounds of explosives hidden in the boat’s hull. The explosion blew a forty-foot hole in the Cole’s port side, killing seventeen sailors and wounding thirty-nine in the worst attack on an American warship since the Iraqi attack on the USS Stark thirteen years earlier. President Clinton ordered the military to dust off the Iron Lightning plan developed after the Khobar Towers incident and to explore Iran’s role in the bombing. Newbold worked with the new CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks, to flesh out a broad range of military options designed to both retaliate and deter Tehran from undertaking any future terrorist attacks. These ranged from a massive weeklong bombardment by aircraft and missiles against military sites in downtown Tehran, including destroying Iran’s oil export facilities, to such—in the parlance of the Pentagon—“nonkinetic actions” as working with the Treasury Department to disrupt Iran’s financial system.2 Myriad other possible missions, including a renewed CIA targeting of Iranian intelligence officers and covert operations supporting the Iranian opposition, were suggested. “They were unconventional and imaginative and punitive,” said Newbold of their proposals.3
While the evidence soon pointed to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden as the culprits behind the Cole attack, Newbold remained suspicious about Iran’s involvement.4 Just four years after Iran’s deadly attack in Saudi Arabia, the Cole seemed to fit into a pattern of Iranian-sponsored strikes at the American military.
Five days after Bush’s inauguration, CIA Director George Tenet briefed the new president on the terrorist threat, including Iran.5 The next day, Rumsfeld demanded an update on the military plans, including those for Iran. Newbold laid out both the contingency plan developed under Clinton to retaliate for the Cole and the much larger Iranian military plan approved under Anthony Zinni to remove the regime. The latter resembled the old plans dating back to the days of General Paul X. Kelley and the rapid deployment force. It called for half a million men invadin
g Iran from the east and west and converging on Tehran in two giant pincers.
Rumsfeld hated both ideas. He lambasted CENTCOM’s invasion plan as unrealistic and a Cold War relic that relied on masses of men, tanks, and artillery and failed to adjust force levels based on new technology. The Iran briefing reinforced in the secretary’s mind the idea that military planning lacked any imagination. He ordered Newbold to come up with a new plan to respond to Iranian terrorism with a range of military options against Iranian “centers of gravity” and to prevent responses that threatened U.S. forces or access to the Strait of Hormuz. And yesterday was not soon enough for the impatient new defense secretary.
In less than a week, Newbold was standing again in front of Rumsfeld with a revised plan. Cruise missiles and aircraft would strike Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force training camps near Tehran; this could be expanded to other targets, such as the Quds Force or the MOIS headquarters buildings. CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks added an option similar to those schemes developed when the United States last squared off against Iran in the 1980s. At the time, CENTCOM called them the invisible hand in reverse, which were a series of nonattributable American operations against Iran. Franks proposed a similar concept. Navy SEALs would secretly infiltrate Iranian harbors and blow up high-value targets such as the three Iranian submarines or Revolutionary Guard missile boats. This would send the Iranian government an unmistakable message about the consequences of terrorism. But keeping the fight in the shadows, Newbold stressed, would lessen the likelihood of escalation as the U.S. government maintained the illusion, at least publicly, of deniability.
A gruff Rumsfeld listened and interrupted. He finally cut Newbold off with his own idea. He ordered CENTCOM to prepare to execute Franks’s “invisible hand in reverse,” as well as a large three- to four-day bombing campaign designed to destroy not only terrorist targets, but all of Iran’s ballistic missiles and naval and air bases. The alert order went out to Franks the next day labeled as a top secret special category message, with the code name Polo Step.6
But Donald Rumsfeld had no intention of actually attacking Iran or, for that matter, the perpetrators of the Cole attack, including Osama bin Laden lurking in Afghanistan. The Bush administration had little interest in military action to avenge terrorist attacks that happened under Bill Clinton. As former NSC counterterrorism official Roger Cressey observed, “It didn’t happen on their watch. It was the forgotten attack.”7 But Rumsfeld had shrewdly used the Iran military plan to send a strong signal to the Pentagon. He intended to shake up the Defense Department and force the generals and the civilian bureaucracy to mold to his will. He pushed out longtime civil servants, replacing them with political appointees well down into the lower levels of the department. He cut the Joint Staff by 15 percent, moving many of the billets up into his own office. He personally approved every promotion to three-star general. He incessantly questioned the status quo and peppered subordinates with short memos called “snowflakes,” raising questions and demanding answers on issues great and small. He berated or “challenged” the generals to think “outside the box,” and demanded answers from the military in days, or sometimes hours, even to enormously complex problems.
One of the Bush administration’s first acts in developing a new policy toward Iran came from the new head of the State Department’s policy planning staff, Richard Haass, who produced a paper on a list of topics for possible negotiations with Iran. It listed the significant areas of disagreement—that is, Iran’s support for Hezbollah and its nuclear program—but also areas where the two nations could work together, such as counternarcotics. Haass shared this with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and advocated engagement with Iran rather than isolation.8 The Joint Staff also prepared a paper recommending trying to build on the Clinton opening to President Khatami. Although the Iranian government continued to pursue weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, the military offered an optimistic assessment of the reformers and of Khatami’s ultimate success: “With 25 million reformers and 5 million conservatives, change is simply a matter of time,” wrote a military Middle East analyst.9 The military agreed with Haass and recommended engaging Iran along areas of common interest, including Iraq, while pressing them to renounce terrorism and their missile programs.
The idea found no support within the administration. Many senior officials believed the Iran government teetered on the brink of overthrow. “Any U.S. diplomatic initiative would be tantamount to throwing a rope to a drowning man,” Haass recalled. The new civilian defense team flatly rejected the Joint Staff’s views. Early engagement with Iran never gained traction. “Iran was at the bottom of the list of regional concerns,” Ken Pollack noted.10
Rumsfeld took a different course. Although he believed that Iran would eventually obtain a nuclear weapon, he did not view it as an immediate crisis.11 Instead he called for a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Iraq. Rumsfeld had served as Reagan’s Middle East envoy when the United States played a balancing act between Iran and Iraq. “I wondered if the right combination of blandishments and pressures might lead or compel Saddam Hussein toward an improved arrangement with America,” Rumsfeld wrote in his memoirs. He advocated a throwback to the days when Iraq served as a bulwark to contain Iran. “While a long shot,” he wrote, “it was not out of the question.”12
Iraq also galvanized the conservative intellectuals filling the political appointee positions within the Pentagon. This included Rumsfeld’s number two, a rumpled ideologue named Paul Wolfowitz. Collectively known as neoconservatives, or “neocons,” they were a loose grouping of like-minded men who sprang from the political left and merged with the anti-Soviet hawks of the Cold War. They argued for a unilateralist foreign policy centered upon America’s moral superiority and her willingness to use military force as an instrument to confront the world’s evils. They were not shy about using force to remake the globe in an image pleasing to America.13
Wolfowitz viewed Saddam Hussein as the principal threat to American security. A polite, likable, soft-spoken man, Wolfowitz exemplified the absentminded professor, possessing a quick mind and exhibiting perpetual personal disorganization. He had first raised the Iraqi threat thirty years earlier when he headed a 1979 limited contingency study for Secretary Harold Brown. Wolfowitz viewed Iraq through the lens of the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party represented the modern face of fascism. In a 2004 memo after the U.S. invasion, in response to proposed reconciliation with former Baath officials, Wolfowitz killed the idea, scrawling in the margin, “They are Nazis!”14
During the Republican exile between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, the neocons pushed for the overthrow of the Iraqi regime using covert action and armed exiles backed by American airpower.15 Now back in power, they pressed for using U.S. military muscle to establish safe havens in which free-Iraq forces could muster to overthrow the Iraqi government.
President Bush’s national security adviser, Condi Rice, had a close rapport with the president, having served to educate the neophyte candidate on foreign policy. A bright policy wonk and Russia expert, she was more than just an adviser, becoming a close friend to the president and First Lady. Her frequent contact with them gave her both the insight and access needed for an effective national security adviser. But the president used her as his personal foreign policy adviser and not as the heavy hand to coordinate and implement his policy goals.16 Instead, Rice worked to build consensus decisions within the National Security Council. When senior officials differed, rather than raising these differences to the president for his decision, Rice sent it back to senior officials for them to try and hash out the issue once again. On contentious policy issues, endless discussions never led to a decision on which course to take. This made for a feeble national security adviser and a dysfunctional national security process.
George W. Bush was chiefly responsible for this inertia. By his own admission, the swaggering
Texan was not introspective. He showed little interest in second-guessing his policy decrees.17 Bush fashioned himself as a decisive captain and titled his memoirs Decision Points, in which he discusses a series of case studies, all of which show the self-described “decider” confidently making the important decisions of his presidency, guided by his religious faith and the righteousness of the cause. In actuality, Bush avoided making stark choices. Detractors and admirers alike who worked in the White House agreed that the president wanted his subordinates to form a consensus on foreign policy and then present the decider with a single course of action. The problem with this managerial style occurred when his subordinates could not come to an agreement. In other administrations, such as that of President Reagan, the national security adviser simply forwarded both views with a cover sheet on which the president would check either choice A or B, sign it, and everyone knew, unequivocally, how the commander in chief had ruled. “This never happened in the Bush administration,” lamented a midlevel NSC official. Instead, the president ordered his national security adviser back to hash out the issue again, in spite of the fact that it would never have been brought to the Oval Office had his advisers been able to form a collective decision.18
On June 1, 2001, Condi Rice chaired a meeting with Rumsfeld, Powell, and Cheney on Iraq. The Pentagon urged quick action, and was supported by the equally hawkish vice president. They argued that time was not on Washington’s side. Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN inspectors three years earlier and, unchecked, “Saddam could possess nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction,” a Defense Department point paper warned.19