by David Crist
In the heat of the Washington summer, the Bush inner circle met twice more to examine regime change in Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated for targeted or smart sanctions, and not military action, to keep Saddam Hussein in his box. The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, agreed. The U.S. military’s air campaign had reduced the Iraqi military to a hollow shell—a brutal dictatorship but no threat to its neighbors, he argued. Rice offered no strong opinions either for or against the Pentagon’s recommendations. But Shelton grew concerned that those advocating military action had begun to sway others in the interagency debate.
The one person in the administration fixated on Iran, perhaps more so than Iraq, was John Bolton, the new undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. With his shock of graying hair and a white walrus mustache, Bolton advocated a muscular foreign policy. Unlike the idealism of Wolfowitz, Bolton’s views stemmed from the need for unilateral American action and hawkish Middle East views similar to those of Israel’s Ariel Sharon. This placed him at odds with the more temperate Powell and Armitage running the State Department. But Powell accepted Bolton in part to deflect criticism by the more hawkish people in the administration. Armitage suspected he had been placed deliberately by the vice president to keep an eye on the powerful top diplomat, and referred to Bolton as one of the “bats.” “When the day ended and the sun went down, they left their caves and flew back to report to the White House,” Armitage said.
Bolton viewed Iran as a serious threat. Iran’s unrelenting nuclear program presented the gravest of challenges, and he sympathized with the Israeli worries of the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. In his portfolio of arms control, he pushed the administration to pressure Russia to halt its aid to Iran’s nuclear and missile program, especially completing the twenty-year-old fledgling reactor at Bushehr.20
George Bush showed little interest in either Iraq or Iran. During the transition, Newbold briefed President-elect Bush on the current air operations over Iraq enforcing the no-fly zones. Bush asked only one question: how much money the Iraqi no-fly zones operation cost. Iran did not even come up in conversation.21 As the heat of summer began to wane, the decider had yet to engage on Iraq. How he would have finally come down between smart sanctions or action remains speculative and would have been the great foreign policy debate of his first term. A terrorist attack by al-Qaeda ended the debate.
September 11, 2001, was a typical late summer day in Washington. A brilliant sunny blue sky superimposed itself over the white monuments and imposing granite buildings built with socialist grandeur during the 1920s. With Labor Day over and the kids back at school, hordes of government workers clogged the Beltway and the other highways running into Washington. While Cheney and Rumsfeld worked in their respective offices on opposite sides of the Potomac River, much of the government’s senior leadership was scattered across the globe: the president in Florida, Hugh Shelton on his way to Hungary, other senior defense officials scattered about Russia and Europe.
That morning, nineteen Middle Eastern men boarded four jets in Boston, Washington, and Newark. Air traffic controllers soon noticed someone had turned off the transponder of American Airlines Flight 11, a 767 bound from Boston to the West Coast. The aircraft did an abrupt course change, turning back east. At the controls was Muhammad Atta, the ringleader of the band of Muslim anarchists and supporters of the Saudi zealot Osama bin Laden. Flying fast and low across the Manhattan skyline and chanting “Allahu akbar”—God is great—Atta flew the large passenger jet straight into the side of one of the two tallest buildings in the world and a symbol of American capitalism.
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, military officers monitoring the world hot spots in the dingy cubicle labyrinth of the highly secure National Military Command Center learned of it from the television news. The NMCC was not the stuff of Hollywood. Rather than an impressive war room with high-tech electronic maps as described by fanciful writers, in reality it resembled more of an unkempt maze. A building within a building, it sat in the center of the Pentagon, easily accessible to the offices of the chairman and the secretary of defense, who could walk down the hall and enter from any number of guarded posts. At its heart was the current operations section. Here a host of officers toiled, monitoring crises around the globe in a large, narrow, open room that meandered back around large square pilings that supported the weight of the building. Off this room was a small office where a brigadier general sat twenty-four hours a day as the senior watch officer, and a small conference room, which served as the nerve center during a crisis, replete with phones arrayed around a large rectangular table and a video screen on the far wall. This was the station of the chairman, and frequently the secretary, during a crisis. Around corners and through other doors was the alert center, poised to launch America’s nuclear arsenal, and a room housing the communications link with Moscow, installed shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis to allow instant messages between the two countries.
At first, officers monitoring the plane crash in New York believed it might have been a civilian plane; a few even recalled the bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building during the Second World War. A call to the Federal Aviation Administration, however, dispelled this theory.
The Pentagon too was a target. Skimming over Arlington National Cemetery, another hijacked aircraft clipped a lamppost of a navy exchange gas station before its wing clipped a generator and it tumbled into the colossal five-story building. The jet’s momentum carried it through three of the building’s five expansive rings, finally depositing part of its landing gear in the center of an interior access road.
“There was a heat wave like haze extending from the back of the room up to the ceiling,” described a defense civilian, Christine Morrison. “Before I could register or complete that thought, this force hit the room, instantly turning the office into an inferno hell. Everything was falling, flying, and on fire, and there was no escaping it.”22
In a small conference room next to the desk of the senior watch officer at the NMCC, Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs vice chairman General Richard Myers monitored the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and prepared for whatever else might come. It was a stifling environment; two dozen men crammed into the small conference room. Designed to be self-contained in the event of a nuclear war, the NMCC had been sealed shut, closing the two sets of airtight doors to prevent smoke from entering the sensitive area. Within a couple of hours the oxygen ran short and the doors were reopened until the choking smoke forced them closed again.
With the smoke thick in the corridors of the Pentagon, at two forty p.m. Rumsfeld met with Stephen Cambone, deputy to the undersecretary of defense for planning, Douglas Feith. They discussed what information they had about who had been behind the attack, and the secretary brainstormed about the military response. Iraq immediately came out of Rumsfeld’s mouth. Cambone jotted in his notebook, “Hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at same time—not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].”23
“The events of September 11 make it clear that we can simply no longer tolerate networks of state support for terrorism—particularly not those which are pursuing weapons of mass destruction—whether or not they were involved in this tragedy,” Wolfowitz wrote in one of a series of memos to Rumsfeld immediately after the attack. “If there is even a 10% chance that Saddam Hussein was behind Tuesday’s horrors, a maximum priority has to be put on eliminating that threat.”24
Not surprisingly, Wolfowitz wanted to start with Iraq. Iraq was assumed to have weapons of mass destruction and had shown a willingness to use them. He now couched it as a key component in the new global war on terrorism. “We can’t find all the snakes in the swamp…unless we drain the swamp,” he wrote to Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz raised doubts about al-Qaeda’s being responsible. He went so far as to suggest to the defense secretary that another country might have staged the attack to look as though 9/11 had been carried out by Osama bin Laden. “One could also imag
ine why someone would want it to appear that way even if they were, for example, Iraqis or Iranians or Syrians.”25
A few days after the terrorist attack, Newbold walked into Feith’s office with a rough plan to strike al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Feith looked disdainfully at the marine general. “What are you planning that for?” he said. “Iraq is the target.”26
Newbold was aghast. “Iraq had not attacked the United States.” In 2002, Newbold retired in protest. Before leaving the Pentagon, he handed the chairman a scathing letter outlining the folly of the coming war with Iraq.
The weekend following the 9/11 attacks, Bush convened his foreign policy team at Camp David in Maryland. The discussions centered on the coming war in Afghanistan and how the United States could avoid repeating the errors of earlier empires. Wolfowitz made a pitch for attacking Iraq rather than Afghanistan.27 Going after al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was more akin to a police action, explained Doug Feith, reflecting the views of many of the civilian appointees at the Pentagon. By striking at Iraq, you addressed the larger problem of state sponsors of terrorism, and that was “thinking strategically.”28 Bush rejected the argument, but Wolfowitz had laid down the marker for what would follow Afghanistan.
Douglas Feith was charged with developing defense policy for Secretary Rumsfeld. Thin with thick black hair, he was viewed by many officers as an arrogant ideologue. But Feith had a lawyerly precision. He drove subordinates crazy, proofreading their reports and criticizing comma placement even with time-sensitive briefings, but he proved adept at fleshing out Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s ideas.
The defense secretary wanted to put the “global” in the war on terrorism. He looked for a way of demonstrating unilateral American action, the ability to strike anywhere in the world to root out America’s enemies. He wanted an aggressive, offensive military strategy. Richard Perle, the head of the influential Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel for the secretary, agreed. He advocated a series of successive campaigns, including Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The U.S. military would defeat one, withdraw quickly to avoid a lengthy occupation that would drain public support and resources, and then swiftly move to attack the next country. This appealed to Rumsfeld.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Feith and Joint Chiefs vice chairman General Peter Pace developed a matrix of the global terrorist network as part of regular meetings on building a “global war on terrorism” campaign. One objective behind their efforts was to ensure that the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists did not occur. While some countries linked to terrorists, such as Syria and Libya, might be coerced into giving up their weapons, others, such as Iraq, Feith and Pace believed, were beyond compelling with diplomatic or economic tools. “For over ten years, every reasonable means had been tried short of military force against Saddam Hussein,” said Feith. Iran fell into a different category, Feith believed. “The United States had not tried to pressure the Iranians in a meaningful way using economic and political tools. Military force was not a serious alternative in 2001 and 2002.”29
American intelligence aided the design by playing a double game on linkage between 9/11 and state sponsors of terrorism. On October 18, CIA Director George Tenet passed a report to Rumsfeld speculating as to which countries might have a motive to conduct terrorist attacks against the United States, focusing on Libya, Iran, and Iraq. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seized on this think piece as additional ammunition in their crusade to attack Iraq. When CIA analysts continued to come up short in proving this nexus, the Defense Department established the Office of Special Plans under Feith’s oversight. Headed by a taciturn policy insider, Abe Shulsky, its mission was to look for links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the intelligence community had missed. The fact that Shulsky’s group did not find the link either did not dissuade the Bush Defense Department. An October 21, 2001, memo edited by senior defense officials Peter Rodman, Doug Feith, and Donald Rumsfeld summed up their views succinctly: “The absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.”
The hijackers who plowed their planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, caused Bush administration policy to congeal as ideology merged with power politics. Both Armitage and Powell quickly fell in line. Vice President Dick Cheney believed in power politics and executive authority. He fixated on the weapons of mass destruction argument. “If a terrorist group acquired a nuclear or chemical device,” he told a staffer, “they would certainly use it and create far greater damage than on September 11.” Believing that a higher power had placed him as president during this critical moment in history, George Bush embraced Wolfowitz’s goals for the war. He viewed the coming war against terrorism with a Wilsonian grandeur. The terrorist attacks now presented the opportunity to remake the Middle East based upon American values of the rights of individuals and not the whim of oligarchy.
Atrocity” is how Tehran’s Iran News described the slaughter. Some Iranian officials believed that the United States had created a1-Qaeda as a tool against the Islamic Republic. Conspiratorial-minded officials remained skeptical that such an operation could be conducted without the American government’s knowledge. But the magnitude of the attack as well as the culprits stunned the Iranian government and its populace.30 “My deep sympathy goes out to the American nation,” said President Mohammad Khatami. “Terrorism is condemned and the world public should identify its roots and its dimensions and should take fundamental steps to eliminate it.” Mourners held a spontaneous candlelight vigil as thousands of people took to the streets of north Tehran chanting, “Death to terrorists.” Iranian soccer fans observed a minute of silence before a match with Bahrain. Even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemned the attacks: “Mass killing is wrong, whether it’s in Hiroshima, Bosnia, New York, or Washington.”31 During Friday prayers at Qom, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini said that the Iranian people grieved with the relatives of those killed, and the traditional slogan “Death to America” was absent from the crowds’ mantras.32
Tehran had mixed emotions about the new administration. President Khatami desperately wanted to improve Iran’s economy. He needed this for political survival, but also to show detractors within the government the tangible benefits from better relations with the West.33 Bush’s family ties to the oil industry appeared to be a good omen. Rafsanjani believed that pressure from American oil companies might lead to a lifting of the sanctions. Although his father’s assignment as CIA director caused some unease within the Iranian government, many within the Iranian business community hoped the Republicans would be more sympathetic to lifting the sanctions in order to make money for American companies.
If the terrorist attack changed the focus of the U.S. government, it portended a change regarding Iran too. The traditional American antagonist suddenly loomed as a potential ally. “The Iranians seemed shocked by the scale of the attack,” said Richard Armitage. Iran showed no enthusiasm for al-Qaeda or its Sunni-based objectives.
The perpetrators of 9/11 were harbored by a fiercely anti-Shia, anti-Iranian Afghan tribal alliance, the Taliban. Iran supported the main opposition group, the Northern Alliance, with close ties to the legendary Afghan resistance fighter who opposed both the Soviets and the Taliban, Ahmad Massoud. In 1998, Iran threatened to invade Afghanistan following the killing of eight Iranian diplomats by Taliban forces when they stormed the city of Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan. As a result, Iran increased its support for the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban forces. In the first half of 1999 alone, thirty-three cargo planes with 380 metric tons of small arms, ammo, and fuel arrived from the eastern Iranian air base of Mashhad to Tajikistan for transport to the Northern Alliance.
Since the late 1990s, the United Nations had sponsored meetings in Geneva with Afghanistan’s neighbors plus the United States and others with an interest in Central Asia to resolve the myriad problems caused by the Afghan civil war and the Taliban’s victory. Iran housed two million Afghan refugees. Afghan opi
um made its way through Iran’s porous border bound for Iranian cities as well as the streets of Europe. The seventh floor of the Department of State paid little attention to these discussions, which fell under the auspices of the department’s bureau that handled India and Pakistan rather than the Middle East. But the venue placed American and Iranian diplomats in the same room, and after September 11 the State Department saw this informal venue as a means of reaching out to Iran to leverage its access and cooperation with the Northern Alliance in the forthcoming American attack on the Taliban.
“The Iranians had the contacts to help us in Afghanistan, and appeared to be willing to use their influence in a constructive way,” said Flynt Leverett, a CIA officer serving as the director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.34
Secretary Powell dispatched Ryan Crocker to meet with the Iranians in Geneva. As cover, the Italians and Germany were included to avoid the appearance of direct talks. But in fact, it would be the first face-to-face discussions between the two nations since 1986, during the arms-for-hostages debacle of the Reagan administration.
Discreet and experienced, and fluent in both Arabic and Farsi, Crocker served in some of the most demanding posts of the Middle East. In April 1983, he suffered superficial injuries from flying glass when an Iranian surrogate detonated a car packed with explosives in front of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. He headed the State Department’s Iraq task force following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, before returning to Lebanon in 1990 as the ambassador. This would be the first of six ambassadorial appointments in the region, including Iraq in 2007 during the height of the violence following the U.S. invasion and Afghanistan during the surge there under President Obama. Crocker knew something about Iran. His first posting as a Foreign Service officer in 1972 was to the American consulate at Khorramshahr in southwestern Iran. A captive of the student protests on American university campuses at the time, Crocker arrived convinced that a leftist revolution would send the shah’s reactionary, authoritarian regime to the “dustbin of history.” He spent two years traveling the countryside, talking to students and labor organizers trying to prove this thesis. “I could not have identified a politicized mullah if I tripped over one. I had no idea of what Khomeini was writing in Najaf,” Crocker recalled, lamenting his own naïveté. With the shah’s overthrow, Crocker realized the inherent problem of looking at another society through one’s own lens. “I learned the important lesson that you need to check your intellectual baggage at the door when you arrive in someone else’s complex society, and Iran is an incredibly complex country.”