by David Crist
“The NIE didn’t just undermine diplomacy,” Bush wrote. “It also tied my hands on the military side.”41 Talk of military strikes against Iran’s facilities ended within the administration.
Iran answered with more centrifuges and expanded enrichment. In April 2008, President Ahmadinejad announced during a visit to Iran’s main enrichment complex at Natanz that it had started installing six thousand centrifuges at the site, twice the number currently spinning uranium. Iran continued to proclaim the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. It stressed a fatwa against nuclear weapons issued by the supreme leader in 2005 and called for a nuclear-free Middle East. “We are willing to negotiate over controls, inspections, and international guarantees,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, but he viewed it as his country’s right under the nonproliferation treaty to enrich uranium, and any effort to halt that impinged on its right to nuclear energy.
As the Bush administration neared its end, it tried a last, weak push to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran. The six powers had offered a “freeze-for-freeze,” with Iran agreeing not to expand its program in return for no additional sanctions, and included a package of new economic and political incentives in return for halting enrichment of uranium. The British had asked the United States to send an American diplomat to Tehran when they presented the latest offer to Iran, but the Americans balked.42 Instead, on a Saturday in July 2008, William Burns, who had recently replaced Nicholas Burns (no relationship) as the undersecretary of state for political affairs, walked in during the ongoing talks at Geneva’s city hall between Iran and the six nations that had been haggling with Iran for more than three years. While any meeting with the Americans and Iranians at the same table became a public spectacle, Burns never spoke privately with his Iranian counterpart. The U.S. delegation made it known that his presence was a onetime affair designed to show support for the talks and reiterated that further talks would be based upon the precondition that Iran stop uranium enrichment. Iran again rejected the precondition.
In the end, the United States failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. But the administration had taken long strides down the sanctions road, and these would bite deep into Iran over time. While the Bush administration’s second term appeared more unified on Iran, in the end disagreements again plagued a coherent policy. Rice’s views on a dual track of sanctions and diplomacy prevailed because of her personal relationship with the president and drowned out those calling for shunning Iran. These internal squabbles undermined a vibrant policy. Offering the stark contrast of freedom versus totalitarianism had worked well in undermining popular support for the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Rice and Bush set out a similar program designed to undermine the Iranian government through open information. But this contrasted with the hard-liners who desired to isolate Iran. They worried that allowing more Iranian students to come to the United States invited dangerous technology transfers and Iranian spies inside the United States. These attitudes undermined the basic intent of the freedom agenda. By refusing to talk to Iran, the United States operated blindly. American diplomats and intelligence analysts had minimal insight into the opinions of the Iranian people or its government and largely depended on third parties for information and insight into the country. In the end, American policy rested on prejudice and supposition more than fact.
But the one area where the facts proved incontrovertible and all the parties in the U.S. government should have agreed was Iraq. The American invasion opened the door for Iranian influence, and Iran moved to consolidate its power. While a nervous Iran had been willing to make an accommodation to the United States in 2003, by the second Bush term Iran no longer felt the need. Instead, the Revolutionary Guard decided to punish the power of “global arrogance.” While the United States debated Iran’s nuclear program, the secretive Quds Force began a quasi-war with the Americans. For the first time since the tanker wars and Operation Earnest Will, the two nations squared off in a low-level war as CENTCOM forged a new plan to combat Iran. The twilight war moved toward darkness.
Twenty-Six
A QUASI-WAR
As Washington prepared for Christmas 2006, President Bush and Vice President Cheney traveled by motorcade the short distance over to the Pentagon. After the normal staged handshakes with some service personnel in the hallway, the two men sat down with the six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff around the long table in a conference room that served as the temporary Tank, as long-awaited Pentagon renovations forced the men out of their usual haunts on the outer E ring. Stephen Hadley and Donald Rumsfeld joined them, as did the latter’s designated successor, a levelheaded, sometimes ruthless, former CIA analyst and seasoned government official Robert Gates.
The affable chairman, Peter Pace, presented the president with a five-page document of PowerPoint slides titled “Joint Chiefs of Staff Military Advice—Predecisional—Close Hold.” The briefing addressed a new military plan to win in Iraq. Tall and good looking, Pace had served six years in the top two positions within the military, where he used the talents that had earned him the nickname among his Annapolis classmates of “Perfect Peter” to get along with the prickly secretary of defense. He offered his advice only in private and had raised no discernable objections to the strategy toward Iran or in Iraq, even as the latter derailed under the pressure of religious strife and a growing insurgency.
Iraq had dominated much of these men’s attention that fall. In the aftermath of the bombing of an important Shia shrine by Iraqi al-Qaeda, the security situation had deteriorated dramatically, and despite Rumsfeld’s public claims to the contrary, it had descended into a full-scale religious civil war. The first line on the briefing summed up the situation as the chiefs viewed it: “We are not losing, but we are not yet winning—time is not on our side.” Pace added his own comments to this: “at home, in the region, and in Iraq.”
The normally reticent decider, President George W. Bush, understood the ramifications of failure, and for one of the first times, he fully engaged in the policy discussions, probing his divided advisers for answers. Army general David Petraeus, had requested additional troops for a surge that would support a new counterinsurgency strategy to win the war, yet the four-star generals in Washington, Tampa, and Baghdad all opposed the idea. Pace had asked for the meeting in the Tank for the service chiefs to air their views, but the senior officers and generals offered no new ideas—just an expansion of the current plan to increase training of the Iraqi army and put it in the lead. It was more a “crisis in perception, confidence, not violence,” they said, and they recommended merely expanding the advisory effort to train the Iraqi army faster. “Now is not the time to surge U.S. combat forces, Mr. President,” said U.S. Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker, who had been plucked out of retirement by Rumsfeld.1
“What’s new?” Bush said. “We are doing much of this already. I have deep anxiety about Baghdad’s security.” The problem was that the Iraqi train was coming off the rails due to a lack of security, primarily in the Iraqi capital, and the president knew it.
Toward the end of the meeting, the talks turned to Iran’s role in fomenting the violence. As the American problems mounted, Iran grew more emboldened. That year, Iran had dramatically increased its support for Shia militias and provided a new, sophisticated type of improvised explosive device that had killed 140 coalition soldiers.
“We are working on an execute order to neutralize their networks,” Pace said. This would be part of an overarching military plan to counter Iran that included enhancing the Gulf Arab defense capabilities to respond to Iranian aggression. CENTCOM proposed two courses of action to deal with Iranians inside Iraq. The first was a nonlethal option to harass and expose their operatives; the second would be a high-end option: to immediately begin arresting Iranian agents inside Iraq and targeting their surrogate forces in the Middle East. The chiefs cautioned against taking action that might escalate the crisis and highlighted the risks of taking direct action without Iraqi prime ministe
r Nouri al-Maliki’s approval, but some in the room wanted decisive action. As one participant wrote in his notes: “Kill Iranians in Iraq.”
In the boldest decision of his presidency, Bush overruled the generals, including Pace, and in January 2007 authorized sending in the de facto American reserve of five brigades—thirty thousand troops—to Iraq. And just two days after the meeting in the Tank, the president also gave the go-ahead to take military action against Iran. Amid the drama of the surge debate on Iraq, the United States and Iran again appeared on a collision course to war.
The appointment in mid-2003 of a new CENTCOM commander, General John Abizaid, portended a more informed approach to the Middle East by the U.S. military. He relieved Tommy Franks in an unprecedentedly garish ceremony at an indoor sports stadium in downtown Tampa. Franks had declined a request by the chairman to extend for an extra year to provide continuity on the war in Iraq in order to rest and pursue a lucrative book deal. A Lebanese American, fluent in Arabic, Abizaid had served as the senior plans officer for the chairman at the outset of the invasion of Iraq. In private discussions leading up to the U.S. invasion, Abizaid had cautioned that diminishing Iraqi power might provide an opening for Iran, much in the same vein as the United States worried about removing Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm in 1991. During the war, Abizaid served as the forward deputy commander of CENTCOM, where he was one of the few who cautioned against allowing the unchecked looting and the open support for some of the Shia militias.
From the outset, Abizaid focused on Iran. He worried that the United States lacked a strategic plan for the Middle East, with Washington entirely focused on the war in Iraq. “We cannot lose sight of the growing role Iran is playing across the region,” he wrote to Rumsfeld shortly after taking over CENTCOM.
Abizaid worried about an unintended conflict with Iran. On June 21, 2006, a U.S. Navy P-3 aircraft harassed an Iranian submarine by dropping sonar buoys around it, and closed provocatively close again three days later. Tehran sent a diplomatic note to the United States protesting the incident. Since 2001, the United States had exchanged forty such démarches with Iran, each protesting the other country’s actions, and while this seemed innocuous, if the Iranians mistook sonar buoys for bombs, there would be a shooting war in the Persian Gulf.
A more disturbing incident occurred toward the end of Abizaid’s tenure. The water boundary between Iran and Iraq—haggled over in 1975—was a straight line from the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab. Over the years, the shifting sands had moved the boundary, and Iran and the coalition disagreed on the exact location of the international boundary. Since 2003, the Revolutionary Guard had increased its presence in the area, forming a new 3rd Naval District and establishing a surveillance post on a massive crane, leaning and heavily damaged from the Iran-Iraq War. U.S. sailors called it the sunken crane. On March 23, 2007, the HMS Cornwall dispatched a Royal Marines and sailor boarding party to search a suspected smuggler ship located near the disputed maritime border.
Alerted by the sunken crane, two Revolutionary Guard speedboats came across the waters. The senior Iranian commander was Captain Abol-Ghassem Amangah. Aggressive and ambitious, he quickly realized that the water was too shallow for the HMS Cornwall to come within ten miles. As his boats approached, most of the British personnel were searching the ship, leaving only a couple of sailors in the two Zodiacs. While the conversation was cordial at first, Amangah quickly accused the British of entering Iranian waters. Without any orders from his headquarters, the guard officer ordered his men to train their weapons on the British, and told the British to surrender and follow him to his base. After trying in vain to get support from their superiors and fearing loss of life, the Royal Navy lieutenant in charge ordered his detachment to surrender. The Iranians stepped into the British boats and took over the controls, driving them back to Amangah’s base in Iran.
The commander of Fifth Fleet, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, learned of the incident while the Iranians were taking the British back to their base. An experienced surface warfare officer with multiple tours in the Gulf, he had commanded the last Earnest Will convoy just as the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. He dispatched surveillance assets to monitor the British captives and had his staff begin to develop some ideas about using force to get them back. But his British deputy waved him off. Her Majesty’s government did not want to escalate the situation. So Cosgriff watched as the Iranian military flew the fourteen men and one woman to Tehran.2
The incident surprised Tehran as much as London. Amangah had had no orders to do what he did, but his seniors in the Revolutionary Guard liked that kind of initiative. President Ahmadinejad quickly took advantage of the gift. The British prisoners became a propaganda coup for the Iranian government, which paraded them before news cameras. After twelve days, Ahmadinejad ordered them released, sending them back in Iranian-made suits and carrying a bag of presents courtesy of the Islamic Republic. Captain Amangah was handsomely rewarded for his actions. President Ahmadinejad awarded him a medal, and he took command of a major Revolutionary Guard force, jumping over a number of more senior officers.
Abizaid and the Americans took notice. In keeping with Napoléon’s maxim that “every soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his pack,” the incident provided a clear path to glory in the Revolutionary Guard. It would only serve to inspire more rogue and aggressive actions by the guard, Abizaid believed. “It provided every guard officer a model for how to get promoted,” said one U.S. admiral.
The CENTCOM commander did not share all of the administration’s views of Iran. He argued for a broader strategy to undercut Iran across the Middle East. He pressed for a new emphasis on Israeli-Palestinian peace to help improve America’s position in the Middle East and suggested the United States could entice away Iran’s only ally, Syria. After the overthrow of Saddam and before the insurgency took root, the United States held powerful bargaining power compared with a nervous al-Assad. It had a chance to cut a deal to curtail Syrian support for Hezbollah.
The army general repeatedly called for a meeting with the Iranians. “I did not want to talk to them because I wanted them to be our friends,” he said after he retired. “I wanted to talk to them to avoid miscalculations that so often lead to conflict, much like the same way we had during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.” He supported Richard Armitage in providing aid to the Iranians following the December 2003 Bam earthquake in hopes that the interaction between the American and Iranian soldiers and airmen might lead to a dialogue between the two militaries. General Abizaid proposed including Iranian officers in the International Military Education and Training programs sponsored by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. These training programs emphasized democratic values and had been used for decades to influence military students on the virtues of the American way of life. Including Iranian officers, Abizaid surmised, would help break down the distrust of the United States. He also suggested cooperation on areas of mutual concern. Iran had a terrible heroin problem, with junkies littering Iranian parks high on cheap Afghan poppies. He suggested offering Iran nonlethal aid to control drug smugglers coming in from Afghanistan.3
These ideas did not sit well with the White House. Both the vice president’s staff and Abrams opposed any dialogue with Iran, with Abrams seeing accommodation with Syria as naive.4 Any assistance would only give legitimacy to the regime, and providing military training or assistance would only give them “unmatched” insight into U.S. military capabilities. Rumsfeld expressed concern about any military exchange programs, and none of Abizaid’s Iranian openings ever got beyond point papers and discussions.
Abizaid and the administration did agree on the growing danger of Iran’s ballistic missiles. Abizaid’s concerns found support in the U.S. government. At the State Department, supporting CENTCOM’s fell to another newly arrived appointee, John Hillen. With a goatee and short-cropped hair, the extroverted assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs had solid credentials both in foreign policy and in
the military. He had received a bronze star during the epic tank battle of “73 Easting” with the Iraqi Republican Guard during Desert Storm. He then left the army and went on to earn his doctorate in international relations at Oxford University. Hillen proposed a new policy venture called the Gulf Security Dialogue. With the help of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Hillen wanted to get the Gulf Arabs engaged in working together in a common defense against Iran. He had no hope for a new Persian Gulf version of NATO, but just wanted to push forward in areas where they should be able to work together, such as missile defense.
Hillen worked closely with Peter Rodman at the Pentagon, and the two agreed on the policy framework underpinning the dialogue, which included deterring Iran, countering terrorism, and providing stability in the Middle East. The administration used this framework as a basis to significantly increase arms sales to the Gulf Arabs.
In May 2006, Hillen and Ryan Henry from the Pentagon traveled to all the Gulf countries to hawk the Gulf Security Dialogue and explore means of improving defense cooperation. Fear of Iran resonated in the Gulf. Peter Rodman even remarked that Arab-Israeli peace, which had always been a major topic of discussions, became a footnote. Hillen offered to facilitate greater cooperation with CENTCOM and among the other states. The United States offered to sell advanced Patriot missiles, new fighter aircraft, radar that could track missiles across the region, and even the brand-new Littoral Combat ship to the Gulf Arabs. Working through the U.S. military, they would integrate all this into a Persian Gulf–wide air defense system.