The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  Obama and his aides in turn jumped on Clinton’s position, seeing it as a vehicle to clearly differentiate him from the senator and former First Lady and to feed off the post–Iraq War sentiment. Though he had spent just two years in the Senate, Obama understood that the growing tensions with Iran could define his presidency and that he needed to stake out his position early on. “He decided that instead of backing off it, we should double down on it and say, ‘No. This is actually the core contrast,’ ” said Ben Rhodes, who served as a close campaign aide to Obama in 2008. “The same mind-set that led people to follow a herd momentum into a conflict with Iraq was not being tested on Iran.”

  Clinton’s position on Iran marked her as perhaps the most hawkish on the issue among the Democratic Party’s leadership. She embraced the need for military force if Tehran didn’t roll back its nuclear program, something Obama was reluctant to do. Differences on Iran would affect their working relationship going forward. Jewish voters and pro-Israel lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who deeply opposed any engagement with Iran, embraced her. Clinton’s position also dampened some criticism of her from the right. Many Republicans, who hated her social platforms, suddenly viewed her as among the most pragmatic of the Democrats seeking to succeed George W. Bush. This sentiment held throughout Obama’s first term, when Clinton served as his secretary of state. It would also split the pro-Israel community in the Democratic Party and Washington’s foreign policy establishment.

  McCain’s criticism of Obama’s Iran stance was even sharper. The Arizona Republican argued that, counter to Obama’s semantics, every American president from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush had in fact already sought to engage Tehran. The results had been either tragedies, such as the 1979 American hostage crisis and Iran-Contra, or failures, such as the ambassador-level talks in Baghdad in 2007 that had been aimed at reducing the sectarian violence in Iraq but which, the Pentagon concluded, did nothing to reduce Tehran’s training of Shiite militias or its shipments of IEDs and other munitions into Iraq.

  McCain charged that Obama was set to run straight into Iran’s tried-and-trusted practice of engaging Western countries but then dragging them into months of tedious negotiations without, in the end, giving any ground. McCain argued this dynamic had afflicted the French, German, and British diplomats who met with Iranian nuclear officials for five straight years, without the involvement of the Bush administration, in the early 2000s. The talks achieved a short-term freeze of Iran’s nuclear work, but then Tehran accelerated its activities under President Ahmadinejad. McCain argued that Barack Obama was going to play right into this Iranian strategy if he won the White House, providing Tehran with months, if not years, of political cover to push ahead with its nuclear and military programs.

  “Senator Obama wants to sit down, without any precondition, across the table and negotiate with this individual,” McCain said of Ahmadinejad during a July campaign stop in Louisiana. “My friends, that’s not right and that’s naive and that shows a lack of experience and a lack of judgment.”

  Obama, however, was unbowed, as his march to the White House appeared certain. Even before the election, members of his campaign team met with Syrian leaders, including President Assad, to notify them of the new American approach Obama would take once in office. Among these envoys were Jewish advisors, such as the Princeton professor Daniel Kurtzer and the Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross. Obama personally telegraphed to many in Washington’s most hawkish organizations that he was going to engage the Islamic Republic, in effect warning them of a major policy shift. If Tehran responded with a “clenched fist,” he argued, Washington’s ability to gain international support to exert even more financial pressure on Iran down the road—or even take military action—would only be enhanced. Obama argued that international opposition to the Bush administration’s Mideast policies had undercut U.S. efforts to impose multilateral sanctions on Tehran—a point that had merit.

  In June 2008, Obama, along with McCain and Clinton, addressed Washington’s powerful pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), at its annual policy conference in Washington. Despite facing a potentially hostile audience, the young candidate sought to woo the Jewish voters at AIPAC to support his new position. “Our willingness to pursue diplomacy will make it easier to mobilize others to join our cause,” Obama told thousands of AIPAC members at Washington’s cavernous convention center, occasionally earning applause. Some in the audience said they were concerned about alienating the man most people believed would be the next president of the United States. “If Iran fails to change course when presented with this choice by the United States, it will be clear…that the Iranian regime is the author of its own isolation,” Obama told the AIPAC audience.

  Once in office, Obama quickly moved forward with his strategy, delivering the Persian New Year message to the Iranian people and sending letters to Khamenei. Within months of taking office, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his positions on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons globally. Iran was the central focus in this strategy. “What was interesting about Iran is that lots of things intersected: nonproliferation, Israel, the Middle East, and the Iraq War,” Rhodes said. “All of these different currents of American foreign policy converged in Iran in a way that made it not just a big issue in its own right, but a battleground in terms of American foreign policy.”

  —

  OBAMA HAD LITTLE TIME to pursue his outreach to Khamenei before the first major foreign policy crisis of his administration emerged. Just six months after Obama took office, Tehran held presidential elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was seeking a second four-year term. The politician had emerged as a star among the Islamic and developing nations after his 2005 election, due to his confrontational polices toward the West. His calls for Israel’s destruction even rallied many Arab populations behind the Persian leader’s rhetoric. And Ahmadinejad’s unbending position on Iran’s right to produce nuclear fuel was widely backed by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a Cold War–era coalition that was made up of countries from most of the developing world. White House officials believed the vote would provide a gauge as to whether Tehran might soften its stance toward the West on the nuclear question.

  Even before the Iranian elections, Obama’s outreach to Khamenei was facing skepticism from Israel, the Arab states, and even some members of the U.S. president’s own cabinet. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, channeling much of John McCain’s angst, pressed Obama to set a clear timeline for his diplomatic outreach to Iran. The Israeli leader argued that the diplomacy should not extend beyond the end of 2009, when the United States and Europe should start putting in place “crippling” new sanctions on Iran. (The U.S. Congress, with the support of pro-Israel lobbyists, was already drafting legislation on this front.) Netanyahu and his advisors particularly pushed for a formal oil embargo on Iran to dry up Tehran’s largest source of revenue, rather than pursuing the Treasury’s stepped-up approach. And they wanted the United States to be prepared to take military action to knock out Iran’s nuclear sites, possibly in collaboration with the Jewish state, if Tehran didn’t capitulate.

  The oil-rich monarchies in the Persian Gulf were also worried about Obama’s diplomacy. Countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia had grown rich in part because of the isolation of Iran after the Islamic revolution, becoming major energy and service providers after Tehran was forced to pull back from the global economy. The UAE port of Dubai supplied many of the shipping, financial, and trade services that Iranian companies might have performed if there had been no American sanctions. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain had all scored major arms deals as the United States beefed up its military capabilities, as well as those of its allies, along Iran’s borders and in the Persian Gulf. Many of these Arab leaders feared that Obama would cut off the gravy train of military and oil deals that had made Iran’s regional neighbors rich.

  In March 2009, Hillary Clinton—by
now Obama’s secretary of state—met with the UAE’s foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, on the sidelines of an international conference on the Palestinian territories, held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on the Red Sea. The placid azure waters of the resort town contrasted sharply with the contentious issues discussed inside its conference rooms. During this meeting, Sheikh Abdullah, an Emirati prince, pressed Clinton to keep his country briefed on any diplomatic overtures to Tehran and how this might impact the UAE and the other Gulf states, according to U.S. officials who took part in the meeting. The secretary of state and her husband had strong relations with the UAE going back to Bill Clinton’s White House years. The former president regularly gave paid speeches in the country. The Emiratis, like the Israelis, saw Hillary Clinton as a potential ally in an administration that might be hostile to their security interests.

  Clinton stressed to the British-schooled diplomat—who wasn’t yet forty and was known by the acronym ABZ—that she would keep his country up to date on any developments concerning Iran. But she also voiced a skepticism, shared by others inside Obama’s cabinet, about the prospects for success. “Our eyes are wide open” when it comes to Iran, Clinton told her Emirati counterpart. She said she was “doubtful Iran would respond” to the calls for international dialogue that President Obama was promoting, or that Tehran would scale back its nuclear program in any meaningful way.

  Clinton’s comments weren’t well received at the White House. Obama’s aides believed she was undermining a signature foreign policy initiative of the new U.S. president in the eyes of one of Washington’s closest Arab allies. White House officials always knew that policy differences with Clinton, going back to the campaign, risked undercutting Obama’s international objectives. But they still calculated that it was better to keep Clinton inside the tent than outside, where she could publicly criticize White House initiatives.

  The American diplomat who briefed reporters on Clinton’s meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh was quickly removed and sent to a new posting in Vienna. And Clinton’s advisors became increasingly cautious about briefing journalists on the secretary’s private meetings, worried about offending the White House. They didn’t want the bad blood from the campaign drifting into foreign policy.

  —

  AS IRAN’S JUNE 2009 elections grew closer, the Obama administration further toned down the anti-Iranian rhetoric that had defined the later years of the Bush administration. U.S. officials said they didn’t want to allow Khamenei or Ahmadinejad to make the United States an issue during the campaign, which could give political ammunition to Iran’s conservative and hard-line political players. The White House was intent on opening nuclear diplomacy but viewed any diplomacy with Tehran as frozen until its election cycle was completed. The Obama administration needed to know who they would be dealing with.

  In the months leading up to the vote, the State Department also rolled back some of the democracy-promotion initiatives that the Bush administration had championed to spur change in Tehran, such as funding to train Iranian journalists and opposition websites. Khamenei had publicly denounced these programs as attempts to stir a “color revolution” inside Iran, along the lines of those that had broken out in former Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine during the Bush administration. Obama’s advisors voiced skepticism that such programs even worked; furthermore, they didn’t see a need to antagonize Khamenei. The Obama administration, for example, cut funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, based in New Haven, Connecticut, which catalogued the abuses committed by the Islamic Republic dating back to its founding in 1979. The State Department denied Freedom House, the Washington-based organization focused on global human rights, $3 million in new grants for a Farsi website that sought to promote democracy.

  Critics of the Obama administration’s moves said it was coddling the Iranian regime in a bid to promote a deal on the nuclear program at any cost. “Because Iranians seem willing to take risks, we should be willing to provide them with help when requested,” said Jennifer Windsor, then executive director of Freedom House, after her organization’s funding request was declined in 2009. “The White House clearly didn’t want to rock the boat,” said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment. “They were fixated on the nuclear issue.”

  U.S. officials predicted an uneventful election in 2009 and believed none of the candidates opposing Ahmadinejad offered much hope for dramatic change. Mohsen Rezaei was a former Revolutionary Guard commander whom the Argentine government was seeking to arrest for his alleged role in orchestrating the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The other two main candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were also longtime supporters of the Iranian revolution. Mousavi had served as Iran’s prime minister in the 1980s, during which time he had been just as committed to pursuing Iran’s nuclear program as any other Iranian official, and Karroubi had twice been president of the Iranian parliament. Both men were creatures of the Islamic Republic; while opposed to Ahmadinejad, they didn’t want to fundamentally change the structure of Iran’s theocratic government or the power of the ayatollahs.

  American officials’ assumptions about the Iranian election meant the Obama administration was caught flat-footed when a wave of young, middle-class voters rallied that June behind Mousavi to protest Ahmadinejad and his hard-line supporters in the military and the supreme leader’s office. The campaign spurred a vigorous and heated debate between the two men on issues ranging from economics to Iran’s place in the world. Mousavi chastised Ahmadinejad for mismanaging Tehran’s finances and needlessly agitating the West through his threats against Israel and denial of the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad countered that Mousavi and Karroubi were representatives of Iran’s corrupt elite class and were denying Iran’s poor the fruits of the country’s oil wealth. In a nationally televised debate, Ahmadinejad took the rare step for an Iranian politician of attacking Mousavi’s wife, claiming she had fraudulently obtained her Ph.D.

  Support for Mousavi and Karroubi quickly cascaded into what became known as Iran’s Green Movement. It took its name from a green sash given to Mousavi by former president Khatami, the reform movement’s standard-bearer. Campaigners wore green shirts and scarves, or painted their faces green, to demonstrate their opposition to the regime. On Election Day, June 12, parts of Tehran were bathed in green as Iranians stood in long lines to cast their votes. The sheer size of the outpouring of support for Mousavi caused many in the White House and State Department to believe that Ahmadinejad would lose the election, though U.S. officials were skeptical that this political change would fundamentally change Iranian policy.

  Within hours of the voting booths closing, Iranian state television announced that Ahmadinejad had won the election, with 64 percent of the ballots cast. Mousavi’s office immediately cried foul, arguing it was impossible to call the election so quickly after voting ended. Opposition news sites claimed that Mousavi was well ahead in the election. But the Iranian state was adamant that the incumbent had won with a healthy majority. Election returns even showed that Ahmadinejad had won handily in Mousavi’s home province of East Azerbaijan, according to state media, prompting even more protests from the Green Movement.

  The seeds for a major conflict were sown in Tehran’s streets. Over the next two days, first tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of Iranians started taking to the streets to protest the results. Many started chanting “Where’s my vote?” in Farsi or carrying placards emblazoned with the same mantra. The large numbers of foreign media who had been allowed into Iran to report on the election were giving twenty-four-hour coverage to the political crisis and the state’s response. Iranian security forces responded by shutting down the Internet and confining the opposition candidates, Mousavi and Karroubi, as well as their families and staffs, to their homes. The government also started to expel foreign reporters.

  By the third day, as many as three million Iranians massed at the center of Tehran, a
ccording to media reports and opposition leaders. Their target was Azadi (Freedom) Square, a national monument that had served as the center for political protests in Tehran going back to before the shah. The Iranian security forces appeared incapable of suppressing the popular outrage about the vote. And for the first time in more than a decade, Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard seemed genuinely confused over how to respond to a political threat.

  But the Green Movement, despite a pro-Western position, found almost no support in the White House. In fact, it had thrown Barack Obama’s Iran policy into chaos. This White House wasn’t seeking to spread democracy in the Middle East, or to aggressively intervene in the affairs of other states. That was the doctrine of his predecessor. Obama’s mantra had been to wind down the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and cast the United States as a benign superpower, more interested in stability than in stoking democratic change. But all of a sudden the potential for major change emerged in Iran.

  President Obama held emergency meetings in the Oval Office as the numbers of people on the streets of Tehran swelled. Some administration officials argued the political revolt offered the United States the most important opportunity to promote democratic change in Tehran since 1979. At the very least, they said, the president should provide moral support for the protestors in a public statement. Over at the CIA, many also believed Washington should be doing more, such as enhancing the ability of the protestors to communicate with one another.