Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  • Without specific proof of a state taking hostile action against Americans (Libya—1986; Panama—1989; Afghanistan—2001), I am aware of no precedent for an American surprise attack against a sovereign state. We don’t do “Pearl Harbors.” Remember, President Reagan condemned the Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.

  • U.S. credibility on weapons of mass destruction is deeply suspect at home and abroad as a result of the Iraq legacy.

  • Israeli credibility is equally suspect, if not more so, in the Middle East, Europe, and maybe significant elements of the U.S. public. An act of war based principally on information provided by a third party is risky in the extreme. U.S. and Israeli interests are not always the same.

  • Any Israeli action will be seen as provocative, aimed at restoring their credibility and deterrent after their indecisive war with Hizballah [in 2006] and at shoring up a weak Israeli government. Israeli action could start a new war with Syria.

  • Any overt U.S. preemptive attack will cause a firestorm in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. Efforts to prove our case against Syria and North Korea, based on current available intelligence, will be unsuccessful or regarded with deep skepticism. U.S. military action will be seen as another rash act by a trigger-happy administration and could jeopardize our efforts in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and even with respect to missile defense in Europe. It would be seen as an effort to offset or distract from failures in Iraq.

  I told the group that I agreed the reactor should not be allowed to become active, but that we shouldn’t use it as a pretext to try to solve all our problems with Syria and placate Israel by hitting other targets, as Cheney had suggested. We should focus just on the reactor. I said that my preferred approach was to begin with diplomacy and reserve a military strike as the last resort. We should expose what the Syrians and North Koreans had done and focus on their violations of UN Security Council resolutions, the nonproliferation treaty, and more. At the United Nations, we should demand an immediate freeze on activity at the site and prompt inspection by representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China). We should be specific in saying that the United States would not allow the reactor to become operational but were turning to the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Commission to negotiate its destruction or permanent immobilization. I said this approach would require Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad either to accede or to prove that the facility was not what we said it was. If he did the latter, we would have used diplomacy to defuse a crisis; if, as we believed, he could not, then we could hold other governments’ feet to the fire—to put up or shut up on nonproliferation. As I would later tell the president, the option to delay operational status of the reactor by destroying the pump house (without a water supply, the reactor could not become operational) or by destroying the reactor itself would remain available to us throughout the diplomatic process. I concluded my remarks by saying, “I suspect no one in the world doubts this administration’s willingness to use force—but better to use it as a last resort than as a first step.” The next day, after a videoconference with Petraeus and our ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, the president pulled me aside and thanked me for my comments the evening before. He knew that Hadley, Rice, and I had discussed the “Tojo option”—referring to the Japanese prime minister who ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor—earlier that morning and simply said, “I’m not going to do that.”

  In the latter part of June, the debate intensified as the Israelis pressed us to act or to help them do so. The president was very pro-Israel—as was Cheney—and greatly admired Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and I was genuinely worried that Bush might just decide to let the Israelis take care of the reactor, forgoing any benefit of a sequenced approach and still leaving the United States with all the consequences of an attack. The administration’s senior leaders again staked out our positions in a meeting with the president on June 20. Cheney said we should hit the reactor immediately. Rice and I argued for a sequenced approach, beginning with diplomacy, but if that failed, we should take military action. General Pace supported that approach, saying it “gives you two chances to win.” Hadley observed that if we gave Assad too much time, he would organize the Arab world against us. I warned the president that Olmert was trying to force his hand.

  In early July, I communicated my views privately to the president. I told him that I had recently read various statements on the use of force by former defense secretaries Cap Weinberger and Don Rumsfeld, as well as by Colin Powell and Tony Blair, and that the only thing they all agreed on was that the use of force should be a last resort after all other measures have failed. I warned that a preemptive U.S. strike to destroy the reactor would lead to a “huge negative reaction” at home and abroad, risking a fatal weakening of remaining support for our efforts in Iraq, and that our coalition support there could evaporate. At the same time, if we let the Israelis take care of the problem, we would be regarded as complicit or a coconspirator and that this option also ran the risk of igniting a wider war in the Middle East and an unpredictable reaction in Iraq. I urged Bush to “tell Prime Minister Olmert that we will not allow the reactor to become operational but Israel must allow us to handle this in our own way. If they do not, they are on their own. We will not help them.” Further, I told the president he should tell Olmert very directly that if Israel went forward on its own militarily, he would be putting Israel’s entire relationship with the United States at risk.

  The president talked to Olmert on July 13, and while he declined to put the matter to him in the way I had urged, he did push the prime minister hard “to let us take care of this.” Olmert responded that the reactor represented an existential threat to Israel that it could not trust diplomacy to fix, even if the effort was led by the United States. In the course of the conversation, the president pledged not to expose knowledge of the reactor publicly without an Israeli okay.

  All the president’s national security team met the next morning, and the focus was on the Israelis. I was furious. I said that Olmert was asking for our help on the reactor but giving us only one option: to destroy it. If we didn’t do exactly what he wanted, Israel would act and we could do nothing about it. The United States was being held hostage to Israeli decision making. If there was a secret attack, all the focus would be on what the Israelis did, not what Syria and North Korea had done. I warned that if a wider war occurred after the attack, the United States would be blamed for not restraining the Israelis. “Our proposal [the first step being diplomatic/political] will emerge, making it look like the U.S. government subordinated its strategic interest to that of a weak Israeli government that already had screwed up one conflict in the region [against Hizballah in 2006] and that we were unwilling to confront or cross the Israelis.”

  I am, and always have been, strongly pro-Israel. As a moral and historic imperative, I believe in a secure, viable Jewish state with the right to defend itself. But our interests are not always identical, as I said earlier, and I’m not prepared to risk vital American strategic interests to accommodate the views of hard-line Israeli politicians. The president said that he was impressed with Olmert’s “steadfastness” and that he was unwilling to preempt the prime minister through a diplomatic initiative or even to put much pressure on him. Rice called me late that afternoon to express her deep unease over the situation. I said I might talk to the president again, and she said, “Use my name and count me in.”

  Hadley, Rice, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Cartwright, McConnell, Hayden, Bolten, and I met on Monday, the sixteenth. Bolten asked if the president was in the “right place” on the reactor issue and Israel. I was emphatic in saying no. I said he was putting U.S. strategic interests in Iraq, in the Middle East, and with our other allies in the hands of the Israelis and that he must insist to Olmert that he let the U.S. handle the Syrian problem. Olmert should be told that vital American interests were at
stake, as I had argued earlier, and if necessary, the problem would be dealt with, one way or another, before Bush left office. I repeated what I had said about Olmert boxing us in. Notwithstanding, it was clear that the vice president, Elliott Abrams of the NSC staff, my own colleague Eric Edelman, Condi’s counselor Eliot Cohen, and others were all for letting Israel do whatever it wanted. I’m inclined to think that the president himself was sympathetic to that view, perhaps mainly because he was sympathetic to Olmert’s view of the reactor as an existential threat to Israel, though I never heard him say so. By not confronting Olmert, Bush effectively came down on Cheney’s side. By not giving the Israelis a red light, he gave them a green one.

  On September 6, the Israelis attacked the reactor and destroyed it. They insisted on keeping the existence of the reactor secret, believing—correctly, as it turned out—that the lack of public exposure of the reactor and embarrassment over its destruction might persuade Assad not to retaliate militarily. But Condi and I were frustrated that Syria and North Korea had undertaken a bold and risky venture in violation of multiple Security Council resolutions and international treaties to create a covert nuclear capability in Syria, probably including other sites and labs, and had paid no political price for it. Nor could we use their gambit to our advantage in detaching Syria from Iran or in seeking harsher sanctions on Iran.

  Within a week, the Syrians began a massive effort to destroy the ruined reactor building and to remove all incriminating nuclear-related equipment and structures. They worked at night or under the cover of tarpaulins to mask what they were doing. As the Israelis insisted, we kept silent as we watched the Syrians work. Finally, in April 2008, when the Israelis decided the risk of Syrian military retaliation had greatly diminished, we went public with the photographs and intelligence information on the Syrian reactor. By then, any real opportunity to leverage what the Syrians and North Koreans had done for broader political and nonproliferation purposes had largely been lost. The absence of any Syrian reaction to the Israeli attack—after the absence of Iraqi reaction to the bombing of their Osirak reactor by Israel in 1981—reinforced the views of those in Israel who were confident that any attack on Iranian nuclear sites would provoke, at most, only a very limited response.

  On our side, a very sensitive and difficult security challenge had been debated openly with no pulled punches. The president heard directly from his senior advisers on a number of occasions and had made a tough decision based on what he heard and on his own instincts. And there had been no leaks. Although I was unhappy with the path we had taken, I told Hadley the episode had been a model of national security decision making. In the end, a big problem was solved and none of my fears were realized. It is hard to criticize success. But we had condoned reaching for a gun before diplomacy could be brought to bear, and we had condoned another preventive act of war. This made me all the more nervous about an even bigger looming national security problem.

  IRAN

  The Islamic Republic of Iran has bedeviled every American president since the overthrow of the shah in February 1979. Events in Iran contributed to Jimmy Carter losing his reelection bid in 1980 and nearly got Ronald Reagan impeached in 1987. Every president since Carter has tried in one way or another to reach out to the leadership in Tehran to improve relations, and every one of them has failed to elicit any meaningful response.

  I was a participant in the first of those efforts. In October 1979, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, represented the United States in Algiers at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Algerian revolution. I accompanied him as his special assistant. He received word that the Iranian delegation—the prime minister, defense minister, and foreign minister—wanted to meet with him. Brzezinski received approval from Washington and met in a hotel suite with the Iranians. I was the notetaker. He offered recognition of the revolutionary regime, offered to work with them, and even offered to sell them weapons we had contracted to sell to the shah; we had a common enemy to the north of Iran, the Soviet Union. The Iranians brushed all that aside and demanded that the United States return the shah, who was then receiving medical treatment here, to Tehran. Both sides went back and forth with the same talking points until Brzezinski stood up and told the Iranians that to return the shah to them would be “incompatible with our national honor.” That ended the meeting. Three days later our embassy in Tehran was overrun and more than fifty Americans taken hostage. Within a few weeks, the three Iranian officials with whom we had met had been purged from their jobs.

  On April 24, 1980, the United States attempted a daring military operation to rescue those hostages. As executive assistant to the head of CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, I was aware of the planning and was with him in the White House the night of the mission. The operation ended in a fiery disaster in the desert sands of eastern Iran, with eight Americans killed when a helicopter collided with a C-130 transport plane on the ground. It was a humiliating failure. The only good to come out of it was that this tragedy soon led to the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command and the superb military capabilities—both in people and in equipment—that would kill Osama bin Laden thirty-one years later.

  Nineteen-eighty also saw the beginning of an eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, which began in September with an attack by the Iraqis. The U.S. approach during the Reagan administration was ruthlessly realistic—we did not want either side to win an outright victory; at one time or another we provided modest covert support to both sides. This effort went off the rails with the clandestine sale of antitank missiles to the Iranians, with the profits secretly being funneled to help the anti-Communist Contra movement in Nicaragua. This was the essence of the Iran-Contra scandal, which broke publicly in November 1986, nearly wrecked the Reagan administration, and derailed my nomination to be director of central intelligence early in 1987. I had learned to be very cautious in dealing with Iran.

  During the last two years of the Reagan administration, the United States would actually confront the Iranians militarily in the Persian Gulf, when we provided naval protection to Kuwaiti oil tankers. Several of our ships struck Iranian mines, we responded with retaliatory strikes, and in one tragic incident, a U.S. Navy ship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airplane.

  From the early 1980s, the fact that Iran has been the principal foreign supporter of the terrorist organization Hizballah, providing money, intelligence, weapons, training, and operational guidance to its fighters—including the suicide bombers who destroyed the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut during the early 1980s—has further poisoned the air between our two countries. Until al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Hizballah had killed more Americans than had any terrorist group in history.

  In 2004, Brzezinski and I were asked to cochair a task force on U.S. policy toward Iran under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations. One reason I had moved to the Pacific Northwest after retiring as CIA director was to avoid getting roped into projects like this. But because of my respect for, and friendship with, Brzezinski and council president Richard Haass, I agreed.

  The task force issued its report in July 2004, acknowledging the failure of repeated efforts over the preceding twenty-five years to engage with Tehran but expressing the view that the U.S. military intervention in both Afghanistan and Iraq, on Iran’s eastern and western borders, respectively, had changed the “geopolitical landscape” and might offer new incentives for a mutually beneficial dialogue. The report recommended selective diplomatic engagement as a means to address issues such as Iran’s nuclear program. The report also proposed withdrawing U.S. objections to an Iranian civil nuclear program in exchange for stringent safeguards; suggested using economic relationships as positive leverage in dealing with Iran; and recommended U.S. advocacy of democracy in Iran “without relying on the rhetoric of regime change.” The recommendations acknowledged the likelihood of Iranian obstinacy preventing progress.

  With “reform” pres
ident Hojjatoleslam Mohammed Katami in office—someone who in 1998 had called for a “dialogue with the American people”—and “reformers” winning a landslide victory in the Iranian general election in 2000, the recommendations of the report did not seem particularly radical, despite Iran’s continued support for anti-Israeli militants. However, given events over the ensuing two years, including the election of a hard-line president in Iran and Iranian support for Shia extremists killing our troops in Iraq, by the time I came back to government in late 2006, I no longer supported most of the recommendations in the report. It so quickly slid into oblivion that after I was nominated to be secretary, someone asked Steve Hadley if the administration had been aware of the positions I had taken in the report vis-à-vis Iran. I was told Steve was quite taken aback and asked, “What report?”

  On December 23, 2006, five days after I became secretary of defense, the UN Security Council voted to impose limited sanctions on Iran, thus internationalizing some of the economic sanctions the United States had imposed on Tehran during the Clinton administration and first years of the Bush administration. In his January 10, 2007, speech announcing the strategy change and the surge in Iraq, Bush also said that henceforth U.S. troops would target Iranian agents inside Iraq who were helping the insurgency; more significantly, he also announced that he was sending a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf and deploying Patriot missile defense batteries to the region as well. During a White House meeting on January 21, Rice passed me a note saying, “The Iranians are getting very nervous. Now is the time to keep the heat up.”

  The trouble was that the Iranians were not the only ones getting nervous. A number of members of Congress and commentators worried publicly whether the Bush administration was getting ready to launch another war, a worry that only grew every time we announced some new nefarious act by the Iranians. I tried to strike the right balance in a press conference on February 2, saying that the second carrier was intended to increase pressure on the Iranians in response to their training and providing weapons to Shia extremists fighting the United States in Iraq (we believed the Iranians either killed or trained the killers—murderers, actually—of five American soldiers in Karbala on January 20), as well as to serve as a response to their continued nuclear activities. I underscored that “we are not planning for a war with Iran.” On February 15, I said, “For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran.” Cheney’s affirmation a few days later that “all options are still on the table”—the administration’s position—hardly helped dampen the speculation.