The
Iran Plans
By Seymour M. Hersh
10 April, 2006
The
New Yorker
The Bush Administration, while
publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a
nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and
intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former
American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning
groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat
troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting
data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.
The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian
regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring,
to enrich uranium.
American and European intelligence
agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree
that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear
weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will
take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best
way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use
only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that
it will not be delayed or deterred.
There is a growing conviction
among members of the United States military, and in the international
community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear
confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that
Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the
White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence
official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They
say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world
war?’ ”
A government consultant with
close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush
was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb”
if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must
do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future,
would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is
going to be his legacy.”
One former defense official,
who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told
me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a
sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership
and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.”
He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What
are they smoking?’ ”
The rationale for regime
change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert
who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush.
“So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons
program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is:
How long will the present Iranian regime last?”
When I spoke to Clawson,
he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort
into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than
to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson
said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and
thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with
Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer
to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial
accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a
wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not
like planning to invade Quebec.”
One military planner told
me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning
and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of “coercion”
aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see
how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really
show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added,
“People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,”
but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus
all the way along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests
for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military
planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing
a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that
Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels”
but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were
“inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)
“This is much more
than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna.
“That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to
fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they
control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going
to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”
A senior Pentagon adviser
on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House
believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power
structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he
said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that
the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.”
A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase
the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser
said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s
most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong
ties to Iran. “And here comes Al Qaeda.”
In recent weeks, the President
has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few
key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat.
A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take
part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues,
told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because
“they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re
doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”
The House member said that
no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk
of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who
led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going
to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?”
(Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure
from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added.
“The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.”
Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome
thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”
Some operations, apparently
aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American
Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea,
have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid
ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since
last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal
radars.
Last month, in a paper given
at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner,
a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring
from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed
to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs
of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred
targets would have to be hit. He added:
I don’t think a U.S.
military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production
plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic
missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are
fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to
get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be
used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile
sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities
may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S.
will have to use Special Operations units.
One of the military’s
initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon
this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon,
such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is
Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles
south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards,
reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges,
and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet
beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough
enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has
acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment
program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its
current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination
of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions,
but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure
the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock,
especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
There is a Cold War precedent
for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the
early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched
as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside
Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed
for “continuity of government”—for the political and
military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities,
in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet
facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains
classified. “The ‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was
the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former
senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined
that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that
some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped
the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity
of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.
A former high-level Defense
Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing
would allow the U.S. to “go in there and do enough damage to slow
down the nuclear infrastructure—it’s feasible.” The
former defense official said, “The Iranians don’t have friends,
and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back
their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re
ready to go.” He added, “We don’t have to knock down
all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles
really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the
ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous—put bad
stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”
But those who are familiar
with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence
official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know
what’s underneath—to know which ventilator feeds people,
or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that
we don’t know.” The lack of reliable intelligence leaves
military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little
choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every
other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,”
the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’
is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough
decision. But we made it in Japan.”
He went on, “Nuclear
planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details
of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds,
radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not
an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a
little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever
anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re
shouted down.”
The attention given to the
nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about
resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove
the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without
success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House
said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’
”
The Pentagon adviser on the
war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking
seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest
in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles.
He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also
confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning
over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military
against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,”
the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter
may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had
agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they
are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The
internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser
said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition
to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”
The adviser added, however,
that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has
gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose
members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re
telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less
radiation,” he said.
The chairman of the Defense
Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State
in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared
to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces
sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative
think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear
weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability
“for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of
high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional
weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members
of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security
adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence;
and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security.
The Pentagon adviser questioned
the value of air strikes. “The Iranians have distributed their
nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key
stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he said. He warned,
as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction”
of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world:
“What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”
With or without the nuclear
option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired
high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war
planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air
attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher target”
than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing
to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board.
Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems.”
The Pentagon adviser said
that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many
hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of
them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe
it’s the way to operate”—that the Administration can
achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that
has been supported by neoconservatives.
If the order were to be given
for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would
be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure
bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter,
I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians
in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in
Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast,
and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops “are studying the
terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and
recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the consultant
said. One goal is to get “eyes on the ground”—quoting
a line from “Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular
proof.” The broader aim, the consultant said, is to “encourage
ethnic tensions” and undermine the regime.
The new mission for the combat
troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing
interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations,
which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense
Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A.
operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported
to key members of Congress.
“ ‘Force protection’
is the new buzzword,” the former senior intelligence official
told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine
activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield
or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and
are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The guys
in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in
Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in
Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”
The President’s deep
distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront
Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad,
who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986,
may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties.
(There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.)
Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist
who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and
the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the
security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of
most-wanted terrorists.
Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A.
officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that
Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government
“are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at
Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in
Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve
got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason
to back off.”
Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary
Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy;
by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants
with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who
has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as “a
white coup,” with ominous implications for the West. “Professionals
in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out,”
he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe that they
are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that, particularly
in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s
attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you
like.”
Iran’s supreme religious
leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a
stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,”
one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The
Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program,
but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme
Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will
not take action without his approval.”
The Pentagon adviser on the
war on terror said that “allowing Iran to have the bomb is not
on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror
network. It’s just too dangerous.” He added, “The
whole internal debate is on which way to go”—in terms of
stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that
Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall
the American action. “God may smile on us, but I don’t think
so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state.
The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear
state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going
to happen.”
While almost no one disputes
Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon
it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a
former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of
the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based on
what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing
a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a covert
nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation,
diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking
it out. But if you do it”—bomb Iran—“without
being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble.”
Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad,
Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that
“Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched
uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is
simply a technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a senior
Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s
duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside
Iran—the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation,
run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials
have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public
evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State
in Bush’s first term, told me, “I think Iran has a secret
nuclear-weapons program—I believe it, but I don’t know it.”
In recent months, the Pakistani
government has given the U.S. new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called
father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house
arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear
materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late
nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided
information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building
a bomb. “The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’
” the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon
adviser also confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”)
The concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has
credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the
neoconservatives what they want to hear”—or what might be
useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under
pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.
“I think Khan’s
leading us on,” the former intelligence official said. “I
don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’
But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information
on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own
sources— sensors and the covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so
burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s
office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the
Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ ”
The Administration’s
case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence
on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the
Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph
Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration
strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for
the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:
The vice president of the
United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich
nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress
that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary
of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.
Cirincione called some of
the Administration’s claims about Iran “questionable”
or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, “What do
we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?”
The answer, he said, “is in the intelligence community and the
I.A.E.A.” (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most
recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran
was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)
Last year, the Bush Administration
briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information
about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an
Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages
of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported
that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used
in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the
focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were
generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated,
but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared
to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, “RELYING
ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”
I was told in interviews
with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the
laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted.
The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German
and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans
eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian
was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known
where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his
laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It
was a classic “walk-in.”
A European intelligence official
said, “There was some hesitation on our side” about what
the materials really proved, “and we are still not convinced.”
The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, “but
had the character of sketches,” the European official said. “It
was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”
The threat of American military
action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna.
The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make
a nuclear weapon, but “nobody has presented an inch of evidence
of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” the high-ranking
diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians
are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But, if the
United States does anything militarily, they will make the development
of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat said.
“The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s
future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a
menace to American policy.”
In Vienna, I was told of
an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei,
the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize
last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms
Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We
cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat
to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we
will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you
will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”
Joseph’s heavy-handedness
was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been
inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. “All of the inspectors
are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian
leadership are nutcases—one hundred per cent totally certified
nuts,” the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding
concern is that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just
like the neocons on the other side”—in Washington. “At
the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to
talk to the Iranians.”
The central question—whether
Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium—is
now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant
to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official
told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s nothing
the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American
diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of
enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end.”
Another diplomat in Vienna
asked me, “Why would the West take the risk of going to war against
that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re
low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its
cards on the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed
similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A.
He said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish
an inspection system—if you don’t trust them—you can
only bomb.”
There is little sympathy
for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies.
“We’re quite frustrated with the director-general,”
the European diplomat told me. “His basic approach has been to
describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s
not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea
of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous.
It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation
risk.”
The Europeans are rattled,
however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President
Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their
real goal is regime change. “Everyone is on the same page about
the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change,”
a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans
have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between
going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington
on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans
engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”
“The Brits think this
is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a former National Security
Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s
Saban Center, told me, “but they’re really worried we’re
going to do it.” The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged
that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington
but that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very
difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the
British “are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the
Iranians, with no compromise.”
The European diplomat said
that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything
it was doing, but “to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability
is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges”
to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was,
he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in
its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take
a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the
American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the
more likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what
we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the
moment they back off.”
The diplomat went on, “You
never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions.
We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime
to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there
is unity in opposition and the price imposed”—in sanctions—“is
sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the
U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t
work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military
option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”
Tony Blair, the British Prime
Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading
up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked
by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action
against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been more circumspect,
saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.
Other European officials
expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing
campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad
is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence official
told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You
can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack,
he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might
be sympathetic to the U.S. “Iran is no longer living in the Stone
Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books,
and they love it,” he said. “If there was a charm offensive
with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.”
Another European official
told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. “It’s
always the same guys,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “There
is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.”
A key ally with an important
voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years
that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point
of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s
interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which
would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision
to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland
on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility
toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world
peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear
again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”
Any American bombing attack,
Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions:
“What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability
does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism?
Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack
do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this
mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?”
Iran, which now produces
nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off
production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade
or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through
which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the
recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences
of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open
by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. “It’s
impossible to block passage,” he said. The government consultant
with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem
could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic
reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the
oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated
that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from
ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending
on the duration and scope of the conflict.
Michel Samaha, a veteran
Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut,
told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil
and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
“They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could
begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy
world.”
Iran could also initiate
a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah.
On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter
such attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at U.S. intelligence
agencies. “The best terror network in the world has remained neutral
in the terror war for the past several years,” the Pentagon adviser
on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This will mobilize them
and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon.
If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless
the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us.” (When
I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that,
if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel and the
new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)
The adviser went on, “If
we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle.”
The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at
greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating
on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has
close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star
general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the
region, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one
sound truck.”
“If you attack,”
the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad will
be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility
and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”
The diplomat went on, “There
are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution.
They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful
thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is now.”