Iran:
The Next Act
By Seymour M. Hersh
20 November, 2006
The
New Yorker
A month before the November elections,
Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion
at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what
if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How would that affect
policy toward Iran, which is believed to be on the verge of becoming
a nuclear power? At that point, according to someone familiar with the
discussion, Cheney began reminiscing about his job as a lineman, in
the early nineteen-sixties, for a power company in Wyoming. Copper wire
was expensive, and the linemen were instructed to return all unused
pieces three feet or longer. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork
that resulted, Cheney said, so he and his colleagues found a solution:
putting “shorteners” on the wire—that is, cutting
it into short pieces and tossing the leftovers at the end of the workday.
If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that
victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option
with Iran. The White House would put “shorteners” on any
legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting
in its way.
The White House’s concern
was not that the Democrats would cut off funds for the war in Iraq but
that future legislation would prohibit it from financing operations
targeted at overthrowing or destabilizing the Iranian government, to
keep it from getting the bomb. “They’re afraid that Congress
is going to vote a binding resolution to stop a hit on Iran, à
la Nicaragua in the Contra war,” a former senior intelligence
official told me.
In late 1982, Edward P. Boland,
a Democratic representative, introduced the first in a series of “Boland
amendments,” which limited the Reagan Administration’s ability
to support the Contras, who were working to overthrow Nicaragua’s
left-wing Sandinista government. The Boland restrictions led White House
officials to orchestrate illegal fund-raising activities for the Contras,
including the sale of American weapons, via Israel, to Iran. The result
was the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-eighties. Cheney’s story,
according to the source, was his way of saying that, whatever a Democratic
Congress might do next year to limit the President’s authority,
the Administration would find a way to work around it. (In response
to a request for comment, the Vice-President’s office said that
it had no record of the discussion.)
In interviews, current and
former Administration officials returned to one question: whether Cheney
would be as influential in the last two years of George W. Bush’s
Presidency as he was in its first six. Cheney is emphatic about Iraq.
In late October, he told Time, “I know what the President thinks,”
about Iraq. “I know what I think. And we’re not looking
for an exit strategy. We’re looking for victory.” He is
equally clear that the Administration would, if necessary, use force
against Iran. “The United States is keeping all options on the
table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime,”
he told an Israeli lobbying group early this year. “And we join
other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow
Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
On November 8th, the day
after the Republicans lost both the House and the Senate, Bush announced
the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the nomination
of his successor, Robert Gates, a former director of Central Intelligence.
The move was widely seen as an acknowledgment that the Administration
was paying a political price for the debacle in Iraq. Gates was a member
of the Iraq Study Group—headed by former Secretary of State James
Baker and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman—which
has been charged with examining new approaches to Iraq, and he has publicly
urged for more than a year that the U.S. begin direct talks with Iran.
President Bush’s decision to turn to Gates was a sign of the White
House’s “desperation,” a former high-level C.I.A.
official, who worked with the White House after September 11th, told
me. Cheney’s relationship with Rumsfeld was among the closest
inside the Administration, and Gates’s nomination was seen by
some Republicans as a clear signal that the Vice-President’s influence
in the White House could be challenged. The only reason Gates would
take the job, after turning down an earlier offer to serve as the new
Director of National Intelligence, the former high-level C.I.A. official
said, was that “the President’s father, Brent Scowcroft,
and James Baker”—former aides of the first President Bush—“piled
on, and the President finally had to accept adult supervision.”
Critical decisions will be
made in the next few months, the former C.I.A. official said. “Bush
has followed Cheney’s advice for six years, and the story line
will be: ‘Will he continue to choose Cheney over his father?’
We’ll know soon.” (The White House and the Pentagon declined
to respond to detailed requests for comment about this article, other
than to say that there were unspecified inaccuracies.)
A retired four-star general
who worked closely with the first Bush Administration told me that the
Gates nomination means that Scowcroft, Baker, the elder Bush, and his
son “are saying that winning the election in 2008 is more important
than the individual. The issue for them is how to preserve the Republican
agenda. The Old Guard wants to isolate Cheney and give their girl, Condoleezza
Rice”—the Secretary of State—“a chance to perform.”
The combination of Scowcroft, Baker, and the senior Bush working together
is, the general added, “tough enough to take on Cheney. One guy
can’t do it.”
Richard Armitage, the Deputy
Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me that he believed
the Democratic election victory, followed by Rumsfeld’s dismissal,
meant that the Administration “has backed off,” in terms
of the pace of its planning for a military campaign against Iran. Gates
and other decision-makers would now have more time to push for a diplomatic
solution in Iran and deal with other, arguably more immediate issues.
“Iraq is as bad as it looks, and Afghanistan is worse than it
looks,” Armitage said. “A year ago, the Taliban were fighting
us in units of eight to twelve, and now they’re sometimes in company-size,
and even larger.” Bombing Iran and expecting the Iranian public
“to rise up” and overthrow the government, as some in the
White House believe, Armitage added, “is a fool’s errand.”
“Iraq is the disaster
we have to get rid of, and Iran is the disaster we have to avoid,”
Joseph Cirincione, the vice-president for national security at the liberal
Center for American Progress, said. “Gates will be in favor of
talking to Iran and listening to the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
but the neoconservatives are still there”—in the White House—“and
still believe that chaos would be a small price for getting rid of the
threat. The danger is that Gates could be the new Colin Powell—the
one who opposes the policy but ends up briefing the Congress and publicly
supporting it.”
Other sources close to the
Bush family said that the machinations behind Rumsfeld’s resignation
and the Gates nomination were complex, and the seeming triumph of the
Old Guard may be illusory. The former senior intelligence official,
who once worked closely with Gates and with the President’s father,
said that Bush and his immediate advisers in the White House understood
by mid-October that Rumsfeld would have to resign if the result of the
midterm election was a resounding defeat. Rumsfeld was involved in conversations
about the timing of his departure with Cheney, Gates, and the President
before the election, the former senior intelligence official said. Critics
who asked why Rumsfeld wasn’t fired earlier, a move that might
have given the Republicans a boost, were missing the point. “A
week before the election, the Republicans were saying that a Democratic
victory was the seed of American retreat, and now Bush and Cheney are
going to change their national-security policies?” the former
senior intelligence official said. “Cheney knew this was coming.
Dropping Rummy after the election looked like a conciliatory move—‘You’re
right, Democrats. We got a new guy and we’re looking at all the
options. Nothing is ruled out.’ ” But the conciliatory gesture
would not be accompanied by a significant change in policy; instead,
the White House saw Gates as someone who would have the credibility
to help it stay the course on Iran and Iraq. Gates would also be an
asset before Congress. If the Administration needed to make the case
that Iran’s weapons program posed an imminent threat, Gates would
be a better advocate than someone who had been associated with the flawed
intelligence about Iraq. The former official said, “He’s
not the guy who told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
and he’ll be taken seriously by Congress.”
Once Gates is installed at
the Pentagon, he will have to contend with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan,
the Rumsfeld legacy—and Dick Cheney. A former senior Bush Administration
official, who has also worked with Gates, told me that Gates was well
aware of the difficulties of his new job. He added that Gates would
not simply endorse the Administration’s policies and say, “with
a flag waving, ‘Go, go’ ”—especially at the
cost of his own reputation. “He does not want to see thirty-five
years of government service go out the window,” the former official
said. However, on the question of whether Gates would actively stand
up to Cheney, the former official said, after a pause, “I don’t
know.”
Another critical issue for
Gates will be the Pentagon’s expanding effort to conduct clandestine
and covert intelligence missions overseas. Such activity has traditionally
been the C.I.A.’s responsibility, but, as the result of a systematic
push by Rumsfeld, military covert actions have been substantially increased.
In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been
working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the
Party for Free Life in Kurdistan. The group has been conducting clandestine
cross-border forays into Iran, I was told by a government consultant
with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as “part
of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran.”
(The Pentagon has established covert relationships with Kurdish, Azeri,
and Baluchi tribesmen, and has encouraged their efforts to undermine
the regime’s authority in northern and southeastern Iran.) The
government consultant said that Israel is giving the Kurdish group “equipment
and training.” The group has also been given “a list of
targets inside Iran of interest to the U.S.” (An Israeli government
spokesman denied that Israel was involved.)
Such activities, if they
are considered military rather than intelligence operations, do not
require congressional briefings. For a similar C.I.A. operation, the
President would, by law, have to issue a formal finding that the mission
was necessary, and the Administration would have to brief the senior
leadership of the House and the Senate. The lack of such consultation
annoyed some Democrats in Congress. This fall, I was told, Representative
David Obey, of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations
subcommittee that finances classified military activity, pointedly asked,
during a closed meeting of House and Senate members, whether “anyone
has been briefing on the Administration’s plan for military activity
in Iran.” The answer was no. (A spokesman for Obey confirmed this
account.)
The Democratic victories
this month led to a surge of calls for the Administration to begin direct
talks with Iran, in part to get its help in settling the conflict in
Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair broke ranks with President Bush
after the election and declared that Iran should be offered “a
clear strategic choice” that could include a “new partnership”
with the West. But many in the White House and the Pentagon insist that
getting tough with Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq. “It’s
a classic case of ‘failure forward,’” a Pentagon consultant
said. “They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover
their losses in Iraq—like doubling your bet. It would be an attempt
to revive the concept of spreading democracy in the Middle East by creating
one new model state.”
The view that there is a
nexus between Iran and Iraq has been endorsed by Condoleezza Rice, who
said last month that Iran “does need to understand that it is
not going to improve its own situation by stirring instability in Iraq,”
and by the President, who said, in August, that “Iran is backing
armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold”
in Iraq. The government consultant told me, “More and more people
see the weakening of Iran as the only way to save Iraq.”
The consultant added that,
for some advocates of military action, “the goal in Iran is not
regime change but a strike that will send a signal that America still
can accomplish its goals. Even if it does not destroy Iran’s nuclear
network, there are many who think that thirty-six hours of bombing is
the only way to remind the Iranians of the very high cost of going forward
with the bomb—and of supporting Moqtada al-Sadr and his pro-Iran
element in Iraq.” (Sadr, who commands a Shiite militia, has religious
ties to Iran.)
In the current issue of Foreign
Policy, Joshua Muravchik, a prominent neoconservative, argued that the
Administration had little choice. “Make no mistake: President
Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving
office,” he wrote. The President would be bitterly criticized
for a preëmptive attack on Iran, Muravchik said, and so neoconservatives
“need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend
the action when it comes.”
The main Middle East expert
on the Vice-President’s staff is David Wurmser, a neoconservative
who was a strident advocate for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein. Like many in Washington, Wurmser “believes
that, so far, there’s been no price tag on Iran for its nuclear
efforts and for its continuing agitation and intervention inside Iraq,”
the consultant said. But, unlike those in the Administration who are
calling for limited strikes, Wurmser and others in Cheney’s office
“want to end the regime,” the consultant said. “They
argue that there can be no settlement of the Iraq war without regime
change in Iran.”
The Administration’s
planning for a military attack on Iran was made far more complicated
earlier this fall by a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A.
challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran
might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive
evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running
parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International
Atomic Energy Agency. (The C.I.A. declined to comment on this story.)
The C.I.A.’s analysis,
which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on
technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other
empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water
samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional
data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech
(and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine
American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities
inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity
were found.
A current senior intelligence
official confirmed the existence of the C.I.A. analysis, and told me
that the White House had been hostile to it. The White House’s
dismissal of the C.I.A. findings on Iran is widely known in the intelligence
community. Cheney and his aides discounted the assessment, the former
senior intelligence official said. “They’re not looking
for a smoking gun,” the official added, referring to specific
intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. “They’re looking
for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the
mission.” The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency also
challenged the C.I.A.’s analysis. “The D.I.A. is fighting
the agency’s conclusions, and disputing its approach,” the
former senior intelligence official said. Bush and Cheney, he added,
can try to prevent the C.I.A. assessment from being incorporated into
a forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities,
“but they can’t stop the agency from putting it out for
comment inside the intelligence community.” The C.I.A. assessment
warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the
failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant
that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it. The former senior
intelligence official noted that at the height of the Cold War the Soviets
were equally skilled at deception and misdirection, yet the American
intelligence community was readily able to unravel the details of their
long-range-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. But some in the White
House, including in Cheney’s office, had made just such an assumption—that
“the lack of evidence means they must have it,” the former
official said.
Iran is a signatory to the
non-proliferation treaty, under which it is entitled to conduct nuclear
research for peaceful purposes. Despite the offer of trade agreements
and the prospect of military action, it defied a demand by the I.A.E.A.
and the Security Council, earlier this year, that it stop enriching
uranium—a process that can produce material for nuclear power
plants as well as for weapons—and it has been unable, or unwilling,
to account for traces of plutonium and highly enriched uranium that
have been detected during I.A.E.A. inspections. The I.A.E.A. has complained
about a lack of “transparency,” although, like the C.I.A.,
it has not found unambiguous evidence of a secret weapons program.
Last week, Iran’s President,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced that Iran had made further progress in
its enrichment research program, and said, “We know that some
countries may not be pleased.” He insisted that Iran was abiding
by international agreements, but said, “Time is now completely
on the side of the Iranian people.” A diplomat in Vienna, where
the I.A.E.A. has its headquarters, told me that the agency was skeptical
of the claim, for technical reasons. But Ahmadinejad’s defiant
tone did nothing to diminish suspicions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“There is no evidence
of a large-scale covert enrichment program inside Iran,” one involved
European diplomat said. “But the Iranians would not have launched
themselves into a very dangerous confrontation with the West on the
basis of a weapons program that they no longer pursue. Their enrichment
program makes sense only in terms of wanting nuclear weapons. It would
be inconceivable if they weren’t cheating to some degree. You
don’t need a covert program to be concerned about Iran’s
nuclear ambitions. We have enough information to be concerned without
one. It’s not a slam dunk, but it’s close to it.”
There are, however, other
possible reasons for Iran’s obstinacy. The nuclear program—peaceful
or not—is a source of great national pride, and President Ahmadinejad’s
support for it has helped to propel him to enormous popularity. (Saddam
Hussein created confusion for years, inside and outside his country,
about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in part to project
an image of strength.) According to the former senior intelligence official,
the C.I.A.’s assessment suggested that Iran might even see some
benefits in a limited military strike—especially one that did
not succeed in fully destroying its nuclear program—in that an
attack might enhance its position in the Islamic world. “They
learned that in the Iraqi experience, and relearned it in southern Lebanon,”
the former senior official said. In both cases, a more powerful military
force had trouble achieving its military or political goals; in Lebanon,
Israel’s war against Hezbollah did not destroy the group’s
entire arsenal of rockets, and increased the popularity of its leader,
Hassan Nasrallah.
The former senior intelligence
official added that the C.I.A. assessment raised the possibility that
an American attack on Iran could end up serving as a rallying point
to unite Sunni and Shiite populations. “An American attack will
paper over any differences in the Arab world, and we’ll have Syrians,
Iranians, Hamas, and Hezbollah fighting against us—and the Saudis
and the Egyptians questioning their ties to the West. It’s an
analyst’s worst nightmare—for the first time since the caliphate
there will be common cause in the Middle East.” (An Islamic caliphate
ruled the Middle East for over six hundred years, until the thirteenth
century.)
According to the Pentagon
consultant, “The C.I.A.’s view is that, without more intelligence,
a large-scale bombing attack would not stop Iran’s nuclear program.
And a low-end campaign of subversion and sabotage would play into Iran’s
hands—bolstering support for the religious leadership and deepening
anti-American Muslim rage.”
The Pentagon consultant said
that he and many of his colleagues in the military believe that Iran
is intent on developing nuclear-weapons capability. But he added that
the Bush Administration’s options for dealing with that threat
are diminished, because of a lack of good intelligence and also because
“we’ve cried wolf” before.
As the C.I.A.’s assessment
was making its way through the government, late this summer, current
and former military officers and consultants told me, a new element
suddenly emerged: intelligence from Israeli spies operating inside Iran
claimed that Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear
bomb. The provenance and significance of the human intelligence, or
HUMINT, are controversial. “The problem is that no one can verify
it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We
don’t know who the Israeli source is. The briefing says the Iranians
are testing trigger mechanisms”—simulating a zero-yield
nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials—“but
there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site?
How often have they done it? How big is the warhead—a breadbox
or a refrigerator? They don’t have that.” And yet, he said,
the report was being used by White House hawks within the Administration
to “prove the White House’s theory that the Iranians are
on track. And tests leave no radioactive track, which is why we can’t
find it.” Still, he said, “The agency is standing its ground.”
The Pentagon consultant,
however, told me that he and other intelligence professionals believe
that the Israeli intelligence should be taken more seriously. “We
live in an era when national technical intelligence”—data
from satellites and on-the-ground sensors—“will not get
us what we need. HUMINT may not be hard evidence by that standard, but
very often it’s the best intelligence we can get.” He added,
with obvious exasperation, that within the intelligence community “we’re
going to be fighting over the quality of the information for the next
year.” One reason for the dispute, he said, was that the White
House had asked to see the “raw”—the original, unanalyzed
and unvetted—Israeli intelligence. Such “stovepiping”
of intelligence had led to faulty conclusions about nonexistent weapons
of mass destruction during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq war. “Many
Presidents in the past have done the same thing,” the consultant
said, “but intelligence professionals are always aghast when Presidents
ask for stuff in the raw. They see it as asking a second grader to read
‘Ulysses.’ ”
HUMINT can be difficult to
assess. Some of the most politically significant—and most inaccurate—intelligence
about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction came from an
operative, known as Curveball, who was initially supplied to the C.I.A.
by German intelligence. But the Pentagon consultant insisted that, in
this case, “the Israeli intelligence is apparently very strong.”
He said that the information about the trigger device had been buttressed
by another form of highly classified data, known as MASINT, for “measuring
and signature” intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency is
the central processing and dissemination point for such intelligence,
which includes radar, radio, nuclear, and electro-optical data. The
consultant said that the MASINT indicated activities that “are
not consistent with the programs” Iran has declared to the I.A.E.A.
“The intelligence suggests far greater sophistication and more
advanced development,” the consultant said. “The indications
don’t make sense, unless they’re farther along in some aspects
of their nuclear-weapons program than we know.”
In early 2004, John Bolton,
who was then the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control (he is now
the United Nations Ambassador), privately conveyed to the I.A.E.A. suspicions
that Iran was conducting research into the intricately timed detonation
of conventional explosives needed to trigger a nuclear warhead at Parchin,
a sensitive facility twenty miles southeast of Tehran that serves as
the center of Iran’s Defense Industries Organization. A wide array
of chemical munitions and fuels, as well as advanced antitank and ground-to-air
missiles, are manufactured there, and satellite imagery appeared to
show a bunker suitable for testing very large explosions.
A senior diplomat in Vienna
told me that, in response to the allegations, I.A.E.A. inspectors went
to Parchin in November of 2005, after months of negotiation. An inspection
team was allowed to single out a specific site at the base, and then
was granted access to a few buildings there. “We found no evidence
of nuclear materials,” the diplomat said. The inspectors looked
hard at an underground explosive-testing pit that, he said, “resembled
what South Africa had when it developed its nuclear weapons,”
three decades ago. The pit could have been used for the kind of kinetic
research needed to test a nuclear trigger. But, like so many military
facilities with dual-use potential, “it also could be used for
other things,” such as testing fuel for rockets, which routinely
takes place at Parchin. “The Iranians have demonstrated that they
can enrich uranium,” the diplomat added, “and trigger tests
without nuclear yield can be done. But it’s a very sophisticated
process—it’s also known as hydrodynamic testing—and
only countries with suitably advanced nuclear testing facilities as
well as the necessary scientific expertise can do it. I’d be very
skeptical that Iran could do it.”
Earlier this month, the allegations
about Parchin reëmerged when Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest
newspaper, reported that recent satellite imagery showed new “massive
construction” at Parchin, suggesting an expansion of underground
tunnels and chambers. The newspaper sharply criticized the I.A.E.A.’s
inspection process and its director, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, for his
insistence on “using very neutral wording for his findings and
his conclusions.”
Patrick Clawson, an expert
on Iran who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, a conservative think tank, told me that the “biggest
moment” of tension has yet to arrive: “How does the United
States keep an Israeli decision point—one that may come sooner
than we want—from being reached?” Clawson noted that there
is evidence that Iran has been slowed by technical problems in the construction
and operation of two small centrifuge cascades, which are essential
for the pilot production of enriched uranium. Both are now under I.A.E.A.
supervision. “Why were they so slow in getting the second cascade
up and running?” Clawson asked. “And why haven’t they
run the first one as much as they said they would? Do we have more time?
“Why talk about war?”
he said. “We’re not talking about going to war with North
Korea or Venezuela. It’s not necessarily the case that Iran has
started a weapons program, and it’s conceivable—just conceivable—that
Iran does not have a nuclear-weapons program yet. We can slow them down—force
them to reinvent the wheel—without bombing, especially if the
international conditions get better.”
Clawson added that Secretary
of State Rice has “staked her reputation on diplomacy, and she
will not risk her career without evidence. Her team is saying, ‘What’s
the rush?’ The President wants to solve the Iranian issue before
leaving office, but he may have to say, ‘Darn, I wish I could
have solved it.’ ”
Earlier this year, the government
of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert created a task force to coördinate
all the available intelligence on Iran. The task force, which is led
by Major General Eliezer Shkedi, the head of the Israeli Air Force,
reports directly to the Prime Minister. In late October, Olmert appointed
Ephraim Sneh, a Labor Party member of the Knesset, to serve as Deputy
Defense Minister. Sneh, who served previously in that position under
Ehud Barak, has for years insisted that action be taken to prevent Iran
from getting the bomb. In an interview this month with the Jerusalem
Post, Sneh expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of diplomacy
or international sanctions in curbing Iran:
The danger isn’t as
much Ahmadinejad’s deciding to launch an attack but Israel’s
living under a dark cloud of fear from a leader committed to its destruction.
. . . Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer
not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will
. . . I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream
without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime
from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.
A similar message was delivered
by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, in a speech in Los Angeles
last week. “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing
to arm itself with atomic bombs,” he said, adding that there was
“still time” to stop the Iranians.
The Pentagon consultant told
me that, while there may be pressure from the Israelis, “they
won’t do anything on their own without our green light.”
That assurance, he said, “comes from the Cheney shop. It’s
Cheney himself who is saying, ‘We’re not going to leave
you high and dry, but don’t go without us.’ ” A senior
European diplomat agreed: “For Israel, it is a question of life
or death. The United States does not want to go into Iran, but, if Israel
feels more and more cornered, there may be no other choice.”
A nuclear-armed Iran would
not only threaten Israel. It could trigger a strategic-arms race throughout
the Middle East, as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—all led by
Sunni governments—would be compelled to take steps to defend themselves.
The Bush Administration, if it does take military action against Iran,
would have support from Democrats as well as Republicans. Senators Hillary
Clinton, of New York, and Evan Bayh, of Indiana, who are potential Democratic
Presidential candidates, have warned that Iran cannot be permitted to
build a bomb and that—as Clinton said earlier this year—“we
cannot take any option off the table.” Howard Dean, the chairman
of the Democratic National Committee, has also endorsed this view. Last
May, Olmert was given a rousing reception when he addressed a joint
session of Congress and declared, “A nuclear Iran means a terrorist
state could achieve the primary mission for which terrorists live and
die—the mass destruction of innocent human life. This challenge,
which I believe is the test of our time, is one the West cannot afford
to fail.”
Despite such rhetoric, Leslie
Gelb, a former State Department official who is a president emeritus
of the Council on Foreign Relations, said he believes that, “when
push comes to shove, the Israelis will have a hard time selling the
idea that an Iranian nuclear capability is imminent. The military and
the State Department will be flat against a preëmptive bombing
campaign.” Gelb said he hoped that Gates’s appointment would
add weight to America’s most pressing issue—“to get
some level of Iranian restraint inside Iraq. In the next year or two,
we’re much more likely to be negotiating with Iran than bombing
it.”
The Bush Administration remains
publicly committed to a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear impasse,
and has been working with China, Russia, France, Germany, and Britain
to get negotiations under way. So far, that effort has foundered; the
most recent round of talks broke up early in November, amid growing
disagreements with Russia and China about the necessity of imposing
harsh United Nations sanctions on the Iranian regime. President Bush
is adamant that Iran must stop all of its enrichment programs before
any direct talks involving the United States can begin.
The senior European diplomat
told me that the French President, Jacques Chirac, and President Bush
met in New York on September 19th, as the new U.N. session was beginning,
and agreed on what the French called the “Big Bang” approach
to breaking the deadlock with Iran. A scenario was presented to Ali
Larijani, the chief Iranian negotiator on nuclear issues. The Western
delegation would sit down at a negotiating table with Iran. The diplomat
told me, “We would say, ‘We’re beginning the negotiations
without preconditions,’ and the Iranians would respond, ‘We
will suspend.’ Our side would register great satisfaction, and
the Iranians would agree to accept I.A.E.A. inspection of their enrichment
facilities. And then the West would announce, in return, that they would
suspend any U.N. sanctions.” The United States would not be at
the table when the talks began but would join later. Larijani took the
offer to Tehran; the answer, as relayed by Larijani, was no, the diplomat
said. “We were trying to compromise, for all sides, but Ahmadinejad
did not want to save face,” the diplomat said. “The beautiful
scenario has gone nowhere.”
Last week, there was a heightened
expectation that the Iraq Study Group would produce a set of recommendations
that could win bipartisan approval and guide America out of the quagmire
in Iraq. Sources with direct knowledge of the panel’s proceedings
have told me that the group, as of mid-November, had ruled out calling
for an immediate and complete American withdrawal but would recommend
focussing on the improved training of Iraqi forces and on redeploying
American troops. In the most significant recommendation, Baker and Hamilton
were expected to urge President Bush to do what he has thus far refused
to do—bring Syria and Iran into a regional conference to help
stabilize Iraq.
It is not clear whether the
Administration will be receptive. In August, according to the former
senior intelligence official, Rumsfeld asked the Joint Chiefs to quietly
devise alternative plans for Iraq, to preëmpt new proposals, whether
they come from the new Democratic majority or from the Iraq Study Group.
“The option of last resort is to move American forces out of the
cities and relocate them along the Syrian and Iranian border,”
the former official said. “Civilians would be hired to train the
Iraqi police, with the eventual goal of separating the local police
from the Iraqi military. The White House believes that if American troops
stay in Iraq long enough—with enough troops—the bad guys
will end up killing each other, and Iraqi citizens, fed up with internal
strife, will come up with a solution. It’ll take a long time to
move the troops and train the police. It’s a time line to infinity.”
In a subsequent interview,
the former senior Bush Administration official said that he had also
been told that the Pentagon has been at work on a plan in Iraq that
called for a military withdrawal from the major urban areas to a series
of fortified bases near the borders. The working assumption was that,
with the American troops gone from the most heavily populated places,
the sectarian violence would “burn out.” “The White
House is saying it’s going to stabilize,” the former senior
Administration official said, “but it may stabilize the wrong
way.”
One problem with the proposal
that the Administration enlist Iran in reaching a settlement of the
conflict in Iraq is that it’s not clear that Iran would be interested,
especially if the goal is to help the Bush Administration extricate
itself from a bad situation.
“Iran is emerging as
a dominant power in the Middle East,” I was told by a Middle East
expert and former senior Administration official. “With a nuclear
program, and an ability to interfere throughout the region, it’s
basically calling the shots. Why should they coöperate with us
over Iraq?” He recounted a recent meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
who challenged Bush’s right to tell Iran that it could not enrich
uranium. “Why doesn’t America stop enriching uranium?”
the Iranian President asked. He laughed, and added, “We’ll
enrich it for you and sell it to you at a fifty-per-cent discount.”
Copyright © CondéNet
2006
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