Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (30 page)

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.

I
RAN

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” president 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.

Ayatollah Khamanei, Iran’s “supreme” leader, had weighed in publicly on February 8, warning that Iran would retaliate against our interests if attacked by the United States. At the same time, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards navy announced the test-firing of an antiship missile “capable of sinking a large warship.” Trying to downplay its significance, I told the press at a NATO defense ministers meeting in Seville that we had watched the test, and “other than that, I think it’s just another day in the Persian Gulf.”

About the same time, the administration went public with evidence that the Iranians were supplying sophisticated IED bomb-making materials to Iraqis trying to kill our troops. We couldn’t prove that the most senior Iranian leaders knew about this, but I found it inconceivable that they did not; I was eager for us to be even more aggressive in picking up their agents—or killing them—in Iraq. Tensions with Iran rose further in March 2008, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guards navy seized fifteen British sailors and marines accused of intruding into Iranian territorial waters. (I immediately directed that no U.S. sailors or Marines were to patrol or board other boats in the Gulf without cover from helicopter gunships or without a U.S. warship within firing range. I wasn’t about to risk any of our sailors or Marines falling into Iranian hands.) Four days later the United States began a naval exercise in the Gulf, including two aircraft carriers and a dozen other warships—it was the first time two carriers had held a joint exercise in the Gulf since 2003.

These actions set off another round of speculation that President Bush was laying the groundwork for attacking Iran.
The Economist
speculated that Bush “might not be prepared to leave office with the Iranian question unresolved.” In an editorial, the magazine explained why Bush might act:

One is Iran’s apparent determination to build nuclear weapons, and a fear that it is nearing the point where its nuclear programme will be
impossible to stop. The second is the advent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a populist president who denies the Holocaust and calls openly for Israel’s destruction: his apocalyptic speeches have convinced many people in Israel and America that the world is facing a new Hitler with genocidal intent. The third is a recent tendency inside the Bush administration to blame Iran for many of America’s troubles not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East.… Given his [Bush’s] excessive willingness to blame Iran for blocking America’s noble aims in the Middle East, he may come to see a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear programme as a fitting way to redeem his presidency.