by David Crist
While the National Security Adviser Jim Jones focused more on Europe, Iran fell into the portfolio of his deputy. Donilon preserved the Iranian small group that had been started by Stephen Hadley, and it continued to meet to discuss Iran three times a week without the nachos that Hadley frequently offered. But Donilon created a firestorm when he moved the small group to the larger White House Situation Room and invited ten people from the NSC staff to attend what had been a small, close-hold group. At the time, Donilon was not privy to the operational information relayed to Obama and Jones by the outgoing Bush team and had no idea of just how sensitive the details were of efforts to thwart Iran’s ambitions. General Cartwright and the CIA deputy director, Stephen R. Kappes, refused to brief such a large gathering about their operations against Iran.
“I am going to take this to the president!” said a furious Donilon to Cartwright.
“I welcome bringing this in front of the president,” Cartwright answered sternly. “I am not going to discuss our sensitive operations in front of this large a group. It will leak out, and that will only limit your options in the future.” Cartwright had earned Bush’s respect for his calm and reasoned manner and would soon win Obama’s. Donilon finally relented and agreed to hold off the most sensitive subjects for another forum, but he continued inviting twenty people to the Iranian small group meeting. The national security adviser believed that any strategy for Iran had to be a broad-based approach, one that incorporated all the agencies of the U.S. government. There was such a thing as being too secret. By keeping the details to only a handful of people, it would be impossible to bring in all tools available to pressure Iran into peacefully stopping its nuclear weapons program.
From the outset, Obama pressed for engagement with Iran. He personally believed the Bush administration had not seriously used diplomacy to address the tensions with the country. He wanted to test Iran’s willingness to negotiate and resolve the differences that divided the two nations.4 The president offered to talk without preconditions, including the requirement that Iran first halt its uranium enrichment. In a series of speeches around Washington think tanks, administration officials echoed a new slant: that what was unacceptable was a nuclear-armed Iran, not necessarily a nuclear-capable Iran. Just six days after his inauguration, President Obama appeared on Arab television and said that negative perceptions lay at the heart of Middle East quarrels. By implication, he was sending a message that Iran and the United States needed to get beyond the usual knee-jerk reaction that each side was inherently out to get the other.
In Tehran, the election of Barack Obama divided officials. Iranian news media became infatuated with the first African-American president and broadcast a steady stream of reports that the election represented a repudiation of Bush’s policies and offered the prospect of better relations with the United States. A number of Iranian diplomats expressed optimism about the prospects of better relations with the new American president. “The words of Obama were good,” said one such foreign ministry official. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad agreed. Just two days after the election, he took the extraordinary step of sending a congratulatory letter to Obama. “You are expected to make a fast and clear response to the demands for a fundamental change in U.S. domestic and foreign policy,” he wrote. “Iran welcomes major, just and real changes in policies and behavior.” The Iranian president’s supporters, including the foreign ministry, praised Ahmadinejad’s gesture as a constructive step toward ending thirty bitter years of estrangement.5
But hard-liners within the Iranian government lambasted their president. “Today becoming a politician in the United States is synonymous with bowing humbly before Zionism,” wrote one commentator. These hard-liners countered that the Jewish lobby controlled both parties, so in spite of Obama’s rhetoric, no American president would make any real substantive change in policy toward Iran. As proof, they pointed to the appointment of Dennis Ross as Obama’s point man for Iran and the Middle East. Ross had recently come from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which Iranian leaders widely viewed as a key think tank for the Israeli-American axis. The powerful speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, said he was hopeful that Obama represented a real change, but thought it naive to think that the United States would make any substantive changes to its antagonistic policies, especially on the nuclear issue.6
As for the one man whose opinion counted most, the supreme leader, he remained silent. Ayatollah Khamenei had never been sanguine about accommodating Washington. Anti-Americanism remained a pillar of the revolution of whose flame he was the keeper. He had endorsed the openings ten years earlier, following 9/11, but after the Americans rebuffed his overture Khamenei had no urge to repeat the mistake. Still, he did not publicly condemn Ahmadinejad’s letter to Obama. The only hint of his misgivings appeared in an editorial in a newspaper closely aligned with him, which implied that Ahmadinejad had “fallen for a mirage” in thinking Obama was different than Bush.7
The one point on which supporters and skeptics of Obama in Tehran both agreed was the need for the Americans to make a tangible gesture. Lifting some of the sanctions would be a good start. Iran would not respond to mere words.
The State Department drafted different responses for President Obama to Ahmadinejad’s letter. When Obama took office, he refined the communiqué. At the outset, the administration had been bombarded by those purporting to represent the Iranian government or a moderate faction in Tehran. But Dennis Ross knew the disappointing history of using these intermediaries. Real decisions of this magnitude rested with only one man: the supreme leader. So Obama sent his response not to Ahmadinejad but to Khamenei. In the first of two letters to the Iranian spiritual leader, Obama suggested direct negotiations to resolve the nuclear impasse and offered the possibility of opening an American interests section in Tehran as well as cooperation in areas where the two nations overlapped, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama received a reply to his first letter from the supreme leader’s office. The polite but guarded response did not commit Iran to talks but highlighted Iran’s own grievances with the United States, including the freezing of Iranian assets dating back to the shah.
Obama pressed forward. In March, he recorded a three-minute greeting for the Iranian new year, Nowruz. This was the first of what would become an annual Nowruz message by President Obama. “I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he began, calling the nation by its postrevolutionary name in an effort to show that regime change was not his objective.8 “We seek engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.” After praising Iran’s rich heritage, Obama offered the country a seat at the community of nations and extended an offer for better relations. The American president closed with a bit of Farsi and a quote from the Persian poet Saadi: “The children of Adam are the limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.”9
Iran refused to grasp the extended hand. Ahmadinejad expressed more optimism, praising the American president’s words while telling reporters the United States needed to make fundamental changes in its behavior and take real steps to show goodwill. But the supreme leader remained unmoved. Following Obama’s Nowruz video, the Ayatollah Khamenei dedicated much of his Friday sermon to responding to the Americans. He dismissed Obama’s overtures as rhetorical and unsubstantive. “They say, ‘Let us negotiate. Let us establish relations.’ But they have only changed their slogan. Have you halted your oppressive sanctions? Have you given up your unconditional defense of the Zionist regime? Change must be real.” As long as the United States continues its same policies, the ayatollah said, relations “will remain the same as thirty years ago.”10
Obama continued trying, with another speech in June, this time at Cairo University. He called for a new beginning in the Middle East between Islam and the West. Regarding Iran, Obama admitted American mistakes, including overthrowing the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953; he highlighted Iranian errors too, such
as the hostage taking during the 1980s. “Rather than remain trapped in the past, I’ve made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.” However, the president drew a line with Iran’s nuclear program. He acknowledged Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear power, but not to nuclear weapons. “This is not simply about America’s interests. It’s about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.”
Iran remained recalcitrant. Its Supreme Council for National Security remained divided about whether this represented a real change in American policy that might work to Iran’s advantage or just more empty words from an American government that remained bent on overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Unlike during the aftermath of 9/11, the supreme leader felt no need to respond to Obama. All the while, Iran’s centrifuges continued spinning, enriching more uranium.
But American officials remained hopeful. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton briefly floated the idea of extending the U.S. nuclear umbrella to friendly states in the Middle East as a counter to an Iranian nuke. The administration’s point man for Iran, Dennis Ross, an optimist by nature, wrote before coming into the administration, “It’s not too late to stop Iran from getting the bomb. It’s not clear the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would sacrifice anything to get nuclear weapons. In fact, history shows that his government responds to outside pressure, restricting its actions when it feels threatened and taking advantage when it judges it can.”11 But Ross already knew what many Iran neophytes now in the White House were just discovering: Iran was hard. Many officials wistfully hoped the entire issue would just go away.
A woman named Neda Agha-Soltan lay without moving in a street in Tehran, looking blankly up at the cameraman. Her black chador was flung up, exposing her Western jeans and running shoes. As two people frantically tried to attend to her, a stream of dark red blood suddenly poured from her mouth and nose. It was six thirty p.m. on June 20, 2009. The twenty-six-year-old aspiring musician, who worked in her parents’ travel agency, had just exited a car to join demonstrations that had paralyzed Tehran for nearly a week following the disputed presidential elections. A gunshot had rung out; the shooter was either on a nearby rooftop or on a motorcycle just down the road. Neda had collapsed to the pavement. “I’m burning, I’m burning!” she had exclaimed before her eyes glazed over and the blood poured across her face. The death of this young woman on the street in Tehran caused a firestorm, as the video immediately appeared all over the Internet. She became the tragic human symbol of the largest demonstrations to roil Iran since 1979.
In the spring of 2009, President Ahmadinejad stood for reelection. In May, the twelve-man Guardian Council formally approved only 4 candidates from the 476 who had applied. In addition to the incumbent, the others were all powerful regime insiders: former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezai; a former speaker of the parliament, Mehdi Karroubi; and an earlier supporter of the revolution and onetime prime minister, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who had played a major role in the secret negotiations for arms during the Reagan administration. While they differed on domestic policy, none offered any course change regarding the United States, and all supported Iran’s nuclear program.
For a week leading up to the elections, the candidates squared off in a series of one-on-one debates. On June 3, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi conducted a contentious debate. Mousavi accused Ahmadinejad of “superstition and adventurism.” He said the president had cozied up to the Americans, and blasted him for his inane statements about the Holocaust; Mousavi said that “the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] members were very satisfied with Ahmadinejad’s performance.” The attacks caught the Iranian president off guard, but he defended his record, saying that he had improved Iran’s position and accusing Mousavi of being involved in graft.12
On June 12, voters went to the polls. Although many ballots were cast in paper and not computerized, within a couple of hours of the polls closing, the government announced that Ahmadinejad had won reelection, capturing a whopping 62 percent of the votes and carrying every province but two. The president had won by a wide margin even in districts that he had lost in the previous election. Mousavi came in second, with just under 34 percent of the vote. While the voting patterns and quick announcement appeared highly irregular, it was difficult to prove outright fraud. Regardless, supporters of the losing candidates cried foul. The next day hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets, many wearing the color green, representing Islam and Mousavi’s party. The supreme leader ordered a partial recount, but the results stood. Over the following days, the protests grew. Many computer-savvy students used Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to organize rallies and post videos of the upheavals to the outside world. Three days after the elections, three million people poured out into the streets to protest the results. “Where is my vote?!” they chanted.
The Iranian government responded with a deft use of force. Senior Revolutionary Guard officers wanted to crush the opposition, but the specter of the last revolution hung over the crisis and the supreme leader worried about the backlash if the security forces opened fire on the populace. The government initially allowed some protesters to vent anger, but as they continued in defiance of the supreme leader’s directive that they should cease, black-clad Basij militia on motorcycles clubbed demonstrators while police, backed by armed Revolutionary Guardsmen, occasionally shot protestors to establish fear and panic. Neda Agha-Soltan fell into this unfortunate category. The government selectively arrested relatives of the candidates and their chief supporters. Most were released from Evin Prison after a few days, but the action had a chilling effect. Both Rezai and Karroubi fell in line and accepted the election. But Mousavi held out. He was eventually placed under house arrest, and to illustrate a point, security officials shot and killed his nephew during a demonstration in December.
The Iranian government blamed the disturbances on Western intervention. It accused the U.S. soft-power operations by the CIA begun under Bush of fomenting the disturbances. Iran expelled a number of British diplomats, accusing them of aiding the Americans. Western journalists were ordered to leave. The security services moved to shut down the media sites that allowed information to flow inside and outside the country, and a series of “technical glitches” shut down the Internet in Tehran on several occasions.
For President Obama, the crisis presented a conundrum. If the United States came out strongly in favor of the demonstrators, it risked undermining them by making them look as though they were lackeys of America. The president wanted to avoid the perception of trying to stage a repeat of the 1953 coup—still a sore point with many Iranians. The information from those protesting in the streets of Tehran steadfastly indicated that the protesters did not want American assistance. But the United States could not simply ignore the repression of hundreds of thousands of people calling for free and fair elections.
The United States looked at various means to help the demonstrators, but the prevailing view during the nearly daily meetings in the Situation Room was that there was not much the United States could do to influence the events on the ground. “The uprising grew out of internal dynamics,” said one retired general. “Our activities were not likely to influence many of the students.”
The one area where the United States could aid the demonstrators was the Internet. The United States had the means to keep the Iranians from shutting down the social networking and blogging sites, like Twitter, that had become a prime means for demonstrators to organize and share information.13 When Twitter announced a brief shutdown for server maintenance, the State Department successfully lobbied for the service to stay open to allow Iranians to continue communicating.14 At the American government’s request, Twitter took steps to try to actually increase connectivity
for Ira-nians.
Congressional pressure grew. Bipartisan legislation threatened such draconian measures as the punishment of any country that sold refined petroleum products to Iran. Senior officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon cautioned that such harsh measures would lead to increased attacks by Iranian surrogates in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama walked a tightrope, condemning Iran’s actions while not escalating the crisis or closing the door to a negotiated settlement on the nuclear issue.
The protests spread to other Iranian cities, but the demonstrations largely remained localized among students in Tehran. Unlike 1979, the election did not galvanize the populace as a whole and remained chiefly a dispute among the ruling elite. The regime maintained strong support in rural areas. At one point both Karroubi and Mousavi considered calling for strikes in Tehran’s bazaar, which had been critical to the downfall of the shah in 1979. Thirty years later, the bazaar remained one of the centers of power in Iran. Just the year before, merchants and traders had organized a successful general strike against a new value-added tax; it took only a few days before President Ahmadinejad reversed the decision and suspended the tax. But in the current crisis, the bazaar remained loyal or at least neutral. Without the merchants’ support, a second Iranian revolution never got off the ground. While demonstrations continued into 2010, the enthusiasm of the students waned. When in February 2010 opposition leaders flooded the Internet, attempting to rally support for massive protests during the commemoration of the 1979 return of Ayatollah Khomeini from exile and the end of the shah’s governance, a legal adviser for Mir-Hossein Mousavi said the turnout would shock the regime, but the event came and went without any significant demonstrations, as the city was ringed with police and Basij.
