by Jay Solomon
“An effective policy on Iraq offers the United States an opportunity to endanger and ultimately triumph over Iran’s Islamic Revolution as well,” Wurmser wrote in the 1999 book, which drew almost no notice at the time. “Launching a policy and resolutely carrying it through until it razes Saddam’s Baathism to the ground will send terrifying shock waves through Tehran.” He argued that Iraq’s Shiite population would emerge as a rival to Tehran’s government.
In a broader sense, this challenge to Iran, Wurmser wrote, could lead to the undermining of Tehran’s political and religious legitimacy and break apart its regional system of alliances, known as the “resistance axis,” which comprised Syria’s Assad regime and the militant groups fighting Israel: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Wurmser argued that this alliance was among the largest sources of anti-American and anti-Western terrorism and militancy in the world, and Iran was its powerful core. Any weakening of Tehran, he argued, would fray this alliance and serve as the key to a new and stable Middle East, with restored American power.
“Lebanon-based terror is a major tool used by Iran and Syria to erode American prestige and regional influence,” Wurmser wrote. “For the United States, any strategy that would compromise the eclipsing influence of Iran’s revolutionary clerics…would usefully promote American interests.”
Wurmser’s short book, written in near obscurity, encapsulated the strategic rationale some in the George W. Bush administration had for invading Iraq, with a weaker Iran as the ultimate goal. Indeed, Wurmser was one of the few neoconservative strategists to last through nearly all eight years of the Bush administration, alternating between posts at the Pentagon and State Department before becoming Vice President Richard Cheney’s top Middle East advisor. During this time, the conflict he had written about in 1999 played out along the very fault lines he envisaged, though not necessarily with the outcome he predicted. A struggle between the United States and Iran for control of the Middle East was taking place with hot wars and proxy battles in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. These regional conflicts quickly eclipsed Washington’s focus on al Qaeda and Sunni extremism and exposed the limits of American strategic planning.
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IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING September 11, 2001, the U.S. conflict with Iran emerged as the largest national security challenge for both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, as hundreds of thousands of American troops occupied Iran’s neighbors Iraq and Afghanistan. American diplomats and military strategists struggled to define a coherent policy somewhere between subverting Iran and trying to negotiate with it. In 2003, Iran’s ambassador to France, a relative of Khamenei’s, sent a memo to the U.S. State Department in Washington though the Swiss ambassador, who represented American interests in Tehran. The correspondence was delivered in the months following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, which raised fears in the Iranian government that they could be the next Mideast country targeted by the Pentagon. The letter explained that Iran sought to conduct an extensive dialogue with the United States in a bid to normalize relations. Among the concessions Iran was considering making, according to a copy of the letter, was a suspension of its nuclear program, an end to arming and financing of Hezbollah and Hamas, and Iranian assistance in helping to stabilize Iraq. In return, Iran wanted normalized relations with Washington, an end to international sanctions, and guarantees the United States wouldn’t seek to promote regime change in Iran. U.S. officials didn’t believe the offer was sincere, or that it came from the top.
To this day, American and Iranian officials differ over whether Tehran’s 2003 offer was legitimate and had been approved by Supreme Leader Khamenei. Two high-ranking Iranian officials told me in interviews the memo was written by one of Khamenei’s relatives through marriage: Sadegh Kharrazi, Iran’s ambassador to France at the time. His uncle was Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi. Both had significant political cover to pursue their diplomatic initiatives because of their relationship with Iran’s most powerful man. “You think we wouldn’t have checked every paragraph with the Leader?” said an Iranian official involved in the memo’s drafting. “We would never have risked that.”
Senior members of the Bush administration, however, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, never believed that the Iranian overture was serious. If it had been, they argued, Iran would have made the offer directly through the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations or via Washington’s European allies. Hawks in the Bush administration thought the letter was floated by some Iranian diplomats as a defensive ploy to ward off a possible American attack. The letter was dismissed at the time either as a fake or as a desperate attempt to temporarily relieve U.S. pressure.
“We thought we were being set up. Dealings with Iran had severely damaged both President Reagan and Carter,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, a top White House and State Department official in the Bush administration. “We were willing to deal with Iran authoritatively. But this was not taken seriously.”
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THE RESPONSE TO THE LETTER revealed how wary the United States had grown over any communications with Tehran. This uncertainty was no help in developing a unified and coherent policy toward Iran. Rather, it exposed deep divisions within Washington’s national security establishment and fueled turf wars and ideological fights involving the State Department, Pentagon, White House, CIA, and FBI. At times these clashes produced internal charges of spying and treason, with catastrophic ramifications for the security of the United States and its allies.
Nowhere were these divisions more apparent and pronounced than in the buildup to the Iraq War. Hard-line and neoconservative strategists in the National Security Council and Pentagon believed conquering Baghdad would weaken Tehran, as outlined in Wurmser’s book. But many in the State Department and Pentagon, as well as officials in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, feared Saddam’s overthrow would only empower Tehran regionally, by removing one of its foremost enemies and opening Iraq to Iranian influence. They took the position exactly opposite to Wurmser’s, arguing that Iraq’s Shiite majority would closely align itself with Iran after Saddam’s fall—which is, in fact, what happened. “I never understood the rationale for the war when it came to the challenge of Iran,” said Michael Oren, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States during Obama’s first term. “I can remember telling members of Congress that Iran would move much closer to Israel’s borders once Baghdad fell.”
The battle over Iran policy also played out inside Washington’s intelligence services. Since 2002, evidence had been mounting that the Iranians were moving quickly toward a nuclear weapon, which could have placed the United States on a path toward war with Iran. But in late 2007, the collective offices of the United States’ sixteen American spy agencies released a report on the state of Iran’s nuclear program. The report, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), was requested by Congress and represented the most expansive study to date by the U.S. government on Tehran’s nuclear work. Its conclusions stunned the White House and Israel by arguing that Tehran had ceased a coordinated effort to develop nuclear weapons, akin to the United States’ Manhattan Project, in 2003. The NIE, according to U.S. officials, was based in part on intercepted emails and telephone calls made by the suspected head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, a Revolutionary Guard officer named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. He complained in his communications that the Iranian government had cut off funding for his operations.
The NIE sent shock waves across the international diplomatic community. Iranian president Ahmadinejad cited the study as a “gift from God” and proof that Tehran wasn’t secretly developing nuclear weapons. Many White House officials and allies in Israel, France, and Britain, meanwhile, believed the intelligence report ended the possibility that the Bush administration would use military force against Iran during its final years in office.
Republicans and some officials inside the White House publi
cly charged the authors of the intelligence report with launching a policy coup against President Bush. They noted that the authors of the report, former State Department counterproliferation and terrorism experts, had been among the most vocal in challenging the intelligence assessments on Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear program in the months heading into the 2003 Iraq War. Vindicated after revelations about Iraq that showed no nuclear weapons, these officials were now seeking further payback against the hawks and the so-called neoconservatives in the Bush administration, and trying to prevent another war.
“You couldn’t read the key judgments [of the report] and not assume that this was intended to change policy,” said John Bolton, who served as President Bush’s ambassador to the UN and the State Department’s top counterproliferation official. “It shredded the Bush administration policy.”
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BARACK OBAMA FACED NO FOREIGN POLICY issue more pressing than this when he took office in 2009. Despite the NIE’s conclusion, Iran continued to expand and refine its ability to enrich uranium, and UN inspectors could see in the course of their regular visits to Iran that it was close to being capable of producing weapons-grade fuel. The debate focused on when—not if—this might happen, and whether Tehran would take the risk of developing actual weapons. Obama and his aides worried Israel might make good on its threats to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, setting off a regional war. “We just thought this would be a catastrophe. We thought it would collapse the painstaking international house of cards we built,” Benjamin Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security advisor, told me in a 2016 interview about the potential for an Israeli attack. “It would invite the Iranian response, so we’d be in the worst of all worlds.” Tehran’s support for militias fighting American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, meanwhile, placed Iran in the position of being able to either support or sabotage Obama’s plans to end the wars in those countries.
Obama administration officials say that in their first term U.S. policy toward Russia, China, and Europe was largely viewed through the lens of American efforts to gain these countries’ support for sanctioning Tehran. President Obama shelved missile-defense plans in Europe to win the Kremlin’s buy-in. American diplomats exhaustively sought to find new energy suppliers for China so that Beijing could wean itself off Iranian oil.
Obama’s White House planned to escalate sanctions by quietly building on the work begun by the Treasury Department during the Bush administration. The Treasury had already cut off Iran’s major banks and financial institutions from the global banking system, but now Washington sought to dry up Iran’s global oil exports, which, for most of the past two decades, were the second- or third-largest within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The Obama administration expanded this financial war by recruiting every country in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia to block trade with Iran and by targeting every sector of Iran’s economy.
The growth of Iran’s nuclear program, meanwhile, galvanized Washington’s and Israel’s intelligence services to use cyber attacks to thwart Tehran’s acquisition of an atomic bomb. Beginning in 2009, U.S. intelligence agencies covertly inserted a computer virus, called Stuxnet, into the computer systems controlling Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. The virus caused the destruction of thousands of Iran’s delicate centrifuges, programming them to spin erratically at supersonic speeds and eventually explode. The computer attacks are the first known use of cyber warfare against a sovereign state.
Tehran and the IRGC responded by establishing the Cyber Army in 2010 to conduct computer attacks on its domestic and international enemies. Major U.S. banks such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley sustained tens of millions of dollars in damages as a result of cyber attacks in late 2012 that U.S. officials said they traced to Iran. The Department of Justice indicted seven Revolutionary Guard hackers, one for allegedly trying to break into the control system of a New York dam.
An ugly game of spy-versus-spy intensified between the United States and its allies on one side and Iran on the other as Tehran’s nuclear program progressed. Israeli officials were convinced Iran was close to the bomb, regardless of American intelligence. Beginning in 2008, masked assailants targeted more than a half dozen Iranian nuclear scientists for assassination as they traveled through downtown Tehran commuter traffic or delivered their children to school. Many of them are memorialized at the Holy Defense Museum. Among them was Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who later became Iran’s vice president and the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. The assailants, who Iran claimed were Israeli agents, placed a magnetized bomb on the bottom of his car; Abbasi-Davani jumped out just before it detonated. He was the only scientist to survive the wave of attacks.
Iran responded by launching a string of its own terrorist attacks on U.S. and Israeli diplomats and tourists. Most of the targets were in Third World countries, such as Thailand, India, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. But in late 2011, U.S. authorities announced that they had uncovered a plot led by the IRGC to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, while he dined at a posh Georgetown restaurant, Café Milano, which was frequented by Washington politicians and diplomats.
As President Obama eyed his second term, there were growing fears in both Tehran and Washington that all-out war could break out because of the escalating nature of the tit-for-tat conflict. In response to the sanctions and assassinations, U.S. officials said, Iran was using Hezbollah to take aggressive positions across the Middle East in 2011 and 2012 in a bid to hedge against Western aggression. But it was a battle that neither the Americans nor the Iranians believed they could sustain. On the American side, President Obama was loath to open a third major war in the Middle East in a little over a decade and thought even more sanctions might provoke Iran rather than bring the regime to its knees. For Iran’s rulers, even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, there was a growing belief that Iran’s economy could be bankrupted by the U.S. financial war, which was already in full swing. In a little over three years, Iran’s international financial transactions had collapsed by around 80 percent, while the value of its currency, the rial, had fallen by nearly 70 percent against the U.S. dollar. Nonetheless, Tehran remained defiant and dangerous.
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THE AMERICAN INVASIONS OF IRAQ and Afghanistan dominated global headlines and cost the United States thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. The emergence of China, India, and Russia as economic and military powers captivated the Pentagon’s long-term strategic planners. And the specter of al Qaeda terrorism continued to weigh on the American public. But over the past fifteen years, no single country has influenced the U.S. foreign policy agenda so aggressively or has so directly threatened American allies across the Middle East as Iran and its theocratic leadership.
Although the nature of the U.S. conflict with Iran has been highly visible in many ways, played out in the exhaustive diplomatic efforts Washington has pursued to curb Tehran’s nuclear program and choke off its finances, much of the conflict has played out covertly, in the shadows, and in ways most Americans never saw or comprehended. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan devolved into proxy battles between the United States and Iran, with the two sides overtly and secretly supporting opposing political parties and militias. The wave of revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa beginning in late 2010—the so-called Arab Spring—fractured the region and led to a new fight between the United States and Iran for influence in a rapidly shifting political landscape. This competition has played out in Lebanon, Yemen, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, and Bahrain.
Nowhere has the fallout from this U.S.-Iranian standoff been more tragic, though, than in Syria, where Iran and the IRGC have propped up and armed President Bashar al-Assad against a nationwide political revolt that’s descended into civil war and left as many as half a million Syrians dead. The chaos has allowed Sunni extremists, in particular the Islamic State, to fill the power
vacuum. Iran’s ability to save the Assad government has until now provided Tehran with a major strategic victory over the United States and its allies. The United States, conversely, appeared powerless to stop the carnage in Syria (if not uninterested in doing so), providing only limited supplies to a rebel movement it never entirely trusted.
The conflict between the United States and Iran has grown ever more intense and sophisticated over the past decade. This book, based on interviews and reporting trips across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States over the past five years, sheds light on just how far Tehran and Washington have gone to combat each other’s roles in the Middle East since 9/11. It also shows the enormous costs both sides have borne in a competition that continues to this day.
Many in America and Iran are intent on turning the page. But the fifteen years of the Iran wars have been an exercise in engaging an enemy we don’t fully understand or trust. Negotiating the future of the relationship from a point of such uncertainty, Washington and Tehran face dubious prospects for moving forward peacefully.
