The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (80 page)

Generals Pace, Myers, and Franks accepted the assumptions that invading Iraq would have a coercive effect on Iran. The closest the Pentagon came to interrogating this occurred just before the war began. A panel of experts met at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., to look at the impact of Saddam’s overthrow on the Gulf region. Middle East expert Judith Yaphe said that it would not convince Iran to change its behavior, and a long war and occupation of Iraq would undermine American goals.
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But her views never resonated within the halls of power, and no one believed Iran would actually see the U.S. action as an opportunity to expand its influence.

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or Iranian leaders, the prospect of the U.S. Army positioned in yet another adjacent country unsettled both reformers and hard-liners. Having suffered nearly a million casualties at the hands of invading Iraqis, Tehran viewed a friendly government in Baghdad as critical to its security. If the Americans removed their old archrival Saddam Hussein, the Iranians wanted to have a say in shaping the new government. They hoped to duplicate the cooperative spirit of Afghanistan in this new war on their western border and decided to reengage with the United States, despite having cut off talks following the “axis of evil” remark.

In September 2002, Javad Zarif arrived in New York as Iran’s new ambassador to the United Nations. With the Iraq war drums beating ever louder in Washington, Zarif turned again to the president of the American Iranian Council, Hooshang Amirahmadi, who had continued to advocate rapprochement between his country of birth and his adoptive land. The month before the September 11 attacks, he had flown to California to meet with Reagan-era secretary of state George Shultz. Sitting out on Shultz’s patio under the warm sun and with the wine flowing, the two men agreed that if Hooshang could get a senior Iran official to unequivocally declare a desire to normalize relations with the United States, Shultz would use his influence with the new national security adviser to get Washington to reciprocate. While the terrorist attacks changed Shultz’s views, Amirahmadi remained committed to the idea.

In September, Zarif’s house in New York took center stage for these back-channel talks. Amirahmadi brought five prominent former American
diplomats, including Ambassadors Richard Murphy and Thomas Pickering, to meet with the Iranian ambassador. Zarif did most of the talking.

His government had neither rejected nor endorsed normalization with the United States. The supreme leader was not ideologically opposed to the idea, Zarif said, but he did not believe it served Iran’s interests. “Distrust is so deep and thick in U.S.-Iran relations,” the Iranian diplomat added. This included the American side, Zarif continued, where a strong anti-Iranian lobby prevailed due to the Israelis.

Before traveling to New York, the seasoned diplomat Tom Pickering met with William Burns, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, at the department’s headquarters in Washington. Burns said that the administration was prepared to normalize relations so long as Iran took concrete steps to halt its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and to end support to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Pickering passed this on to Zarif, saying that Iran needed to show the political will to do these things and to be prepared to discuss “substantive issues.” Zarif agreed, but added that, for this to happen, the United States needed to show a degree of goodwill itself, which had been conspicuously absent thus far from the Bush administration.

The same group met again later that month for dinner at Zarif’s residence. While staffers for two senators, Democrat Joseph Biden and Republican Chuck Hagel, joined Amirahmadi’s delegation, Iran dramatically raised the meeting’s profile by including its senior diplomat, foreign minister Dr. Kamal Kharrazi, a moderate within the Iranian government and firmly in the Khatami reformist camp. Over dinner, both sides talked about the need for improved relations, but all, especially Kharrazi, expressed extreme pessimism that it would ever happen. Finally, toward the end of the meal, Amirahmadi cut to the chase and bluntly asked the Iranian foreign minister: “Dr. Kharrazi, please tell us in the clearest possible language if Iran wishes to normalize relations with the U.S.?”

After a long pause, Kharrazi responded empathically, “Yes! We are ready to normalize relations.” He added that his government was willing to discuss all the problems that exist between the two nations. The only caveat Kharrazi had for the bargain was for political cover at home: his government needed Washington to take the first step with a positive, public gesture. For the first time since 1979, a senior Iranian official had proclaimed Iran’s willingness to end twenty years of hostility.

That evening, Amirahmadi, Kharrazi, and Zarif continued talking well into the morning hours about the next step. Amirahmadi agreed to sponsor a conference in which Burns and Kharrazi would meet, and the two men would issue joint statements about the need for better relations between the two nations.

Amirahmadi and Pickering met with Burns, Crocker, and the National Security Council’s director for Iraq and Iran, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had carefully tracked both the Dobbins and the Crocker meetings. He had been considered to head the Crocker track, but a divided White House viewed Khalilzad as too high profile to meet with the Iranians at that time. While a hawk on Iran, he listened carefully as Amirahmadi recounted Kharrazi’s statement about normalization and his proposed conference and joint declarations.

“Did the supreme leader approve this?” Khalilzad asked.

“No, but knowing Dr. Kharrazi, I do not believe he would have made any gesture of such magnitude without the knowledge and consent of the leader,” Amirahmadi replied.

Khalilzad liked what he heard. “In principle, there is no problem with the proposal, but I need to consult with my superiors before I can give a definite answer.”

Meanwhile, Zarif and Amirahmadi connived on a joint U.S.-Iran effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Both men agreed that they shared a common enemy in Iraq; the national interests of Iran and the United States were better served by cooperating as they had in Afghanistan. Iran agreed to aid the U.S. military by offering details about the Iraqi military and its weapons of mass destruction programs, permitting use of its airspace to strike Iraq, and providing humanitarian assistance in case of a refugee crisis. But the real goal went beyond just the war. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein merely served as the launching pad to grasp the brass ring: an end to two decades of hostility between Washington and Tehran.

“The idea was a grand bargain,” Amirahmadi later said. In return for Iran’s assistance, Washington would publicly advocate for normalized relations, and this would usher in negotiations that would address not only Iran’s support for terrorism, but the end of two decades of punitive economic and financial sanctions against Iran.

Ryan Crocker soon became well acquainted with Ambassador Zarif and the ideas behind this grand bargain. In September 2002, Zarif arrived in
Paris and took over the meetings with Crocker. Unlike the earlier wide-ranging talks with the Revolutionary Guard officers, Zarif arrived with specific talking points to pass to Crocker. While this clearly represented a more formal, structured dialogue controlled by Iran’s foreign minister, privately Crocker viewed Zarif’s arrival as a downgrading of the talks on the part of Tehran. “This was not a channel that they attached the significance to as they had at the outset.”
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Zarif lacked the gravitas of his predecessors. More important to Crocker, as a Western-educated reformist, Zarif lacked a connection with the real power brokers in Tehran: the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guard.

Over the next three meetings Zarif relayed to Crocker his government’s desire to expand the talks beyond Afghanistan to include Iraq. His talking points tracked closely with the scheme drafted with Amirahmadi in New York, which he no doubt hoped was also relayed back to the State Department. Zarif began by expressing concern that, in the event of war, Iraq might launch chemical weapons at Iran. He discussed the ideas about working together with the United States in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. What had worked in Afghanistan, he told Crocker, could work again against another common foe.

Crocker dutifully relayed the Iraqi proposal back to Washington. Two days before Christmas, with most of official Washington on vacation, Bush’s senior foreign policy team gathered in the White House Situation Room for a hasty meeting to discuss the proposal. They agreed that the NSC would draft a set of talking points for Crocker to relay to the Iranians and that the principals would reconvene after the new year to decide on how best to respond to the Iranian overture.

At the next meeting in Geneva, Zarif wanted to know what the United States would do about the MEK, the People’s Mujahideen of Iran. This quasi-Islamic leftist guerrilla movement remained dedicated to overthrowing the shah and now the Islamic Republic, and Saddam Hussein gave the group sanctuary. It had conducted many terrorist attacks and was credited with the first improvised explosive device attacks in the Middle East, which nearly killed an American brigadier general in the 1970s. The U.S. government designated the MEK a terrorist organization in 1997; Iran worried the United States secretly wanted to use it to destabilize the Iranian regime.

“All you have to do is look at our stated policy; we don’t support terrorists,” Crocker responded.
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But Zarif remained skeptical and listed public
comments from influential neoconservatives that indicated the United States might use the MEK as a liberation force.

Iran’s worries had merit. Within the secretary of defense’s policy shop, some civilians did advocate using the MEK to strike at the Iranian regime, or at least to garner intelligence from inside Iran. Wolfowitz had even suggested this during a principals committee meeting. But in a rare show of resolve, Condi Rice quashed that idea. “If the United States stands for anything, it is against working with terrorists!”
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After several weeks of deliberation, the Bush administration again rejected the overtures from Zarif and Iran. An NSC document summed up the view everywhere but the State Department: “The United States should not at this point respond to overtures from the current regime, but will continue to meet with Iranian Government representatives in multilateral settings when it serves U.S. interests.” The new envoy with Crocker, Zalmay Khalilzad, would be allowed to meet with Iran, but more as a means of issuing demands. He could discuss Afghanistan and getting Iran to turn over al-Qaeda operatives, or any topic “deemed to the advantage of the United States.”
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n March 19, 2003, President Bush again took to the airwaves in a national address. This time speaking from his desk in the Oval Office, Bush opened with resolution: “My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” Actually, the night before, U.S. Special Forces had infiltrated into southern and western Iraq, the vanguard of nearly two hundred thousand American and British troops. “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly,” Bush continued. “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”

After a year and a half of discussion, Wolfowitz had achieved his long-held goal. In less than three weeks, soldiers and marines entered Baghdad, toppling the Iraqi regime. The fact that virtually every rationale made by the United States for the war, especially Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program, turned out to be wrong did not faze those who advocated the conflict. In the pursuit of this myopic policy, the Bush administration had
thrown away diplomatic openings made by Iran. Alarmed by the al-Qaeda attacks and fearful of America’s response, Iran had extended its hand to cooperate in areas where the two nations’ interests overlapped. Instead, the American government failed to develop any cohesive response or Iran strategy other than a policy that paid lip service to regime change in Tehran. In the end, this drift in American policy did nothing other than curtail rapprochement and eliminate Iran’s archrival in Baghdad. If the postwar plan for Iraq turned out to be ill conceived, with too few troops and no occupation plan, so too was the regional security calculus used by the Bush administration for the Middle East. Those who pushed for war—aided by exiles as closely affiliated with Tehran as with Washington—opened the door for Iranian expansion.

But if the Americans were not going to talk, the Iranians had no qualms about fighting. The supreme leader had never been sanguine about prospects of talking with Washington. Rather than see American troops in Iraq as a threat to the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei endorsed a Revolutionary Guard idea designed to take advantage of their contacts within the Shia majority in Iraq. America had presented an opportunity to achieve what Iran could not achieve in eight years of bloody slaughter in the 1980s. This time, much of the blood would be American.

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or Captain Robert Harward, the first two weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom had gone remarkably well. Even for an elite SEAL, he was a man of action. In his mid-forties and extremely fit, Harward was bald with a mysterious pronounced scar down the side of his face. He remained perpetually in motion, stopping only to fixate on someone with a hawklike gaze from his deep-set blue eyes. He was the senior commander of all the naval special warfare forces involved in the invasion of Iraq, and the March 20, 2003, opening night of the American onslaught had been one of the most complex operations ever undertaken by the SEALs. It entailed a simultaneous seizure of Iraq’s two offshore oil platforms and the interconnected pipes and pumping stations on nearby al-Faw Peninsula—the mud spit of land that had been such a key and bloody battlefield during the Iran-Iraq War. U.S. intelligence had feared that Saddam would destroy this important centerpiece of Iraq’s economy either to deprive the Americans of it or to create an environmental disaster in the Persian Gulf by dumping millions of barrels of oil into the open ocean. After months of planning and rehearsing, the SEALs’ operation had gone off perfectly. Without a single U.S. casualty and only sporadic resistance, they safeguarded all of Iraq’s southern oil exports. After that, Harward dispatched his forces to search more than one hundred ships in
the waterways off Kuwait and Iraq and sent reconnaissance teams and snipers to help the marines who, by early April, were already on the outskirts of Baghdad.