The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (85 page)

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n a bright winter day with the National Mall covered in a dusting of snow, George Bush gave his second inaugural address. That fall, the president had comfortably won reelection, and after four years in the White House as a wartime president, Bush showed more confidence in himself and his core beliefs. The president wanted this inaugural address to be more than a litany of policy objectives. He wanted a grand statement about his vision, a Bush Doctrine, and he termed this “the freedom speech.”

That day President Bush outlined a national manifest destiny to spread freedom and democracy. This was not only a historical calling of the United States, he argued, but it had become a security imperative: “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny, prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power.” Only freedom and liberty would break this hatred. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” Bush said. The ultimate goal of his manifesto was nothing less than “ending tyranny in our world.” The idea had fermented in the president’s mind after 9/11 and in the lead-up to attacking Iraq. Free elections in Iraq had lit the spark, one that would sweep across the Middle East, and “one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world,” he said.
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While Bush never mentioned Iran in his inaugural address, the Islamic Republic would be the target of the new freedom campaign. The United States would throw its support behind democratic reformers inside Iran and those external activists advocating for the same reforms. Bush raised this directly the following month during the State of the Union address, on February 2, 2005. “And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”
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President Bush’s freedom agenda was grounded in both idealism and realism. His idealism sprang from his religious beliefs. “Freedom is a universal gift from the Almighty,” Bush wrote in his memoirs.
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But building on a widely accepted American political science theory that democracies don’t fight each other, he believed that spreading freedom would strengthen American security. Bush frequently cited Japan to defend his view. Sixty years earlier, the current prime minister’s father served in the imperial government while Bush’s own father had been a navy pilot fighting that very regime. Now Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was a friend of the American president’s and the Japanese government a staunch ally of the United States.

Neoconservatives both inside and outside the government embraced the president’s words, especially at the influential conservative Washington think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Just after Bush’s reelection, on November 10, 2004, Israeli minister and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky spoke there, along with conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. The gathering highlighted Sharansky’s new book,
The Case for Democracy
, in which the Israeli outlined America’s new manifest destiny. The free world’s—and especially America’s—policy should be the expansion of democracy, he argued. As during the Cold War, individual liberty provided the best means to combat tyranny. Not surprisingly, Sharansky believed the main effort in the push for democracy should be in the Middle East, where authoritarian regimes predominated. Sharansky’s thesis got him an invitation to the Oval Office, where Bush affirmed that the book encapsulated his views on foreign policy regarding the war in Iraq and the larger Middle East. “In
The Case for Democracy
,” reported
Time
, “Bush found validation for his central theory about Iraq: give people liberty, and they will thrive.”
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Implementing the new freedom agenda fell to a reshuffled foreign policy team as appointees great and small headed back to the private sector, replaced by new hires. While Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld remained among the president’s chief triumvirate, the third, Colin Powell (as well as his
deputy, Richard Armitage), left the Department of State, replaced there by Condoleezza Rice. Stephen Hadley fleeted up to be national security adviser, with a new cast of more junior officials on the National Security Council. Two of the principal officials in the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, headed to positions at the World Bank and academe, respectively, with the latter replaced by the conservative diplomat Eric Edelman, who had recently served as ambassador to Turkey and the vice president’s national security adviser. William Luti headed over to the White House to run defense policy for Hadley; he was replaced at Defense by an abrasive retired army brigadier general, Mark Kimmitt, who had recently retired after a contentious tour at CENTCOM as a deputy to the chief planner.

The new secretary of state, Condi Rice, instantly became the most important person in American foreign policy. Overshadowed in the first term by bureaucratic heavyweights, like the president she had grown in both experience and self-confidence. With her close, personal rapport with Bush, Rice had the ear of the Oval Office, and everyone in Washington knew it or assumed it. “There was only one voice in American foreign policy in the second term,” John Bolton said: “Secretary Rice.”
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She too embraced Bush’s freedom vision. In one of her first major speeches on the Middle East, before an audience at the American University in Cairo, Rice stated, “For sixty years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East—and we achieved neither.” In a haughty tone, she dismissed the foreign policies of nine previous presidents. She placed longtime authoritarian allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt on notice that a new wind of freedom was about to blow through the Middle East. “We should all look to a future when every government respects the will of its citizens—because the ideal of democracy is universal.”
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As for Iran, which had an electoral process far more vibrant than the stalwart American ally in whose country she delivered her lecture, the secretary dismissed its democratic process: “The appearance of elections does not mask the organized cruelty of Iran’s theocratic state. The Iranian people are capable of liberty. They desire liberty. And they deserve liberty. The time has come for the unelected few to release their grip on the aspirations of the proud people of Iran.”

The new team under Rice at Foggy Bottom grasped how woefully unprepared the Foreign Service had become regarding Iran. There had been no embassy in the country for nearly thirty years, and so no incentive or career
track for the Foreign Service to focus on Iran. Few bothered studying Farsi, and the diplomats with any firsthand experience in Iran had grown gray and all but disappeared. The State Department had one Foreign Service officer, Henry Wooster, working part-time on Iran under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. There was a handful of old-timers who had served in Iran, but the department had grown devoid of Iranian experts. “We have a problem,” the new number three man at the State Department, Nicholas Burns, told Rice.

Nicholas Burns headed the Iran effort for Rice at the State Department. Thin, articulate, and polished, the career Foreign Service officer had recently served as the ambassador to NATO in Brussels, where he secured European support for the mission in Afghanistan. In one of her first assignments to Burns, Rice directed him to make Iran his priority, both developing a new policy and improving the department’s expertise.

With Rice’s support, Burns pressed to develop a career track for Iranian experts with the Foreign Service. To do this, he took a page from history. During the 1920s, when the United States did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the State Department established Riga Station, where Russian-speaking officers sat and monitored events in the Soviet Union. When the United States finally opened a mission in the 1930s, these men formed the nucleus of the new diplomats in Moscow. Rice and Burns decided to take a similar action with Iran by establishing an Iranian regional presence office in the American consulate in Dubai, where Iranians could obtain visas and Farsi-speaking diplomats could be stationed and interact with the many Iranians who traveled to the relatively open and unrestrained emirate city. State officials built a supporting website to mimic similar ones by real embassies that provided information on the United States for Iranian citizens. Under the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, a new Office of Iranian Affairs was formed. If the U.S. government ever reopened an embassy in Iran, the Foreign Service officers manning this office would provide the vanguard of new American diplomats.
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I
ran came to the forefront on Rice’s first trip overseas as secretary of state in early February 2005. In his second term, President Bush was eager to repair the damage to American-European relations caused by the invasion of Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld’s deriding referrals to Germany and France as “Old Europe.” He traveled to Europe in what became known as the “olive branch”
trip and met with both French and German leaders in Brussels and Mainz. Traveling with the president, Rice expected to hear about Iraq, as most of the Europeans, especially German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, had stridently opposed the U.S. invasion. Instead, Iran’s nuclear program topped the Europeans’ agenda. The Europeans wanted American backing for the ongoing “EU-3” (Germany, France, and the United Kingdom) talks about halting Iranian uranium enrichment.

The United States had not participated in the talks. Colin Powell had kept in close contact with the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and helped guide the discussions in ways acceptable to Washington, but the administration remained opposed to talking with Iran. “Iran is aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons under cover of an openly declared peaceful nuclear energy program,” one 2003 NSC paper concluded. But the Bush White House offered no other avenue to redress the Iranian nuclear program. Now, with a new era of rapport across the Atlantic, the president agreed to support the European diplomatic effort to resolve the Iranian nuclear program peacefully. For the Germans, this new rhetoric by the U.S. government supporting their talks with the Iranians went a long way in repairing the damage over the Iraq invasion.

At the request of the Europeans, Rice extended a goodwill gesture to the Iranians. She agreed to drop the U.S. objections to Iran’s application to the World Trade Organization and to allow the export of spare parts for American-made Iranian civilian airliners. While the secretary of state refused to take regime change off the public table, military action “is simply not on the agenda at this point,” she said during a press conference.
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“I want you to lead this effort and work with the Europeans,” Rice said to Burns in a meeting in her seventh-floor office. Burns remained skeptical about negotiating with Iran, but he threw his energy behind the public diplomacy drive envisioned by Rice to work to resolve the nuclear impasse. Just three weeks after his confirmation, Burns traveled to Europe and met with his German, French, and British counterparts actually negotiating with the Iranians. While there remained limits on what the United States would accept, Iran had to stop enrichment as the precondition. Burns offered additional carrots should Iran decide to cooperate, while pressing the European Union to curtail the transfer of technology needed by Tehran to build its nuclear program.

Iran’s nuclear program had worried Washington for the past decade. U.S.
intelligence had suspected Iran’s nuclear aspirations since the early 1990s. In General John Shalikashvili’s 1993 confirmation hearings for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he told the Senate that Iran would likely be able to produce a nuclear weapon in eight to ten years. This number kept shifting, so as late as 2004, the United States still predicted it would take eight to ten years.
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In 2002, Iranian dissidents publicly exposed two unreported Iranian nuclear facilities: a heavy-water facility at Arak and a deep underground uranium enrichment complex at Natanz. While Iran had not been required to report these under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, subsequent investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency showed a pattern of obfuscation by the Iranians regarding their program. While Iran continued to maintain the peaceful purposes of its nuclear efforts, a contrite President Khatami agreed to suspend uranium enrichment in October 2003 and to allow more stringent inspections.

The nuclear program remained popular with the Iranian people. Clandestine polling by the State Department revealed that over 80 percent of the population agreed with the government’s pursuit of peaceful nuclear power. And while the populace did not believe the government intended to produce a nuclear weapon, even on that there remained strong support. Many Iranians mouthed a common refrain: if Israel and Pakistan could have the bomb, then why not Iran?

After the Iran-Iraq War, Iran embarked on a “self-sufficiency jihad” to achieve energy independence. Ayatollah Khamenei added a vision of Iran as a leader in technology, which the nuclear program supported. Nuclear power would allow for great diversification of Iran’s energy needs, especially as declining output from some of its oil fields fueled concern within the government about Iran’s long-term export capacity. The new nuclear power plants would allow the country to keep up with electricity demand that grew at 8 to 9 percent each year. Iran relies on natural gas and oil for 85 percent of its power generation, and reducing this dependency would allow greater self-sufficiency. Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War heightened concerns about Iranian dependency on the West. Iranian officials wanted domestic enrichment capabilities so they would not have to rely on uranium sources from outside countries, which could conceivably withhold it from Iran in the event of a dispute.