The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (95 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Despite the election disturbances, Obama still held out hope for a deal on the Iranian nuclear impasse. In August 2009, Iran allowed IAEA inspectors into its nearly completed Arak heavy-water reactor and allowed expanded monitoring of its Natanz facility, which produced all of Iran’s enriched uranium. That fall, Iran asked the IAEA for help finding fuel for the small U.S.-built Tehran research reactor, which produced radioisotopes for medical use that treated about ten thousand patients a week. Supplies were slated to run out by the end of 2010. Working with the IAEA, the United States brokered an agreement for Iran to ship about 80 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be further enriched and eventually turned into fuel and sent back to Iran. The agreement was a concession by Washington in essentially acknowledging Iran’s right to enrich its own uranium, even if it was turned into fuel rods elsewhere. At the same time, the United States surprised and embarrassed Iran by publicly exposing the existence of a secret nuclear facility being built at Qom.

Under the pressure, it seemed the two sides had achieved a breakthrough. Iran formally accepted the deal in principle, setting the stage for a face-to-face meeting between U.S. and Iranian negotiators. On October 1, the chief American diplomat, Undersecretary of State William Burns, met with Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili. The two met for forty-five minutes during a break for lunch during the P-5 plus one talks in Geneva, with each side raising its concerns: the nuclear weapons program and human rights issues for the Americans; a worldwide ban on all nuclear weapons and access to peaceful nuclear energy for the Iranians. Afterward, Jalili called the discussions “good talks that will be a framework for better talks.” It all appeared encouraging. Iranian president Ahmadinejad publicly backed the deal, calling it a step forward that paved the way for the future.
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President Obama expressed guarded optimism. “We’re not interested in talking for the sake of talking. If Iran does not take steps in the near future to live up to its obligations, then the United States will not continue to negotiate indefinitely.” In discussions with the Europeans, the president looked to the end of the year for progress on Iran; if this deal fell through, Obama
would not abandon diplomacy, but he intended to turn to the stick of sanctions.

With so much at stake, Iran did an about-face and reneged on the deal. By constitutional design, the Iranian government was fractured into competing centers of power. Still reeling from the presidential election upheavals, the government simply could not make a decision on such a significant issue. The supreme leader distrusted the populist and secular Ahmadinejad and felt no inclination to accommodate the West. Ahmadinejad’s other detractors within the regime were also not inclined to hand the president a victory, and they conspired to scuttle the agreement. As John Limbert, who headed the Iran portfolio at the State Department, commented about the collapse of the deal: “It was clear that serious divisions existed in Tehran. They could not come to an agreement among themselves.”
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One Iranian diplomat expressed the sentiment differently. “Just because the negotiation team agree to terms does not mean that the government will. But before we could decide in Tehran the Americans and Europeans were already pressing for sanctions. That was not the way one showed mutual respect.”
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