The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (93 page)

The argument had merit, and over the next few months the idea of declaring the entire Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization diminished. But the consensus remained for action against the Quds Force.

The main tools available to the U.S. government were spelled out in Executive Orders such as 13224, which allowed the president to disrupt the financing of those accused of supporting terrorism or nuclear proliferation. Since the U.S. government already had comprehensive sanctions on Iran, the use of these orders would be largely symbolic. In October 2007, the president finally issued a carefully crafted order designed to target the pockets of a few Revolutionary Guard leaders. Bush declared the Quds Force to be a supporter of terrorism and the larger Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. The executive order singled out five senior guard generals,
including Qassem Suleimani, and nine guard-controlled companies. The Treasury Department then pressed for international compliance under UN Security Council Resolution 1737, which succeeded in severely hampering their ability to conduct business outside of Iran.

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s the tension increased, the administration weighed taking military action against the Quds Force and its EFP-related facilities in Iran. Vice President Cheney led the call for more aggressive action. He again raised the idea of selective force against the Iranians during the spring of 2007.
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“They are killing our troops. I don’t see why we need to tolerate that,” Cheney entreated in one principals meeting. Cheney suggested attacking the EFP factory at Mehran using Tomahawk cruise missiles, arguing that this limited action would send a strong signal to Iran. The chairman and the Joint Staff pushed back, saying that they needed to carefully examine the consequences of any strike on Iran, including possible escalation in the Gulf or increased surrogate attacks in Iraq. How far, Pace asked, would the United States be willing to go if Iran escalated the attacks by responding in Afghanistan or against the U.S. forces elsewhere in the Middle East or against the Gulf Arab states? But the vice president simply found it repugnant that Iranian operatives could kill American soldiers without any retribution. This only invited more attacks unless Iran saw a cost to be paid for its actions.
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The CENTCOM commander opposed striking Iran. General John Abizaid believed it would create even more problems, expanding a conflict with Iran at a time when the Sunni-based insurgency was at its height.
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The replacement for Abizaid at CENTCOM took things a step further. Admiral Joseph “Fox” Fallon came to Tampa from the four-star job at the Pacific Command, where he had impressed President Bush. He shared the navy’s view that Iran did not pose a significant threat. CENTCOM had exaggerated the country’s military capabilities. Self-assured in the extreme, Fallon put a halt to the planning begun by Abizaid. He believed CENTCOM needed to show more restraint and not expand a conflict that largely did not exist. He was not ignorant of the Iranian Quds Force activities and had authorized U.S. Special Operations Forces to move against some of its operations in Afghanistan, but Fallon offered no real prioritization of effort for the command and became mired in prerogatives. As one admiral commented, “Painting parking lines took on as much priority as Iran.”

In case the order ever came, Fallon’s naval commander developed a very surgical list of fewer than five discrete targets inside Iran. Using only standoff cruise missiles, the navy could easily hit all the targets at once, with a minimal prospect for collateral damage. Whether they were the right targets to halt the Iranian EFP activity remained a question in his mind, however. “These buildings did not have signs on them that said ‘Iranian EFP factory.’”
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While the U.S. government had not taken military action off the table to stop Iran’s nuclear program, Fallon publicly called these sorts of “bellicose comments” unhelpful. This angered Vice President Cheney. In his memoirs, Cheney recounted comments made by a visiting diplomat that echoed his concerns: “If you guys are going to take the military option off the table, couldn’t you at least have your secretary of state do it? When the CENTCOM commander does it, they take notice.”
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According to Cheney, Defense Secretary Gates shared a similar view of the wisdom of military action against Iran. The vice president became incensed when Gates told the Saudi king that Bush would be “impeached if he took military action against Iran.” This was not the news that either Dick Cheney or King Abdullah wanted to hear, and it “removed a key element of our leverage and convinced allies and enemies that we were less than serious about addressing the threat.”
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But news of the deliberations over striking Iran leaked out. It created a frenzy in the media as articles appeared in
Time
and the
New Yorker
, among others, all reporting the United States was set to attack Iran and would use the excuse of Iraq to destroy its nuclear facilities. The recently established Office of Iranian Affairs at the State Department looked like a son of Shulsky’s Office of Special Plans in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
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In truth, attacks on the nuclear sites were never seriously contemplated; the debate centered on a limited military response to Iranian-sponsored attacks inside Iraq. But this distinction failed to make it to the public debate, as detractors of the administration such as reporter Seymour Hersh touted the drumbeat of the next war. “Like a clock, Hersh is right twice a day,” said Elliott Abrams dismissively.

America’s aggressive actions in Iraq did bring Iran back to the bargaining table. Beginning in late 2006, Iran relayed through the Iraqi government a desire to talk with the Americans. Iran hoped to get more official recognition for its interests in Iraq and end the U.S. Special Forces onslaught on its
agents. Whether to accept the offer to talk divided the administration. Rice thought Iran could help stabilize Iraq, as it had Afghanistan in 2001. Cheney expressed reservations about talking to Iran, seeing it as a reward for its bad behavior in Iraq. But Rice convinced the president to endorse this diplomatic effort, in tandem with Prime Minister al-Maliki, to broker an agreement, and Washington agreed to the talks. “The purpose is to try to make sure that the Iranians play a productive role in Iran,” said a White House spokesman.
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For the Americans, the task of heading up the talks fell to Ryan Crocker, ambassador to Iraq and a veteran of Iran negotiations. Crocker had arrived at the embassy in Baghdad in March 2007. His first impression of the situation in Iraq was that it looked eerily like the Lebanon he had left in the 1980s, with Iran and Syria strategically collaborating against the United States. But Iraq was not like Lebanon. While al-Maliki remained friendly with Iran, he hated the country at the same time. “It was another example of the complexities of the Iran-Iraq War, where most of the fighting was done by Shia for a Sunni Arab regime against a Shia Persian one,” Crocker observed.

Crocker knew of the discussions about military strikes against Iran but never viewed them as serious and would have opposed them. If the United States wanted to impact the regime, it could exploit the ethnic divisions by supporting the Kurds or Baluchis. “That would have really terrified the Iranians.” Others outside the government, such as Michael Ledeen, thought the U.S. government never would approve that strategy. But Crocker fully backed the effort to round up the Quds Forces inside Iraq.

On May 28, 2007, Crocker met with his Iranian counterpart, Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi, in Prime Minister al-Maliki’s office. Al-Maliki introduced the two men, and they moved to a conference room. Al-Maliki sat at the head of the polished table as moderator, with Crocker and Qomi squaring off on opposite sides. Qomi had served in the Revolutionary Guard, and his appointment indicated the commanding role that the Quds Force and Suleimani played in Iraq.
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Crocker held out little hope for the talks. They lacked the openness that marked his previous meetings in Geneva, and the Iranian ambassador
operated under a tight rein. Any time Crocker raised an issue that was not on his talking points, Qomi asked for a break to call back to Tehran for instructions. Muddled American objectives undermined the talks too. The United States wanted to gain Iran’s assistance in supporting the Iraqi government while chastising it for the Quds Force operations in Iraq. The two contradictory goals confused the Iranians. The Iranian ambassador raised the detention of the Quds Force fighters only one time, doing so in a lecture positing that “the totally unwarranted detention of these businesspeople was an indication of America’s hostile attitude.”

Crocker repeatedly tried to talk about Iran’s unhelpful actions inside Iraq. “They need to cease,” he said. But Qomi refused to accept the premise of Crocker’s argument. Iran countered with a proposal to form a trilateral mechanism including Iran, Iraq, and the United States to coordinate security issues in Iraq. And Qomi offered Iranian support to rebuild the Iraqi military. Crocker agreed to forward the ideas to Washington, although he knew they would be a nonstarter at the White House. At the end of the meeting, both sides held separate press conferences and agreed the talks had been polite, but little else.
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On July 24, the two diplomats met again at al-Maliki’s office. Iran sent its deputy national security chief—a Revolutionary Guard officer—who stayed in al-Maliki’s offices one floor up, so when Qomi had a question, he paused the talks and scurried up to ask him. The unvarnished talks failed to produce any headway. While both sides professed support for a democratically elected government in Baghdad, each side accused the other of fomenting the violence in Iraq. Once again they adjourned without any progress. Both sides discussed a third round of talks, but the Iranian delegation kept shifting the date, agreeing to one one day and changing its mind the next. In the end, talks about talks faded away.
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The failure of the talks frustrated al-Maliki. He confided to Crocker that Iran had not taken the talks seriously.

To try to undermine the Americans, the brother of the Revolutionary Guard commander, Salman Safavi, tried to work the American embassy in London. In August 2007, he participated in a group discussion and expressed the guard’s interest in talking about security and the nuclear program. While he admitted that Iran had provided material aid to Shia in Iraq, he offered Iran’s support to help in security. But he said that any American designation of the guard as a terrorist organization would preclude cooperation. This transparent ploy did not impress the Americans, and Safavi failed to haggle Iran’s way out of further sanctions.
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A
s Secretary Gates had predicted, Iran overplayed its hand in Iraq. In the aftermath of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, in which the Iranian-backed militia performed well, a self-assured Quds Force decided to
expand the distribution of weapons in Iraq in hopes of inflicting grievous losses on the United States.
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The Iranian-backed Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq eagerly stepped up its attacks. Iran formed new special groups comprising four to ten men under the command of long-term Iranian agents, who frequently did Iran’s bidding but just as frequently freelanced or operated as assassins for hire.
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Iran miscalculated. As Iranian weapons flowed in, they fueled inter-Shia fighting. In 2007, fighting broke out in Karbala between rival Shia groups armed by Iran. Two Badr-affiliated governors were assassinated with Iranian-provided EFPs. Quds Force commander Suleimani stepped in to ease tensions. Al-Maliki appealed to the Iranians to halt the weapons flow and rein in al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi militia, which was frequently uncooperative with the Iraqi government. Iran denied providing weapons, but Suleimani ordered weapons provided only to select trusted groups.
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In March 2008, al-Maliki lost his patience with the lawlessness in Basra and sent ten thousand troops against al-Sadr. With no coordination with the Americans, the resulting battle turned into a stalemate until American and Iraqi reinforcements arrived and al-Maliki continued the offensive. His forces uncovered caches of newly arrived Iranian weapons; one stash alone had more than a thousand mortar rounds and thirty-three blocks of plastic explosives. A cease-fire occurred when Iran stepped in to broker a deal. During two days of meetings in Tehran, Suleimani negotiated a cease-fire between al-Sadr and al-Maliki. Crocker noted the irony of it all: Suleimani had been asked to “sort out the chaos that he has been instrumental in creating and perpetuating.”
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But al-Maliki viewed Iranian actions as designed to undermine his government and pressed both Tehran and Washington to cut off funds for the Iranian-backed special groups. In October 2008, Iraqi forces engaged in a firefight with five likely Quds Force operatives who had recently infiltrated across the border, wounding two.
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This hardly ended Iran’s significant role behind the scenes in Iraq and in the government. But Iran’s role in fueling the violence among the Shia had been exposed, forcing both Suleimani and the Iranian government to scale back their operations and temporarily cut funding for pro-Iranian political parties in Iraq.

The U.S. Special Operations Forces never fully shut down the Iranian networks. They killed Iraqi militia at the cyclic rate, seriously disrupted their operations, and destroyed their safe havens. Many fled to Iran. On September 20, 2007, the U.S. military rolled up another Quds Force officer during a raid
at a hotel in the Kurdish region; the man had been involved in smuggling EFPs into Iraq. Suleimani ordered his officers to keep a lower profile and withdrew some back into Iran to avoid capture. But by the end of 2008, at the close of the Bush administration, they began trickling back into Iraq as the surge ended. U.S. soldiers continued to run across their handiwork, uncovering Iraqis trained in Iran as snipers and bomb makers.
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But the ties that bound the neighboring Shia remained too strong. As the United States withdrew forces, Iran’s surrogate network remained.