THE NEW YORKER: “THE
REDIRECTION, A STRATEGIC SHIFT”
(I)
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
Is the Administration's
new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
A Strategic Shift In
the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has
deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public
diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly
shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some
inside the White House have called the new strategy, has
brought the United States closer to an open confrontation
with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a
widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni
Muslims.
To undermine Iran,
which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has
decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the
Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated
with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in
clandestine operations that are intended to weaken
Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran.
The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed
at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities
has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that
espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to
America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
One contradictory
aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the
insurgent violence directed at the American military has
come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the
Administration's perspective, the most profound - and
unintended - strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the
empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has
made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel
and his country's right to pursue its nuclear program, and
last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, said on state television that "realities in the
region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and
its allies, will be the principal loser in the region."
After the revolution of
1979 brought a religious government to power, the United
States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with
the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and
Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the
September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the
Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came
from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before
the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials,
influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a
Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance
to Sunni extremists, since Iraq's Shiite majority had been
oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from
the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi
Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for
years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has
forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated
government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The new American
policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that
there is "a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,"
separating "reformers" and "extremists"; she pointed to the
Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran,
Syria, and Hezbollah were "on the other side of that
divide." (Syria's Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi
sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, "have made their choice and
their choice is to destabilize."
Some of the core
tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The
clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases,
by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by
finding other ways to work around the normal congressional
appropriations process, current and former officials close
to the Administration said.
A senior member of the
House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard
about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues
had not been adequately briefed. "We haven't got any of
this," he said. "We ask for anything going on, and they say
there's nothing. And when we ask specific questions they
say, 'We're going to get back to you.' It's so frustrating."
The key players behind
the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy
national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing
Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations
Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan,
the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been
deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and
current officials said that the clandestine side has been
guided by Cheney. (Cheney's office and the White House
declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not
respond to specific queries but said, "The United States is
not planning to go to war with Iran.")
The policy shift has
brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic
embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an
existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks,
and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel
and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region,
have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations.
The new strategy "is a
major shift in American policy - it's a sea change," a U.S.
government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The
Sunni states "were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and
there was growing resentment with our gambling on the
moderate Shiites in Iraq," he said. "We cannot reverse the
Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it."
"It seems there has
been a debate inside the government over what's the biggest
danger - Iran or Sunni radicals," Vali Nasr, a senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely
on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. "The Saudis and some in
the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat
is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This
is a victory for the Saudi line."
Martin Indyk, a senior
State Department official in the Clinton Administration who
also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that "the Middle
East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War."
Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle
East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his
opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully
aware of the strategic implications of its new policy. "The
White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq," he said.
"It's doubling the bet across the region. This could get
very complicated. Everything is upside down."
The Administration's
new policy for containing Iran seems to complicate its
strategy for winning the war in Iraq. Patrick Clawson, an
expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued, however,
that closer ties between the United States and moderate or
even radical Sunnis could put "fear" into the government of
Prime Minister Maliki and "make him worry that the Sunnis
could actually win" the civil war there. Clawson said that
this might give Maliki an incentive to cooperate with the
United States in suppressing radical Shiite militias, such
as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Even so, for the
moment, the U.S. remains dependent on the cooperation of
Iraqi Shiite leaders. The Mahdi Army may be openly hostile
to American interests, but other Shiite militias are counted
as U.S. allies. Both Moqtada al-Sadr and the White House
back Maliki. A memorandum written late last year by Stephen
Hadley, the national-security adviser, suggested that the
Administration try to separate Maliki from his more radical
Shiite allies by building his base among moderate Sunnis and
Kurds, but so far the trends have been in the opposite
direction. As the Iraqi Army continues to founder in its
confrontations with insurgents, the power of the Shiite
militias has steadily increased.
Flynt Leverett, a
former Bush Administration National Security Council
official, told me that "there is nothing coincidental or
ironic" about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. "The
Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more
dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to
American interests in Iraq, when - if you look at the actual
casualty numbers - the punishment inflicted on America by
the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude," Leverett
said. "This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps
to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some
point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration
will have an open door to strike at them."
President George W.
Bush, in a speech on January 10th, partially spelled out
this approach. "These two regimes" - Iran and Syria - "are
allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to
move in and out of Iraq," Bush said. "Iran is providing
material support for attacks on American troops. We will
disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow
of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and
destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and
training to our enemies in Iraq."
In the following weeks,
there was a wave of allegations from the Administration
about Iranian involvement in the Iraq war. On February 11th,
reporters were shown sophisticated explosive devices,
captured in Iraq, that the Administration claimed had come
from Iran. The Administration's message was, in essence,
that the bleak situation in Iraq was the result not of its
own failures of planning and execution but of Iran's
interference.
The U.S. military also
has arrested and interrogated hundreds of Iranians in Iraq.
"The word went out last August for the military to snatch as
many Iranians in Iraq as they can," a former senior
intelligence official said. "They had five hundred locked up
at one time. We're working these guys and getting
information from them. The White House goal is to build a
case that the Iranians have been fomenting the insurgency
and they've been doing it all along - that Iran is, in fact,
supporting the killing of Americans." The Pentagon
consultant confirmed that hundreds of Iranians have been
captured by American forces in recent months. But he told me
that that total includes many Iranian humanitarian and aid
workers who "get scooped up and released in a short time,"
after they have been interrogated.
"We are not planning
for a war with Iran," Robert Gates, the new Defense
Secretary, announced on February 2nd, and yet the atmosphere
of confrontation has deepened. According to current and
former American intelligence and military officials, secret
operations in Lebanon have been accompanied by clandestine
operations targeting Iran. American military and
special-operations teams have escalated their activities in
Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon
consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence
official, have also crossed the border in pursuit of Iranian
operatives from Iraq.
At Rice's Senate
appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of
Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to
cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a
pursuit. "Obviously, the President isn't going to rule
anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take
down these networks in Iraq," Rice said, adding, "I do think
that everyone will understand that - the American people and
I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is
necessary to protect our forces."
The ambiguity of Rice's
reply prompted a response from Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel,
a Republican, who has been critical of the Administration:
Some of us remember
1970, Madam Secretary. And that was Cambodia. And when our
government lied to the American people and said, "We didn't
cross the border going into Cambodia," in fact we did.
I happen to know
something about that, as do some on this committee. So,
Madam Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy
that the President is talking about here, it's very, very
dangerous.
The Administration's
concern about Iran's role in Iraq is coupled with its
long-standing alarm over Iran's nuclear program. On Fox News
on January 14th, Cheney warned of the possibility, in a few
years, "of a nuclear-armed Iran, astride the world's supply
of oil, able to affect adversely the global economy,
prepared to use terrorist organizations and/or their nuclear
weapons to threaten their neighbors and others around the
world." He also said, "If you go and talk with the Gulf
states or if you talk with the Saudis or if you talk with
the Israelis or the Jordanians, the entire region is
worried.... The threat Iran represents is growing."
The Administration is
now examining a wave of new intelligence on Iran's weapons
programs. Current and former American officials told me that
the intelligence, which came from Israeli agents operating
in Iran, includes a claim that Iran has developed a
three-stage solid-fuelled intercontinental missile capable
of delivering several small warheads - each with limited
accuracy - inside Europe. The validity of this human
intelligence is still being debated.
A similar argument
about an imminent threat posed by weapons of mass
destruction - and questions about the intelligence used to
make that case - formed the prelude to the invasion of Iraq.
Many in Congress have greeted the claims about Iran with
wariness; in the Senate on February 14th, Hillary Clinton
said, "We have all learned lessons from the conflict in
Iraq, and we have to apply those lessons to any allegations
that are being raised about Iran. Because, Mr. President,
what we are hearing has too familiar a ring and we must be
on guard that we never again make decisions on the basis of
intelligence that turns out to be faulty."
Still, the Pentagon is
continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack
on Iran, a process that began last year, at the direction of
the President. In recent months, the former intelligence
official told that a special planning group has been
established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran
that can be implemented, upon orders from the President,
within twenty-four hours.
In the past month, I
was told by an Air Force adviser on targeting and the
Pentagon consultant on terrorism, the Iran planning group
has been handed a new assignment: to identify targets in
Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants
in Iraq. Previously, the focus had been on the destruction
of Iran's nuclear facilities and possible regime change.
Two carrier strike
groups - the Eisenhower and the Stennis - are now in the
Arabian Sea. One plan is for them to be relieved early in
the spring, but there is worry within the military that they
may be ordered to stay in the area after the new carriers
arrive, according to several sources. (Among other concerns,
war games have shown that the carriers could be vulnerable
to swarming tactics involving large numbers of small boats,
a technique that the Iranians have practiced in the past).
(The New Yorker / Saturday 03 March 2007 Issue )
