Taking Iran Down a Notch
The Bush administration says Tehran is getting too cocky, but the broad U.S. pushback carries big risks
The battlefield, so far, remains confined to Iraq. But the war, in some sense, is growing wider—and more dangerously unpredictable.
The Bush administration's military campaign in Iraq—and its broader approach to the Middle East—are morphing into a head-on struggle against Iran's growing influence. The shift portends either peril or promise. Critics fear President Bush has made another dangerous gamble that is more likely to expand the conflict than to bring Iran to heel. The clarifying focus on Iran, officials counter, offers an opportunity to block the region's leading provocateur from fomenting extremism and pursuing nuclear weapons.
Call the revised strategy "pushback," if you like. The aim is to raise the price for Iranian actions on a range of fronts—from its bank—rolling of militants in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories to its alleged supplying of weapons to anti-U.S. Shiite militias in Iraq to its defiant nuclear programs. "We are clearly upping the ante and sending a powerful message to Iran," Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said in an interview last week. "They have to understand that there are consequences for their actions. This is a concerted strategy, no doubt about it."
Seek and destroy. One piece of that strategy, U.S. News has learned, is the creation of a military special operations task force to move against Iranian agents in Iraq. Task Force 16, as it is known, demonstrates the high priority assigned to the administration's new anti-Iranian drive. Its structure is modeled after the units set up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and kill Iraqi al Qaeda chief Abu Musab Zarqawi. The special ops effort is part of President Bush's newly announced pledge to "seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq." In recent weeks, U.S. forces have conducted at least two raids that captured Iranians said to be officers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps' al-Quds Brigades. Five Iranians are still being detained despite Iran's claim that they are diplomats with legal protection and have been "kidnapped."
A consensus within the administration sees Iran as emboldened by its surging oil revenues, the insurgent and sectarian violence bogging down U.S. forces in Iraq, the tenacity of its ally Hezbollah in surviving Israeli attacks in Lebanon, and the rising power of the radical Palestinian Hamas movement. "The threat that Iran represents is growing; it's multidimensional," Vice President Dick Cheney said on Fox News. U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte says Iran now casts a "shadow" across the region. Adds Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq ... that they are in a position to press us in many ways."
The U.S. get-tougher approach on Iran starts with Iraq, but it extends far more broadly. The administration has moved quietly on some fronts—perhaps to avoid alarming countries like Russia and China that oppose a more confrontational approach. But taken together, the various pieces point to an integrated strategy to counter Iran. "It's a shift in U.S. policy to rolling back Iranian influence," says Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The administration sees dealing with Iran as key to these other issues." Adds Michael Rubin, an American Enterprise Institute analyst who dealt with Iran issues at the Pentagon in Bush's first term, "a critical mass of information" about Iranian activities in Iraq and beyond forced the administration's hand. "It's a moment a long time in coming," he says.
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