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.
U.S. officials call Iran complicit in the killing of American soldiers by providing weapons and training to Shiite militias. Military officers cite Iran as the source of a powerful form of roadside bomb: the "explosively formed projectiles" that penetrate even armored humvees. Iran denies arming militias. One U.S. hope is that taking out Iranian operatives and intercepting supplies will create leverage with Tehran—bargaining chips if the White House opts for talks with Iran about Iraq. "So we need to do things they want us to stop," explains a senior U.S. official, who says the aim is "to reset the relationship with Iran."
There are also military moves outside of Iraq. Bush has approved the dispatch of a second aircraft carrier, the USS John Stennis, and its battle group to the Persian Gulf, as well as the deployment of more Patriot antimissile batteries to allied Arab states across the gulf from Iran. That will boost U.S. firepower in the region and, officials say, reassure friends anxious over Iran's attempts to extend its influence.
Elsewhere, the administration has been supporting both the rearming of Lebanon's Army as a bulwark against Hezbollah and weapons shipments to the Palestinian Fatah movement loyal to moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, who is locked in a sporadically violent political confrontation with Iranian-backed Hamas. U.S. officials plan to fund democratic reformers in Syria opposed to President Bashar Assad, an Iranian ally. In Afghanistan, the United States. has stepped up monitoring of Iranian moves to gain sway with tribal leaders.
In diplomacy, Washington is promoting what amounts to an anti-Iranian grouping of the Gulf Cooperation Council nations, Jordan, and Egypt. The group met last week in Kuwait as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice barnstormed across the region. Rice is talking up a "new alignment" in the Mideast: pro-U.S. reformers and moderates pitted against Iranian-backed militants bent on destabilizing the former.
On the nuclear front, Washington is attempting to keep the heat on Iran for its refusal to stop nuclear fuel-making activities, as demanded in a hard-won but limited United Nations Security Council sanctions resolution adopted just before Christmas. Burns tells U.S. News that Iran is expected to proceed "full bore," accelerating uranium enrichment work at its Natanz facility within the next 30 days. American officials already assume that harsher penalties will be needed, despite opposition in the Security Council.
Washington is also attempting to build economic pressure on Iran well beyond the U.N. sanctions. The Treasury Department has slapped U.S. sanctions on Bank Sepah, an Iranian institution said to handle financing for Iran's missile trade. More broadly, officials have been traveling the world, urging European and Asian banks, as well as oil and gas companies, to cut their ties with Iran. Last week, Burns lobbied senior officials visiting Washington from four major European countries to consider suspending export credits to Iran and to come out against Russia's arms sales to Iran.
The more aggressive administration strategy could alienate some of the countries that have, with varying degrees of reluctance, supported the first, modest set of penalties on Iran. Some of the European allies want to focus on implementing those sanctions before embracing other pressure steps. And Russia, in particular, is inclined to view the U.S. squeeze as unjustified. The administration, says a senior Russian official, "sees [the resolution] as a good pretext to raise pressure." He adds, "There is no good faith."
Dissent. Intriguingly, there are signs in Iran of growing reformist opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose rhetoric against the West is seen as worsening Iran's economic condition. In recent weeks, Ahmadinejad has been heckled by university students, and the normally cowed media have given the protests significant coverage. Pro-Ahmadinejad conservatives fared badly in local elections, including in Tehran, and in the selection of the Assembly of Experts, a group that chooses Iran's supreme spiritual leader. Anger over raging inflation, unemployment, and unmet economic promises has prompted dozens of lawmakers to challenge Ahmadinejad's program in parliament. "Our strategy might be beginning to work," says a European diplomat.
Perhaps, but some experts worry that Washington may overplay its hand and strengthen Iran's hard-liners by stoking fears of American intervention. "This muscular approach will help them," argues Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. And the U.S. moves raise the real possibility that some part of Iran's opaque power structure will miscalculate or lash out against American interests, drawing U.S. military retaliation. Some skeptics believe that is the point. "It looks to me more like an attempt to provoke the Iranians to respond," says Trita Parsi, an Iran specialist and president of the National Iranian American Council. He is not alone. Some U.S. Navy officers in the Persian Gulf, U.S. News has learned, are comparing the rising tensions with Iran to the events in the Gulf of Tonkin that spurred America's fateful plunge into the Vietnam War. Their question: Could it happen again?
This story appears in the January 29, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.