Martin Wolff's List: Iran

One afternoon in late November 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was flying back to Washington from the Army base at Fort Hood, Tex., where he had spoken with soldiers and spouses about the future of Iraq. Sitting across from him at his desk in the back of the Pentagon’s jet, I asked him about the possibility of another military conflict: U.S. air strikes on Iran. “The last thing the Middle East needs now is another war,” he said quietly. “We have to keep all options on the table,” he went on, reciting the standard caveat. “But if Iraq has shown us anything, it’s the unpredictability of war. Once a conflict starts, the statesmen lose control.” He paused, then went on to say: “Here’s another lesson I’ve learned. Two of the presidents I’ve worked for got into trouble because of foreign policy: Carter and Reagan. And in both cases” — Carter with the hostage crisis in Tehran, Reagan with illegal arms shipments to raise money for the Nicaraguan contras — “they got into trouble over Iran.” He half-smiled and cocked his eyebrows.

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.    A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preemptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.”

America is overextended in Iraq, under-deployed in Afghanistan, constrained on Pakistan and stymied on the Arab-Israeli conflict. But Iran is different. It has become the superpower in the region where the United States has invested the most manpower, money, blood and prestige. Washington can’t make enduring progress in the Middle East or South Asia without a denouement in the long showdown with Iran. But what tools does Washington have?...  One new concept has begun to get Tehran’s attention. In January 2006, Stuart Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department, was having breakfast in Bahrain when he noted a local newspaper article about a big Swiss bank that cut off business with Tehran. He clipped the article. It gave him an idea.

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”