Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro
The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran
By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti
Sept. 4, 2019
In July of 2017, the White House was at a crossroads on the question
of Iran. President Trump had made a campaign pledge to leave the
“terrible” nuclear deal that President Barack Obama negotiated with
Tehran, but prominent members of Trump’s cabinet spent the early months
of the administration pushing the mercurial president to negotiate a
stronger agreement rather than scotch the deal entirely. Thus far, the
forces for negotiation had prevailed.
But counterforces were also at work.
Stephen
K. Bannon, then still an influential adviser to the president, turned
to John Bolton to draw up a new Iran strategy that would, as its first
act, abrogate the Iran deal. Bolton, a Fox News commentator and
former ambassador to the United Nations, had no official role in the
administration as of yet, but Bannon saw him as an outside voice that
could stiffen Trump’s spine — a kind of back channel to the president
who could convince Trump that his Iran policy was adrift.
As a top national security official in the George W. Bush administration,
Bolton was one of the architects of regime change in Iraq.
He had long called not just for withdrawing from the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., as the 2015 nuclear deal
was known, but also for overthrowing the Iranian regime that negotiated
it. Earlier that July, he distilled his views on the matter in Paris, at
an annual gathering in support of the fringe exile movement Mujahedeen
Khalq, or the M.E.K., which itself had long called for regime change in
Iran. Referring to the continuing policy review in Washington, he
repeated his belief that the only sufficient American policy in Iran
would be to change the Iranian government and whipped the crowd into a
standing ovation by pledging that in two years, Iran’s leaders would be
gone and that “we here will celebrate in Tehran.”
The document that Bolton produced at Bannon’s request was not a strategy so much as a
marketing plan for the administration to justify leaving the Iran deal.
It did little to address what would happen on Day 2, after the United
States pulled out of the deal. But Bolton’s views were hardly a secret
to those who had spoken to him over the years or read the Op-Ed he wrote
in The New York Times in 2015: Once American diplomacy had been set
aside, Israel should bomb Iran.
Trump pulled out of the Iran deal in May 2018,
just weeks after Bolton took over as his national security adviser, and
now the president is navigating a slow-motion crisis. This June,
attacks were launched against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, and the
United States pointed the finger at Tehran; in July, Britain impounded
an Iranian tanker near Gibraltar, and Iran seized a British-flagged
tanker in the gulf. American spy agencies warn of impending attacks by
Iranian proxies on American troops in the region, and over the summer,
Israel launched flurries of attacks on Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria
and Lebanon. The least surprising outcome of America’s withdrawal from
the nuclear agreement with Iran, though, is that Iran now says that it,
too, will no longer abide by the terms of the deal — a decision that
could
lead Tehran to once again stockpile highly enriched uranium, the fuel to build a nuclear bomb.
The president and his advisers have cited all these acts as evidence
of Iran’s perfidy, but it was also a crisis foretold. A year before
Trump pulled out of the deal, according to an American official, the
Central Intelligence Agency circulated a classified assessment trying to
predict how Iran would respond in the event that the Trump
administration hardened its line. Its conclusion was simple: Radical
elements of the government could be empowered and moderates sidelined,
and Iran might try to exploit a diplomatic rupture to unleash an attack
in the Persian Gulf, Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East.
Ilan Goldenberg, a senior Pentagon official during the Obama
administration, recalls the standoff in the years before the Iran
nuclear deal as a kind of three-way bluff. Israel wanted the world to
believe that it would strike Iran’s nuclear program (but hadn’t yet made
up its mind). Iran wanted the world to believe it could get a nuclear
weapon (but hadn’t yet made a decision to dash toward a bomb). The
United States wanted the world to know it was ready to use military
force to prevent Iran from getting a bomb (but in the end never had to
show its hand). All three were taking steps to make the threats more
credible, unsure when, or if, the other parties might blink.
Trump’s abrogation of the Iran deal has revived the poker game, but
this time with an American president whose tendency to bluster about
American power but avoid actually using it has made the situation in
recent months even more volatile.
“President Trump cannot expect to be unpredictable and expect others
to be predictable,” Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said during a
speech in Stockholm in August. “Unpredictability will lead to mutual
unpredictability, and unpredictability is chaotic.”
Trump’s immediate goal appears to be to batter Iran’s economy with
sanctions to the point that the country’s leaders will renegotiate the
nuclear deal — and its military support for Hezbollah and other proxy
groups — on terms that the administration deems more favorable to the
United States. But it is also based on a gamble that Iran will break
before November 2020, when the next American election could bring a new
president who ends Trump’s hardball tactics.
This is all in aid of what the president’s advisers see as the larger
goal, one embraced not only by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel but also by the Arab states in the Persian Gulf: a realignment of
the Middle East, with Israel and select Sunni nations gaining supremacy
over Iran and containing the world’s largest Shiite-majority state.
It is a wholly different vision than the one advanced by Obama, who
committed to keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon but accepted the
notion that Iran would become a counterweight to Saudi Arabia’s
influence in the region. The two countries would have to “share the
neighborhood,” as he put it, an idea that some Trump-administration
officials sneer at. As one coolly explains, “We’ve decided to deal with
Iran as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be.”
[Read Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart.]
Those who were closest to Obama in the early days of his
administration say he had a cleareyed transactional plan for bringing
peace to the caldron of the Middle East. “We avoided an unnecessary and
uncertain war, brought the Iranians to the table, gained time and space
for negotiations and achieved an unprecedented and successful
arms-control agreement,” says Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security
adviser from 2010 to 2013. The deal, he said, “prevented Iran from
obtaining a nuclear weapon and gave the international community
unprecedented visibility into Iran’s activities,” all of which is in the
“overwhelming interest of the United States.”
Trump’s withdrawal from the deal, compounded by the events of recent months, has revived fears not just that the
United States could take military action against Iran or quietly bless an Israeli strike
but also that all the parties could stumble into a conflict out of
hubris, miscalculation or ignorance. A strike on Iran, however limited
in its design, could unspool widespread chaos in the form of retaliation
by Iranian proxy groups on American forces in the gulf region,
escalating attacks on commercial ships that could send oil prices
skyrocketing, waves of Hezbollah terrorist strikes against Israel,
cyberattacks against the West and ultimately more American troops being
sent to stamp out fires wherever Iran has influence — from Lebanon to
Syria to Yemen to Iraq.
The story of how this simmering crisis began is in many ways a story
about the complexities of America’s relationship with Israel, a story
that has never been fully told. It is the story of a war narrowly
averted, an arms agreement negotiated behind Israel’s back, two bedrock
allies spying on each other and a battle over who will ultimately shape
American foreign policy. Interviews with dozens of current and former
American, Israeli and European officials over several months reveal the
startling details of how close the Israeli military came to attacking
Iran in 2012; the extent to which the Obama administration felt required
to develop its own military contingency plans in the event of such an
attack, including destroying a full-size mock-up of an Iranian nuclear
facility in the western desert of the United States with a 30,000-pound
bomb; how Americans monitored Israel even as Israel monitored Iran, with
American satellites capturing images of Israel launching surveillance
drones into Iran from a base in Azerbaijan; and previously unknown
details about the scope of Netanyahu’s pressure campaign to get Trump to
leave the Iran deal.
Netanyahu recently eclipsed David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s
longest-serving prime minister, but once again he is fighting for
political survival, with another vote to determine his future as prime
minister set for Sept. 17. In a wrinkle of history, some of his
opponents are the same people who vigorously opposed his push to strike
Iran several years ago.
Regardless of the outcome of the election, the landscape of the
current Iran crisis could change quickly, and Trump even said during the
recent Group of 7 summit that he might meet in the coming weeks with
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran. That prospect has set off alarms in
Israel, where some officials raise fears in private that the American
president in whom they had invested so much hope has gone wobbly. But
Netanyahu, at least publicly, says he isn’t worried. In an interview in
August in his office in Jerusalem, he acknowledged the possibility that
Trump, like Obama before him, might try to avoid a war and instead
attempt to reach a settlement over Iran’s nuclear program.
“But this time,” Netanyahu said, “we will have far greater ability to exert influence.”
2. ‘Total Mutual Striptease’
The first public revelation about a clandestine uranium-enrichment program in Iran came in the summer of 2002q,
as America was preparing for war with Iraq. Western intelligence
services had found that scientists at a nuclear facility near Natanz, in
north-central Iran, had begun an effort to enrich uranium ore. A
dossier of these findings leaked to a group affiliated with the M.E.K.,
which went public with the information at a news conference in
Washington. The Bush administration, preoccupied with Iraq, chose to
pursue a path of negotiation with Iran, coupled with sanctions. For many
Israeli officials, the revelation reinforced a conclusion that they had
already drawn:
The United States was making war on the wrong country.
The Israeli leadership grew even more concerned in 2005, when Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran. Ahmadinejad immediately made
known his views about Israel, unleashing fiery rhetoric calling for the
end to the nation and calling the Nazi extermination of Jews a myth. He
increased support for militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah — and,
American and Israeli analysts agreed, he also began to accelerate the
nation’s nuclear program. In a nation built by survivors of the
Holocaust, the moves confirmed for many that
Iran presented an existential threat.
Israel’s leadership at that time was going through an uncertain
moment. In January 2006, Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, suffered
a stroke that left him in a vegetative state. A deputy, Ehud Olmert,
stepping up to replace him, gave a free hand and endless resources to
the clandestine campaign that the Mossad, Israel’s civilian intelligence
agency, was running to stop, or at least delay, the Iranian nuclear
project. In 2007, Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, became Olmert’s
defense minister and issued a written order to the Israeli military’s
general staff to develop plans for a large-scale attack on Iran. But
Olmert thought that many were exaggerating the immediacy of the Iran
threat. His own position, he recalls now, “was that it was not Israel
that should lead a military operation, even with the knowledge that Iran
might indeed succeed in getting a bomb. Just as Pakistan had the bomb
and nothing happened, Israel could also accept and survive Iran having
the bomb.”
Netanyahu, then in the leadership of the conservative Likud party,
took a starkly different position. He had gone to high school and
college in the United States, earning a business degree from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working at the Boston
Consulting Group, where he became friends with the future Republican
presidential nominee Mitt Romney. During his first term as prime
minister — from 1996 to 1999 — he warned a joint session of Congress
that only the United States could prevent the “
catastrophic consequences” of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Now the Likud leader was once again enlisting Israel’s closest ally
into what Uzi Arad, one of his former top advisers, describes as “a
personal crusade against the Iranian threat.” Speaking at the annual
conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, in
Washington in 2007, Netanyahu demanded more sanctions on Iran. He also
met with Dick Cheney, then the vice president, and, according to Arad,
warned that if the West failed to present a credible threat of military
action, Iran would surely get the bomb.
In Cheney, Netanyahu had found the right audience.
The Pentagon’s military and civilian leadership had little appetite for
another war of pre-emption, and by then neither did the president. But
Cheney, like Bolton, had long taken a more expansive view, and he
continued to argue for military action against Iran well into George W.
Bush’s second term.
During a meeting with Bush in May 2008, the vice president sparred
with Robert Gates, the defense secretary, over the wisdom of a strike
against Iran. Gates argued that a military move against Iran by the
United States or Israel would strengthen radical factions in the Iranian
government and rally the country behind the Iranian regime. Gates said
that Olmert should be told in the most direct terms that Israel should
not launch a unilateral attack. Cheney disagreed on every point, saying
that a strike on Iran was necessary and that at minimum the White House
should enable Israel to act. Gates recalled Cheney’s thinking in his
memoir: Twenty years on, “if there was a nuclear-armed Iran, people
would say the Bush administration could have stopped it.”
That same month, Bush arrived in Jerusalem for his last visit to
Israel as president. Olmert hoped to get American and Israeli spies to
share more intelligence about Iran, and he used a private meeting at his
residence to make his case. When the aides had cleared the room,
according to an official who was familiar with the conversation, Olmert
moved in to seal the deal. “Come, let’s open the books and be
transparent with each other,” he said. Bush agreed, a decision that led
to far greater intelligence cooperation between American and Israeli spy
services — a “total mutual striptease” in the words of one of Olmert’s
former aides. This cooperation would culminate in the Olympic Games
operation, which deployed sophisticated computer malware, including the
Stuxnet virus, to sabotage Iranian nuclear facilities. This was one path
forward to containing Iran.
But Bush was also made keenly aware of the other path. One night
during his visit, Olmert invited him for a dinner at his residence with
the members of his national security cabinet, including Barak, the
defense minister, who like Cheney had taken an increasingly hawkish
position on Iran during internal discussions. As Olmert tells the story,
he and Bush walked alone into a side lounge after the dinner. As the
two men relaxed in leather armchairs, Olmert smoking a cigar, the prime
minister told Bush that Barak was waiting and wanted an audience.
Bush was reluctant, according to Olmert. “I understand that it is
politically important for you to let him in,” Olmert recalls Bush
explaining, “but you know my position on the Iran issue. I am
unequivocally against an attack.”
The Bush administration, preoccupied with Iraq, chose to pursue a path of negotiation with Iran, coupled with sanctions.Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro
Olmert persisted. Bush eventually relented, and soon Barak was in the
room, smoking a cigar and sipping a whiskey. He delivered a
comprehensive lecture about the Iran threat. Finally, Bush cut him off.
“He banged on the table like this,” Olmert recalls, “and he said:
‘General Barak, do you know what no means? No is no.”’
Barak, for his part, remembers much about the affair differently,
including Bush’s reaction. In Barak’s version, when he finished making
his case to the American president, Bush turned to Olmert but pointed a
finger directly at Barak. “This guy scares the living shit out of me,”
Barak recalls him saying. (A spokesman for Bush says the former
president does not recall either of these conversations.)
Looking back at that meeting, Barak now sees Bush’s position as
somewhat irrelevant. “The truth is that Bush’s warning did not really
make any difference for us,” he says, “because as of the end of 2008, we
did not have a real, feasible plan for attacking Iran.”
Barak was already looking toward the future. “We knew that anything
that happened after that would, in any case, be under a different
president.”
3. ‘Obama Is Part of the Problem’
Netanyahu began his second term as Israel’s prime minister just
months after Obama took office in 2009. Despite their ideological
differences, Netanyahu had some cause to believe that the new American
president might be a more willing partner in his effort against Iran.
Though Obama first gained attention for his opposition to the Iraq war,
he frequently raised the Iran threat during the campaign and told an
Aipac audience in June 2008 that he would “always keep the threat of
military action on the table to defend our security and our ally
Israel.”
During their first meeting in the White House in May 2009, anxious
aides waited outside the Oval Office as the two leaders met alone. It
was an interminable meeting, and some may have figured that the savvy,
experienced Israeli prime minister was lecturing the young American
president about the Palestinians and the hard truths of Israeli
security.
But when the door opened, it was Netanyahu who appeared shellshocked,
Arad recalls: “Bibi did not say anything, but he looked ashen.” It was
hours later when he told aides that Obama had attacked him and implored
him — actually demanded him, in Netanyahu’s view — to freeze Israel’s
settlements in the West Bank right away, with “not a single brick” added
in the future, according to an Israeli official with direct knowledge
of the meeting. “Bibi left that place traumatized,” Arad says. Speaking
now, Netanyahu says that “
Obama came from another direction, one that adopted most of the Palestinian narrative,” and
ruefully cites the “not a single brick” line to argue that the American
president was against him from the very beginning. (A former
Obama-administration official with knowledge of the White House meeting
says that Obama did not in fact use that phrase.)
The relationship between the two governments was warmer at the
cabinet level. Netanyahu had brought in Arad to be his national security
adviser, and Arad established a direct link with Obama’s own national
security advisers — Gen. James L. Jones and then Donilon — to discuss
the Iranian nuclear program. American and Israeli officials met
regularly in person and even more frequently over encrypted video
conferences. The Obama administration insisted on total secrecy about
the meetings, and an urgent issue was already on the agenda: the
continuing construction of a secret nuclear facility, buried deep inside
a mountain, not far from Iran’s holy city of Qum.
The Fordow fuel enrichment plant was discovered in April 2008 by a
source working for British intelligence, which in turn passed
rudimentary details about the plant to American and Israeli spy
agencies. Unlike the Natanz plant, Fordow was too small to produce
usable amounts of civilian nuclear fuel, making it likely that it was
created solely for the drive toward a nuclear weapon.
American and Israeli officials were now faced with the fact that
ongoing covert operations to sabotage Iran’s nuclear effort had failed
to halt the program. The Israeli perspective, as advanced by Barak, was
relatively simple: The world was running out of time before Iran entered
what Barak called the “zone of immunity,” the point at which the
nuclear program was so advanced and so well defended that any strike
would have too little impact to be worth the risk. The United States,
with its bunker-buster bombs that could penetrate deep into underground
facilities, could wait to strike. But, Barak argued, Israel had no such
luxury. If it was going to act alone, it would need to do it sooner.
Some American military planners derided Barak’s tactic as “mowing the
grass” — a small-bore effort that would need to be repeated again and
again — but it might have been more like a way to get the United States
to move first. “Barak would tell us, ‘We can’t do what you do, so we
need to do it sooner,’ ” says Dennis Ross, who handled Iran policy at
the National Security Council during Obama’s first term. “We interpreted
that as designed to put pressure on us.”
A parade of top American officials began flying to Israel during
Obama’s first term to take the measure of the Israeli planning and to
convince Netanyahu and Barak that the United States was taking the
problem seriously and that Iran was hardly on the brink of getting the
bomb. “Our message was that we understand your concerns, and please
don’t go off on a hair trigger and start a war, because you’re going to
want us to come in behind you,” says Wendy Sherman, a top State
Department official in Obama’s administration.
One of the first to make the trip was Robert Gates, whom Obama had
asked to stay on at the Pentagon. He arrived in Israel in July 2009,
just weeks after the Green Revolution brought thousands of protesters
into the streets of Tehran. The Iranian government seemed fragile, and
Netanyahu told Gates he was convinced that a military strike on Iran
would do more than set back its nuclear program; it could instigate the
overthrow of a regime loathed by the Iranian people. Besides, Netanyahu
said, as Gates recalls in his memoir, the Iranian response to the attack
would be limited. Gates pushed back, just as he had a year earlier
against Cheney. He said Netanyahu was misled by history. Perhaps Iraq
did not retaliate after Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in
1981, just as Syria did nothing when Israel bombed a suspected Syrian
nuclear reactor in 2007. But Iran was very different from Iraq and
Syria, he said. His meaning was clear: Iran was a powerful country with a
capable military and proxy groups like Hezbollah that could unleash
serious violence from just over Israel’s borders.
The relationship between Obama and Netanyahu continued to fracture.
Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador in Washington at the time, recalls
that Netanyahu began to say that “Obama is part of the problem, not the
solution.” The uncomfortable relationship was apparent to all sides.
Arad recalls that when he accompanied Netanyahu to Washington in 2010
for another meeting with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden threw his arm
around Arad and said with a smile, “Just remember that I am your best
fucking friend here.”
4. ‘A Highly Complicated Affair’
Obama took the possibility of a sudden Israeli strike seriously.
American spy satellites watched Israeli drones take off from bases in
Azerbaijan and fly south over the Iranian border — taking extensive
pictures of Iran’s nuclear sites and probing whether Iranian air
defenses spotted the intrusion. American military leaders made guesses
about whether the Israelis might choose a time of the month when the
light was higher or lower, or a time of the year when sandstorms occur
more or less regularly. Military planners ran war games to forecast how
Tehran might respond to an Israeli strike and how America should respond
in return: Would Iran assume that any attack had been blessed by the
United States and hit American military forces in the Middle East? The
results were dismal: The Israeli strikes dealt only minor setbacks to
Iran’s nuclear program, and the United States was enmeshed in yet
another war in the Middle East.
The White House eventually made the decision that the
United States would not join a pre-emptive strike. If
Israel launched such a strike, the Pentagon wouldn’t assist in the
operation, but it wouldn’t stand in Israel’s way. At the same time,
Obama was quietly ordering a buildup of America’s arsenal around the
Persian Gulf. If Israel was going to trigger a war, the thinking went,
it was better to have forces in the region beforehand rather than rush
them there after the fact, when Iran would surely interpret the
deployments as a surge to support Israel. Aircraft-carrier strike groups
and destroyers with Aegis ballistic-missile defense systems moved
through the Strait of Hormuz; F-22 jets arrived in the United Arab
Emirates, and Patriot missile batteries were sent to the United Arab
Emirates and other gulf allies. Some of the deployments were announced
as routine moves to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We didn’t
want the Israelis to mistake it for a green light,” one
Obama-administration official says.
What they didn’t know was, at least at that time, whether
Netanyahu had the ability — or even the real will — to pull off a strike.
It was a complicated question, and one that was the subject of
considerable debate even at the highest levels of the Israeli
government. In November 2010, Netanyahu and Barak convened a private
meeting at Mossad headquarters to discuss a recently devised Iran attack
plan with the chiefs of Israel’s defense establishment. According to
Barak, the conversation quickly became contentious when Lt. Gen. Gabi
Ashkenazi, the military chief of staff, told the room that despite major
advancements, the Israel Defense Forces had not yet crossed the
threshold of “operational capability.”
Ashkenazi’s statement punctured the optimism that had been building
around a strike. “The moment he says there’s no operational capability,
then you have no choice,” Barak recalls now. “Hypothetically, you can
fire him if you want to, but you can’t say, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
Another influential official spoke up: Meir Dagan, the longtime head
of the Mossad, who had been directing Israel’s secret war on Iran. His
credentials as an Iran hawk were hardly in dispute, and he was coming to
the end of a national security career that began in the mid-1960s, so
he had plenty of political capital to burn. He told Netanyahu and Barak
that a military campaign would be foolish and could undo all the
progress the covert campaign had made. Dagan saw the proposed campaign
as a scheme by two cynical politicians seeking the widespread public
support that an attack would give them in the next election.
Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence
service, was also against an attack. Barak and Netanyahu may not have
been interested in the guidance of their advisers, but they did “not
have the authority,” Diskin told them, to go to war without government
approval. Netanyahu had to back down.
The Israeli prime minister became increasingly suspicious of his
senior advisers. He now accuses Dagan of leaking the attack plan to the
C.I.A., “intending to disrupt it,” a betrayal that to Netanyahu’s mind
was “absolutely inconceivable.” Within a year, Dagan, Ashkenazi and
Diskin, along with Uzi Arad, were no longer in their posts.
If Netanyahu hoped his handpicked replacements would be more
compliant, however, he would soon be disappointed. Many others in the
government, including Benny Gantz, the chief of staff who succeeded
Ashkenazi, were also against the attack, according to three officials
who were part of the decision-making process at that time. For Gantz,
who is now running against Netanyahu for the job of prime minister, it
was a practical matter. “Even those who have not seen the intelligence
understand that it would be a highly complicated affair and — if the
impact it would have on other countries is taken into account — a
strategic affair of the highest level,” he says.
5. ‘We Were Running Out of Time’
Netanyahu’s relentless pressure on Obama may have had an unintended consequence.
The
American president, with limited information about what the Israelis
might do, increased his urgent pursuit of a major new initiative: a
clandestine negotiation with Iran.
For Obama, the J.C.P.O.A. would be the centerpiece of his
foreign-policy legacy; it was not just a deal but a framework for
regional stability — a way to shut the Pandora’s box his predecessor
blew open in 2003. For Netanyahu, though, it would be the ultimate
betrayal — Israel’s closest ally negotiating behind its back with its
most bitter enemy.
The effort began in late 2010, with Dennis Ross and Puneet Talwar,
two of Obama’s top national security advisers, aboard a commercial
aircraft bound for Muscat, Oman. The country’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin
Said, was helping mediate the sensitive negotiations around the release
of several American backpackers who had been detained in Iran under
suspicion of being spies. Now Oman would help the United States open a
back channel for far more ambitious discussions.
Inside one of the sultan’s palaces, Ross and Talwar delivered a
message that Obama wanted the Omani ruler to give to only Iran’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: The United States thought there was a
chance for a peaceful denouement to the nuclear standoff with Iran but
was prepared to take military action if Iran rejected diplomacy. The
United States could accept Iran’s harnessing nuclear power for civilian
use, but any military purpose for its nuclear program was intolerable.
Obama had long believed that there might be a sliver of hope for a
nuclear deal, and the White House had already begun a campaign of
punishing economic sanctions designed to pressure Tehran into
negotiations. But some former administration officials said the prospect
of an Israeli military operation gave energy to the diplomatic push.
“Did the Israeli pressure affect our decision to begin talks?” Ross
says. “Without a doubt. Unless we could do something that changed the
equation, the Israelis were going to act militarily.” Ilan Goldenberg,
the former Pentagon official handling Iran issues, says, “We felt we
were running out of time.”
Others within the administration disagreed that
Israeli pressure played a significant role in the effort.
“President Obama’s push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian
nuclear challenge long predated Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
saber-rattling,” says Ned Price, who served as a spokesman for Obama’s
National Security Council. “In fact, it even predated his current stint
as prime minister. Candidate Obama pledged in 2007 to seek the very type
of diplomatic achievement he, together with many of our closest allies
and partners, struck as president in 2015.”
Obama decided to keep the Israelis — and, for that matter, every
other American ally — in the dark about the secret discussions. Some in
his administration feared that if Obama told Netanyahu about the nascent
talks, the Israelis would leak word of them to tank any future deal.
“It was too big a risk,” one former senior Obama-administration official
said. “The trust between the two leaders was badly frayed by this
point. That introduced an element of uncertainty about what Bibi or
people around him would do if they had the information.”
The secrecy around the talks remains a freighted subject among many
former Obama officials, one that few are willing to discuss on the
record. Some believed that the Obama-Netanyahu relationship had grown so
toxic that the Israeli prime minister couldn’t be trusted. And, they
argue, the strategy worked: Talks stayed quiet long enough for them to
mature into serious negotiations and, ultimately, the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action. Others say it was needlessly provocative,
sowing further distrust in an already dismal relationship and creating
the appearance that the Obama White House wasn’t confident enough in its
strategy to defend it to the Israelis. “That was an ongoing debate,”
says Wendy Sherman, who was closely involved in the negotiations. “I was
on the side of telling them sooner rather than later. It was a very
hard call.”
The Israelis found out anyway. In mid-2012, around the time the talks
between American and Iranian officials began in earnest, Israeli
intelligence picked up information about the secret discussions and
reported it to Netanyahu. Some time after hearing the news, Yaakov
Amidror, who succeeded Arad as Netanyahu’s national security adviser in
2011, confronted Dan Shapiro, Obama’s ambassador to Israel, to ask him
if the information about the negotiations was true. Shapiro, who hadn’t
been told about the secret talks, told Amidror it was false. But Shapiro
said it wasn’t long before a colleague in Washington took him aside and
said, “You should stop saying what you’ve been saying.”
Shapiro says now that the secrecy was a mistake. “We should have
assumed that they would discover the talks, and it’s always better to
hear such news directly from us,” he says. “I understand the
apprehension of those who decided to keep it a secret that Israel would
leak it, but the communications between the United States and Israel on
the Iranian issue were conducted with the utmost discretion. I felt we
should have shared that with them in real time. Had I known, I would
have pushed hard to tell them.”
Amidror remains angry to this day. “We had an open and honest
relationship with the Americans,” he says. “Everything went excellently
until it became clear to us that they were concealing things.” In the
end, he says, the American negotiators “sold us up the river.”
Netanyahu takes a more sanguine view of the revelation. “When I was
informed that such talks were underway, I have to say that I was not at
all surprised,” he says. “During his campaign for the presidency, Obama
said that he wanted to reach agreements with Iran and with Cuba. This
was his declared predisposition.”
Netanyahu says that “the knowledge that we were capable and prepared
to strike had a great effect on the Americans and on their involvement
in the matter of Iran” and that “the more the Americans realized that an
attack was drawing near, the more they stepped up the sanctions.” But
in the view of one senior Israeli intelligence official, Netanyahu’s
open preparations for a strike may have worked against him, though,
precisely because it pushed Obama to open negotiations before the
sanctions made Iran desperate for a deal on harsher terms. “Netanyahu
achieved exactly the opposite of what he wanted,” the intelligence
official now says. “By doing what he did, he promoted the deal that he
fought against afterward.”
6. ‘A Very Unfriendly Act’
In the summer of 2012, American spy satellites detected clusters of
Israeli aircraft making what seemed to be early preparations for an
attack. Israeli leaders had spent more than a year delivering ominous
warnings to Washington that they might launch a military strike on
Iran’s nuclear facilities — and that if they did, they would give the
United States little warning and no chance to stop them. One former
senior Israeli security official, looking back at that time, said that
it wasn’t until then that he believed the prime minister was serious
about striking Iran.
Tensions had been building between Israel and the United States for
months. In December 2011, Obama and Barak met in Maryland at a
conference for the Union for Reform Judaism. In Barak’s telling, Obama
asked for his patience and gave him assurances that the United States
would act decisively if the situation demanded it. The Israeli defense
minister’s response was chilly. “It isn’t that I don’t believe you,”
Barak recalls explaining to the president. “But I know that you will
have to decide in accordance with American interests at that time, and
there is no way of knowing where they will lie.”
Unfazed, Obama raised the matter of dissent within the Israeli ranks.
It was well known, he said, that senior Israeli military and
intelligence officials opposed a strike on Iran. This is true, Barak
responded, and the dissenting voices were being treated with respect.
“They have the right to think otherwise,” he said, but in the end, it
was not up to the generals to make the final call.
“If they look up, they see us,” Barak said, meaning himself and the prime minister. “When we look up, we see just the sky.”
Several weeks later, Barak called Leon Panetta, who had recently
succeeded Gates as Obama’s secretary of defense, to deliver an ominous
piece of news: Israel was delaying a joint military exercise on Israeli
soil that had been scheduled for the spring. The annual exercise, called
Austere Challenge, would have involved hundreds of American troops
deploying to Israel, and Barak told Panetta that it would be risky to
have so many Americans on Israeli soil during that period. Are you going
to strike? Panetta asked. Barak was coy, but he didn’t deny that a
strike was at least a possibility. “He basically said, ‘Look, we haven’t
made a final decision, but we want to keep our options open and,
frankly, conducting exercises would limit our options,’ ” Panetta
recalls.
As a way to calm Israeli concern about the Obama administration’s
commitment to keeping Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, Panetta had
even taken the extraordinary step of bringing Barak into his Pentagon
office and showing him a highly classified video. In a desert in the
American Southwest, the Pentagon had constructed an exact replica of the
Fordow facility, and the video showed a test of the 30,000-pound
massive ordnance penetrator, a bunker-busting weapon the Air Force had
designed to penetrate the most hardened of underground defenses. The
bomb destroyed the mock-up in the desert. Barak was impressed.
The White House also made an effort to send a senior official to
Israel every few weeks — to “Bibisit,” as a former senior
Obama-administration official put it. There was plenty of business to
attend to, but the visits also had the effect of limiting Netanyahu’s
options on when he could order an attack. “It did not escape our
understanding that having a visit of a senior American official on the
calendar probably bought you a couple of weeks — before the visit and
then after the visit,” Shapiro says. “For an Israeli official, it meant
you knew you could not strike without feeling that you’ve deceived
somebody while they were sitting in your office.”
But behind the scenes, Israel was indeed preparing for a strike. Its
military and intelligence services had cut the time needed for the final
preparations — for the attack and for the war that might ensue. “I went
to bed every night, if I went to bed at all, with the phone close to my
ear,” says Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador in Washington at the
time. “I was ready to be called in by Israel and sent to the White House
or the State Department to tell them we had attacked, or if they
already knew from their own sources, straight to CNN.”
Such an attack, which came far closer to happening than has
previously been reported, would have been a significant breach of
Israel’s relationship with the United States — or at least with the
Obama administration. With Obama standing for re-election in a contest
that was just months away, some in the White House believed that it was
politics, as much as any direct security threat, that was driving
Netanyahu’s push for a strike. Netanyahu had courted the candidacy of
his old Boston Consulting Group colleague Mitt Romney, Obama’s
Republican opponent in the 2012 election. Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s
closest political adviser, was in contact with the Romney campaign,
which had also taken on John Bolton as a foreign policy adviser. The
concern among American officials was that Netanyahu was threatening a
strike not just to box Obama in but also to sway the November election
in Romney’s favor. (Dermer is now Israel’s ambassador to Washington.)
“It definitely crossed our minds that Israel might consider it an
advantage to strike in the final phase of the U.S. election,” Shapiro
says. The concern was that Israel might believe that it “could force the
United States’ hand to be supportive or to come in behind Israel and
assist. Because otherwise, President Obama could be accused of
abandoning Israel in its moment of need.”
According to former American officials, Tom Donilon called senior
Pentagon and C.I.A. officials to the White House for a two-day meeting
to go over the various situations, and possible American responses,
resulting from an Israeli attack. Separately, Gen. James Mattis, the
head of United States Central Command, urged the C.I.A. to try to locate
Iranian missile launchers — they would be among the first targets of an
American campaign if an Israeli strike drew the United States into the
conflict. (Donilon and Mattis both declined to comment on the planning
process.)
Both Donilon and Panetta made urgent trips to Jerusalem to speak to
Netanyahu and Barak. Shapiro says, “It was important to convey the
message that — in light of our very close coordination on the Iran
strategy to that point — it would be viewed obviously as a very
unfriendly act to use our politics” to gain leverage. Netanyahu refused
to make any promises.
Some former American and Israeli officials think that Netanyahu was
simply deploying his own maximum-pressure strategy, to push Obama toward
either his own strike or even tougher economic sanctions, but never
intended to actually send Israeli jets or commandos to attack Iran.
Netanyahu continued to face profound opposition to military action from
inside the military and the Mossad — “I think they didn’t do it because
the I.D.F. didn’t want to do it,” Dennis Ross says.
A former senior Israeli security official expressed doubts that
Netanyahu and Barak were ever serious about a strike. “I have a feeling
that just discussing such dramatic issues gave them great pleasure. I
saw the politicians’ excitement over their power,” the official says.
“Deep inside them, they do not want to attack, because they realize that
you never know how it will end. But dabbling in whether to attack or
not, and to do so with a cigar in their hands, that is a big deal for
them.”
For his part, Netanyahu insists that the threat of an Israeli strike
“was not a bluff — it was real. And only because it was real were the
Americans truly worried about it.” He pulled back from the brink only
because he still could not get a majority of his cabinet to support him.
“If I’d had a majority, I would have done it,” he says.
“Unequivocally.”
It is possible that Barak’s vigorous efforts to persuade the
Americans to join an effort may have inadvertently helped scuttle it,
thanks to an incident that added considerably to the tension within
Netanyahu’s cabinet. On a trip to the United States in mid-September
2012, just weeks before the election, Barak took a break from official
visits to speak privately with Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of
staff, who had since moved to Chicago and been elected mayor. When the
discussion turned to Iran, Emanuel was characteristically blunt:
Netanyahu and Barak were completely misreading American politics, he
said, and they shouldn’t assume that Obama would allow the Israeli
leaders to dictate his options. Netanyahu soon received a report from
the Israeli Embassy about the meeting, accompanied by whispers that
Barak had gone rogue and was telling his American counterparts that he
was trying to hold “crazy Bibi” back from attacking Iran. Amidror called
Yoni Koren, Barak’s chief of staff, and reproached him for not
reporting the meeting with Emanuel. Netanyahu went on Israeli television
and mocked Barak for going to the United States to “play the role of
the moderate savior.”
Barak fired back, saying he had gone to the United States to “reduce
tension” between the two sides — implying that Netanyahu had potentially
damaged Israel’s most important strategic relationship. There is no
evidence that Barak had turned on Netanyahu, but the incident ruptured
their long alliance. Barak no longer supported a strike. It wasn’t
because of anything that happened in Chicago, he says. The timing was
wrong. “It became clear that calling a strike was becoming more and more
complicated,” he says. The window of time between a planned joint
military exercise and the American election was too tight.
In October, the strike was called off. “It is one thing to strike
alone,” Barak says, “and a totally different thing to draw the United
States into a confrontation that it doesn’t want to be a part of.”
7. ‘It’s Complicated’
Obama’s resounding re-election victory did little to improve
relations between the United States and Israel. The deteriorating
situation brought on a dramatic confrontation at Ben Gurion Airport,
shortly after Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Israel on Nov. 8,
2013, for what was supposed to be a quick stop en route to Geneva for
another round of Iran talks. As aides to both men listened through the
wall, Netanyahu began shouting at Kerry inside an airport lounge,
angered that, in his view, the United States had gone back on promises
to Israel about elements of the deal. (Asked about the incident,
Netanyahu says, “I don’t raise my voice.”)
Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro
As the negotiations progressed, Obama himself spent hours on the
phone with the prime minister, engaged in numerous circular efforts to
engage Israel in the details of the proposed nuclear deal. But the
relationship was beyond repair. The American president would often
return to two estimates that the Pentagon had made for him: An Israeli
strike would set back Iran’s enrichment program by only a year or two.
The proposed nuclear deal would suspend it for a decade or more, and
even after that Iran would still be prohibited from building a bomb.
Netanyahu wasn’t buying it. During one conversation, according to Philip
Gordon, a National Security Council official who listened in on the
phone call, he told Obama he planned to lobby Congress to simply kill
the deal. Obama told him he wouldn’t win.
In late January 2015, Gordon and other White House officials began
hearing rumors that, at first, they couldn’t imagine were true:
Netanyahu had been invited to give a speech before Congress to denounce
the impending nuclear deal. Gordon immediately dashed off an email to
Dermer, the Israeli ambassador. “It’s complicated,” was Dermer’s cryptic
reply. Dan Shapiro was furious when Speaker John Boehner’s office
notified the State Department of the planned speech, calling it a “punch
in the gut” and the hardest moment of his term as ambassador.
He called Yossi Cohen, the national security adviser who would later
take over at the Mossad. Cohen, as it turned out, was also in the dark.
“I found out about it when you did,” he told Shapiro. The speech failed
to turn Congress against the deal, and many in Israel now see it as a
foolish stunt. “Israel must never take a side in internal American
politics,” says Moshe Yaalon, Netanyahu’s defense minister at the time.
“Bibi identified with the Republicans, and that was a mistake. His
speech in Congress was poking a finger in the eye of the president of
the United States. I said all of this to Bibi, but he told me: ‘Forget
it. You don’t get it.’ In his view, no one understands America but him
and Ron Dermer.”
Netanyahu still thinks that’s the case, wryly noting that none of his
critics understand “the big secret” of American politics. He says that
some of his former cabinet members and generals seemed to believe that
the United States consisted of little more than the Pentagon and the
White House, but they were wrong. American public opinion was the key,
and the ability to shape it in some ways cut to the very heart of
Netanyahu’s political persona. “In the last 30 years, I appeared
innumerable times in the American media and met thousands of American
leaders,” he says. “I developed a certain ability to influence public
opinion, and that is the most important thing: the ability to sway
public opinion in the United States against the regime in Iran.”
Despite his powers of persuasion, Netanyahu was — at least for the
moment — unable to prevent a deal. Iran and the United States — along
with Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia — approved the final
draft of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on July 14, 2015. “Tough
talk from Washington does not solve problems,” Obama said in a
statement that day. “Hard-nosed diplomacy, leadership that has united
the world’s major powers, offers a more effective way to verify that
Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon.”
For some, it was the capstone to Obama’s foreign-policy legacy and a significant step forward in stabilizing the region.
For Netanyahu, it was a significant setback, but by no means a permanent one.
8. ‘He Has No Political Weight in the System’
Donald Trump inherited a nuclear deal that American spy agencies
believed was fundamentally working to keep Iran’s nuclear program in
check. But he also inherited a loaded gun: military plans for an Iran
strike that had been meticulously refined during the Obama years.
Less than two weeks after Inauguration Day, Mike Flynn, the national
security adviser, took to the White House lectern and said that the
White House was “officially putting Iran on notice” for engaging in a
missile test and supporting an attack on a Saudi warship. Flynn had
little chance to expand on the vague meaning of “notice”; he was pushed
out 12 days later. But Trump, in his first address to Congress, twinned
in one sentence a shot at Iran and an embrace of Israel. “I have also
imposed new sanctions on entities and individuals who support Iran’s
ballistic-missile program and reaffirmed our unbreakable alliance with
the state of Israel.” The House chamber erupted in thunderous applause.
Trump did pass on early chances to withdraw from the Iran deal, a
result of a split in his cabinet: Defense Secretary James Mattis and
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson argued that the J.C.P.O.A., while
imperfect, was fundamentally working and could be strengthened after
further negotiations with the Europeans. Gerard Araud, the French
ambassador to the United States, said that he and his European
colleagues came to think that Trump would continue his bluster but
ultimately stay in the deal. “There was the feeling that, as usual, all
politicians are different when they are campaigning and when they are
governing,” he says.
But tensions boiled over in July 2017 during a meeting at the
Pentagon, when Tillerson clashed with Trump and Bannon about the wisdom
of staying in the Iran deal — “we all know he’s getting out of the
deal,” Bannon snapped at Tillerson, according to one person with
knowledge of the meeting.
Trump fired Tillerson in March 2018, and H.R. McMaster, the national
security adviser, quit the same month. Mattis left nine months later.
The C.I.A. chief, Mike Pompeo, an Iran hawk since his days as a
Republican congressman from Kansas, had taken over as secretary of state
and became perhaps the administration’s most influential voice on Iran.
And to replace McMaster, Trump turned to John Bolton, who had written
the strategy paper the previous summer advocating for Trump to leave the
J.C.P.O.A. What remained was to persuade the president to do what he
had always said he was going to do: abrogate the Iran deal.
The White House, at least officially, was still on the Tillerson
track, favoring negotiation over withdrawal. Brian Hook, a lawyer
Tillerson brought to the State Department early in the administration,
was negotiating with European leaders to carry out what appeared to be
Trump’s orders: push to broaden the J.C.P.O.A. to include new
restrictions on Iran’s ballistic-missile program and on support for
proxy groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. By April, European officials had
come to think that their negotiations with Hook were working and a
solution was in sight. A five-page draft agreement laid out, in broad
terms, new restrictions on Iran’s missile programs and more aggressive
inspections of nuclear facilities.
Hook regularly reported back on the status of the negotiations,
telling other American officials that he thought a deal with the
Europeans was possible. But the Europeans were up against a powerful set
of players — from Netanyahu to the leaders of the Arab gulf states —
who used their representatives in Washington to lean on the White House
to break from the Iran deal. Some French and German officials now think
that the entire negotiation process was an elaborate charade. “It was a
fiction because Trump was not behind it,” Araud says.
Once again, policy came down to personnel. “I like Brian Hook,” Araud
explained, but he said the French government came to the assessment
“that he has no political weight in the system.” (Hook declined to be
interviewed for this article.)
Trump-administration officials say that the negotiations were
undertaken in good faith but that they didn’t make enough progress
before Trump decided to pull the plug. A senior administration official
says that although the president “felt that he was being generous” in
giving several months to allow the talks in Europe to proceed, “it
didn’t mean his generosity was limitless.”
Even as the European talks continued, Netanyahu was working on a
different track. In January 2018, he would later announce, a high-stakes
Mossad operation enabled the theft of tens of thousands of documents,
videos and photographs being housed in a warehouse on the outskirts of
Tehran. The intelligence trove represented a kind of secret history of
Iran’s quest for a bomb, and Yossi Cohen, the Mossad director, said in a
July 2019 speech that the goal of the operation was to help enforce a
strict inspection regime. “The operation enabled us to inform the
inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency where the Iranians
are hiding the nuclear materials and enable the group to destroy them,”
he said.
But Netanyahu saw far greater opportunities in the intelligence coup,
believing that it could help push Trump to finally get out of the
J.C.P.O.A. He claims now that even before the election, Trump had told
him that he would annul the agreement. “I believed him,” Netanyahu says,
“but of course I looked for ways for him to bolster this decision.”
That March, Netanyahu met with the president personally to go over
highlights from the archive, which he said showed how Iran had lied for
two decades about its nuclear program.
By the time Netanyahu went on television in Israel in late April to
reveal the fruits of the covert operation to the world, the announcement
was seen by many in the United States as an 11th-hour effort to
influence Trump’s decision. But its work had already been done.
According to an official familiar with the arrangements, American and
Israeli officials originally discussed a joint news conference in
Washington with four participants: Netanyahu and Cohen, the Mossad
chief, would disclose the Mossad operation and its fruits; Pompeo would
expound on the significance of the findings; and Trump would use the
archive as Exhibit A for why the United States needed to abandon the
J.C.P.O.A.
With the decision made, all that was left to do was tell the
Europeans, who were still laboring through negotiations under the
impression that there was a chance to salvage the deal. On April 24,
2018 — six days before Netanyahu’s televised presentation and two weeks
before Trump’s announcement of withdrawal — President Emmanuel Macron of
France arrived at the White House for what would be the first official
state visit of Trump’s presidency. Trump seemed to like Macron (their
relationship was dubbed “Le Bromance”), and that day Trump and Macron
and their wives stood on the South Lawn of the White House and planted a
small oak tree. The tree came from Belleau Wood, to the east of Paris,
where American troops turned back German forces near the end of World
War I. Macron wrote on Twitter that the tree “will be a reminder at the
White House of these ties that bind us.” The tree has since died.
Trump brought Macron into the Oval Office, where the two men sat
alone. Trump became serious, according to an official with knowledge of
the meeting, telling Macron he was the first to hear the news: The
United States was leaving the J.C.P.O.A. The news was hardly unexpected
for Macron, but the French president pushed back nonetheless. He told
Trump that the negotiations led by Brian Hook had been successful and
that a breakthrough was close.
As was reported at the time, Trump was clearly puzzled and seemed to
be largely unaware of the negotiations. “Who is Brian Hook?” he said.
9. ‘A Big Risk’
Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal brought the nuclear standoff
full circle. Severe economic sanctions, announced in April with the aim
of driving down Iranian oil exports, triggered months of clandestine
tit-for-tat measures that escalated to the point that, in late June,
American forces were within hours of striking Iran before Trump ordered
them to stand down, much to the disappointment of his more hawkish
allies. For its part, the Mossad has no doubt about who is to blame for
the present crisis. Yossi Cohen said in his July speech that the recent
attacks in the gulf region are “part of a single campaign” and were
“approved by the Iranian leadership and executed — most of them at least
— by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its proxies.”
The White House has adopted a guns-or-butter approach to economic
asphyxiation: Less money in the Iranian government’s treasury will, the
argument goes, force the regime to choose between supporting its
suffering population and funding groups like Hezbollah that it uses to
expand its influence in the Middle East. American intelligence
assessments have concluded that Iranian military and financial support
to such groups has in fact been drying up, a welcome outcome for leaders
in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have seen their own
influence in Washington grow during the Trump administration. But the
larger goal — a regional realignment — remains very much in flux.
The present crisis has drawn the United States and Israel — and their
self-confident leaders — even closer together. Where he once saw
opportunity in openly warring with an American president, Netanyahu has
used his close relationship with Trump as currency as he fights for his
own political survival. Trump is widely popular in Israel, and
Netanyahu’s campaign has adorned its party headquarters in Tel Aviv with
a portrait of the two men standing together. One senior Israeli
official, cracking a smile, said, “Trump is the only one who could beat
Netanyahu in the election.” (Another side of the building features a
similar portrait, with Netanyahu standing beside President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia.)
Having served as C.I.A. director and secretary of defense during a
meltdown in relations between an American president and an Israeli prime
minister, Leon Panetta says there is now danger in the other extreme.
“If it looks like the United States is going to do whatever Israel’s
bidding is, on any issue, then I think the United States loses any
leverage,” he said. “Our fundamental goal has to be to protect our
national security interests. What is in the United States’ interest? And
yes, we are a friend and an ally of Israel, but I think we always have
to maintain a relationship that looks at the bigger picture of that
region and what needs to be done to preserve peace in that region.” In
recent days, Trump has used support for Israel as a kind of litmus test
for American Jews, saying that Jews who opposed him were being
“disloyal” both to Israel and the Jewish people.
And yet Trump’s last-minute decision to abort the attack in June led
to a concern among Iran hawks in both Israel and the United States: that
the president ultimately might not have the resolve to confront the
threat with military force. The hawks also had reason to fear that two
other partners in the anti-Iran coalition — Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. —
might read any “softening” of Trump’s position on Iran as a sign that
they, too, must adjust their positions out of fear of being left alone
to deal with their regional nemesis. Both countries once aggressively
lobbied the Trump administration to take a hard-line position on Iran
and advocated the United States’ leaving the J.C.P.O.A. But the U.A.E.
recently announced a drawdown of its military involvement in Yemen —
where Emirati and Saudi troops have been battling a rebel group that
receives military support from Iran — and sent a delegation to Tehran to
discuss maritime security.
Once again, more than a decade after they first raised the subject
with American officials, Israeli officials have been considering the
possibility of a unilateral strike against Iran. Unlike with Bush and
Obama, there is greater confidence that Trump wouldn’t stand in the way.
Netanyahu has recently been flexing Israeli muscle around the Middle
East — launching hundreds of raids into Syria against Iranian and
Hezbollah arms stores and troop concentrations, and undertaking an even
bolder operation in July against a base in eastern Iraq that, Israeli
intelligence believed, was being used to store long-range guided
missiles en route to Iranian forces in Syria.
The threat of war could be a bluff, or an election ploy. But it also
represents a dangerous confluence of interests: an American president
often reluctant to use military force and an Israeli prime minister
looking to deal with unfinished business. “I think that it’s far more
likely that Trump would give Netanyahu a green light to strike Iran than
that Trump would strike himself,” Shapiro says. “But that, you know, is
a big risk.”
Yaakov Peri, a former chief of Shin Bet, has for years watched
Netanyahu speak about the Iran threat in almost apocalyptic terms. He
has made a kind of causal study of the man whose presence for more than a
decade has loomed over American decision making about Iran, one who
doesn’t believe he’s finished. “When Bibi took the Knesset podium to
make a speech, we used to play a game and bet how often he would say the
name Iran,” he says. “Bibi today is spellbound by his success in
putting the issue on the world agenda, by Trump being so deeply involved
with it, by the fact that his opinion is listened to — and that he was
the prophet of doom who foresaw all of this.”
