Soon after I became CIA director in 1991, I met Ehud Barak, then a lieutenant general and chief of the Israeli general staff. After thirty-five years in the Israeli army, Barak entered politics, became prime minister for a time at the end of the 1990s, and in June 2007 became minister of defense under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Barak retained his position when Netanyahu became prime minister in early 2009, so we were both holdover ministers. By the time Bibi took office, my nearly twenty-yearlong acquaintance with Barak had become a very good, even close, relationship. We had spoken and met often during my time as Bush’s defense secretary and would do so even more frequently during my tenure under President Obama. Barak would travel to Washington to see me about every two months. It was not by accident that even though the political and diplomatic relationship between the Obama administration and Netanyahu remained frosty between 2009 and 2012, the defense relationship remained strong and in every dimension would reach unprecedented levels of cooperation.
Netanyahu’s first visit to Washington in his latest incarnation as prime minister, in mid-May 2009, included a meeting and lunch at the White House and a working lunch with me at the Pentagon. He and I focused on military cooperation and a broad discussion of Iran and its nuclear program. Our first no-punches-pulled discussion of Iran came during my visit to Israel in late July, when images of the rigged Iranian election and subsequent repression of the Green Revolution in June were still fresh. Bibi was convinced the Iranian regime was extremely fragile and that a strike on their nuclear facilities very likely would trigger the regime’s overthrow by the Iranian people. I strongly disagreed, convinced that a foreign military attack would instead rally the Iranian people behind their government. Netanyahu also believed Iranian retaliation after a strike would be pro forma, perhaps the launch of a few dozen missiles at Israel and some rocket salvos from Lebanese-based Hizballah. He argued that the Iranians were realists and would not want to provoke a larger military attack by the United States by going after American targets—especially our ships in the Gulf—or by attacking other countries’ oil facilities. Closing the Gulf to oil exports, he said, would cut the Iranians’ own economic throats. Again I disagreed, telling him he was misled by the lack of an Iraqi response to Israel’s destruction of their Osirak reactor in 1981 and the absence of any Syrian reaction to destruction of their reactor in 2007. I said the Iranians—the Persians—were very different from Iraqis and Syrians. He was assuming a lot in anticipating a mild Iranian reaction, and if he was wrong, an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would spark a war in the region, I said.
These two lines of argumentation would dominate the U.S.-Israeli dialogue over Iran for the rest of my tenure as secretary, though there was not much difference in our intelligence assessments of how far along the Iranians were in their nuclear program, nor in our views of the consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Whether (and when) to act militarily and the consequences of an attack would remain contentious.
The last gasp of Obama’s engagement strategy with Iran was an ingenious proposal, developed by the United States in consultation with our allies in October 2009, that Iran ship about 80 percent of its known 1.5 metric tons of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be enriched, then sent to France for conversion into fuel rods, and finally sent back to Iran for medical research use in the Tehran Research Reactor. According to the experts, once used in the research reactor, the uranium would be extremely difficult to convert for other purposes—such as nuclear weapons. The proposal was seen as a way to get most of the low-enriched uranium out of the country and rendered useless for weapons, while acknowledging Iran’s right to use nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. France, Britain, China, Germany, Russia, and the United States supported the proposal, and tentative agreement was reached with Iranian negotiators in Europe on October 22. Iran backed out the next day, having second thoughts about giving up its big bargaining chip—the low-enriched uranium—without, in their view, gaining any strategic benefit. Given French president Sarkozy’s open loathing of the Iranian regime, I believe the Iranians also had no intention of putting their uranium in French hands.
The failure to make a deal had significant international consequences. The Obama administration, including me, had seen the deal as a way to get the low-enriched uranium out of Iran and thus buy more time for a longer-term solution. Ironically, but as I had believed it would, the diplomatic effort to reach out to Iran was critical to our success in finding more willing partners in a new, tougher approach.
Central to the new approach would be getting international agreement. The Deputies Committee had met several times in early November and agreed that the United States should first pursue a UN Security Council resolution imposing new economic sanctions on Iran, then widen the net of pressure. The president chaired a National Security Council meeting on November 11—just preceding the important NSC session on Afghanistan—to consider next steps. He said we had to pivot from engagement to pressure as a result of the Iranian rejection of the Tehran Research Reactor initiative, the Iranians’ lack of full cooperation with the IAEA inspection of the Qom enrichment facility (a secret facility, the existence of which we revealed to put Iran on its heels and to build support for more sanctions), and their unwillingness to pursue negotiations with the six big powers (France, Germany, Britain, Russia, China, and the United States).
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, felt we were unlikely to get a strong new resolution out of the Security Council. I said that the clock was ticking on both the progress of the Iranian nuclear program and Jerusalem’s patience. We needed a new resolution as a foundation for stronger sanctions, and because we didn’t expect much anyway, I thought we should accept a diluted resolution if we could get it passed quickly. Then we could develop additional sanctions and other punitive actions beyond the strict terms of the resolution. Militarily, I thought we needed to prepare for a possible Israeli attack and Iranian retaliation and figure out a way to use our actions to send the Iranians a message in parallel to economic pressures.
I had hoped for UN action in January or February; the resolution passed in June 2010. The resolution was better than nothing, but it demonstrated that Russia and China remained ambivalent about how hard to push Tehran. China was leery of losing the significant amount of oil it bought from Iran and, in any event, was in no mood to do anything remotely helpful to the United States after we announced the sale of $6.5 billion in arms to Taiwan at the end of January 2010. Russia, I think, still harbored hopes of future economic and political influence in Iran.
Bush and Obama had said publicly that the military option to stop Iran’s nuclear program remained on the table, and it was our job at the Pentagon to do the planning and preparation to ensure that it was not an idle threat. U.S. military leaders were increasingly worried that either the Israelis or the Iranians might take military action with little or no warning and that such an action could require an immediate response from U.S. forces in the Gulf. There would be no time for protracted meetings in Washington or for the president to consult anyone but me, the next person in the chain of command. Other than the U.S. response to a small-scale Iranian “fast-boat” attack on one of our Navy ships, there had been no discussion in either the Bush or the Obama administrations—other than private conversations I had with each president—about momentous decisions that might be required within minutes if serious shooting broke out in the Gulf. It was my view that such a discussion was long overdue.