The Looming Threat of a Nuclear Crisis with Iran – The New Yorker
The first six rounds of diplomacy this spring, Malley told me, made real progress. In June, he presented a nuclear package that included ending most of Trumps sanctions. The collective sense of everybodyobviously the Europeans, the Russians and Chinese, but also the Iranian delegation at the timewas that we could see the outlines of a deal, he said. If each side was prepared to make the necessary compromises, we could get there.
The talks paused that month, after Irans Presidential election. Hassan Rouhani, the previous President and a reformist, had won in 2013 and 2017 on a platform of engaging with the United States. But Trumps sanctions sabotaged the economic benefits promised by the nuclear accord, so in 2021 a majority of Iranians didnt bother to vote. Ebrahim Raisi, a rigid ideologue and the head of the judiciary, was elected. The U.S. had already sanctioned Raisi, noting his role on a death commission that ordered the execution, in 1988, of some five thousand dissidents. At his Inauguration, in August, Raisi pledged, All the parameters of national power will be strengthened.
Malley had left his suits at the hotel in Vienna, expecting talks to resume before long. But five months passed, and Irans nuclear program advanced further. Malley eventually had his suits shipped home. By the time diplomacy resumed, in late November, Malley told me, Irans program had blown through the limits imposed by the J.C.P.O.A. As theyre making these advances, they are gradually emptying the deal of the nonproliferation benefits for which we bargained, he said. The Biden Administration has pushed back. Were not going to agree to a worse deal because Iran has built up its nuclear program, Malley added. At some point soon, trying to revive the deal would be tantamount to trying to revive a dead corpse. The U.S. and its allies might then have to address a runaway Iranian nuclear program. Without a return to the deal, a senior State Department official said, it is more than plausible, possible, and maybe even probable that Iran will try to become a threshold nuclear state.
The wild card is Israel. In September, at the U.N. General Assembly, the new Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, charged that Irans nuclear program had hit a watershed moment, and so has our tolerance. Words do not stop centrifuges from spinning. Israel is due to soon begin training for possible military strikes on Iran. During a visit to Washington in December, Defense Minister Benny Gantz urged the Biden Administration to hold joint military exercises with Israel. The problem with Irans nuclear program is that, for the time being, there is no diplomatic mechanism to make them stop, Palti told me. There is no deterrent. Iran is no longer afraid. We need to give them the stop sign. U.S. officials counter that Israeli operations have often provoked Tehran and set back diplomacy.
Iran can still reverse technological advances if a deal is reached. Its knowledge, however, is irreversible. Irans nuclear program hit new milestones over the past year, Kelsey Davenport said. As it masters these new capabilities, it will change our understanding about how the country may pursue nuclear weapons down the road. Even if the Biden Administration does broker a return to the accord, Republicans have vowed to scuttle it. In October, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, tweeted, Unless any deal w/ Iran is ratified by the Senate as a treatywhich Biden knows will NOT happenit is a 100% certainty that any future Republican president will tear it up. Again.
As the nuclear talks foundered earlier this year, I flew to the Al Asad Airbase, in Iraqs remote western desert, with Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie,Jr., a Marine general from Alabama, who heads U.S. military operations across the Middle East and South Asia. It was part of an extended tour of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Qatar, and Lebanon. In the cavernous cabin of a C-17, he sat alone in a room-size container draped with an American flag. McKenzies military experience with Iran has been perilous and bloody. When he was a young officer, two hundred and forty-one marines were killed in the 1983 suicide bombing of U.S. peacekeepers in Beirut. It was the largest loss of marine lives in a single day since the battle of Iwo Jima, in the Second World War. The Reagan Administration blamed Iran and its then nascent proxies in Hezbollah. Almost four decades later, McKenzie told me that Tehrans nuclear capabilities were far from the only danger it now poses.
Under Trump, hostilities between the United States and Iran escalated. They peaked in 2020, when Trump ordered the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, the revered head of Irans Quds Force, the lite wing of the Revolutionary Guard. As Suleimani arrived in Baghdad to meet local allies, McKenzie called in an M-9 Reaper drone to fire four Hellfire missiles at the Generals convoy. Suleimani and nine others were shredded. His severed hand was identified by the large red-stone ring often photographed on his wedding finger.
Five days later, Iran fired eleven ballistic missileseach carrying at least a thousand-pound warheadat Al Asad Airbase. U.S. intelligence had tracked Irans deployment of the missiles, giving the Americans a few hours to evacuate their warplanes and half of their personnel. Lieutenant Colonel Staci Coleman, the commander of an air expeditionary squad, had to decide which of her crew of a hundred and sixty should leave and who was emotionally equipped to stay. I was deciding who would live and who would die, she later told military investigators. I honestly thought anyone remaining behind would perish. Many of the service members leaving Al Asad anxiously hugged the ones staying. No American military personnel had been killed by an enemy air strike since 1953, during the Korean War.
The first salvo struck around 1A.M. Master Sergeant Janet Liliu recounted to investigators, What happened in the bunkers, well, no words can describe the atmosphere. I wasnt ready to die, but I tried to prepare myself with every announcement of an incoming missile. The bombardment dragged on for hours; it was the largest ballistic-missile attack ever by any nation on American troops. No Americans died, but a hundred and ten suffered traumatic brain injuries. Trump dismissed the suffering at Al Asad. I heard they had headaches, he told reporters. Two years later, many of those at Al Asad are still experiencing profound memory, vision, and hearing losses. One died by suicide in October. Eighty have been awarded Purple Hearts.
The lesson of Al Asad, McKenzie told me, is that Irans missiles have become a more immediate threat than its nuclear program. For decades, Irans rockets and missiles were wildly inaccurate. At Al Asad, they hit pretty much where they wanted to hit, McKenzie said. Now they can strike effectively across the breadth and depth of the Middle East. They could strike with accuracy, and they could strike with volume.
Irans advances have impressed both allies and enemies. After the 1979 revolution, the young theocracy purged the Shahs military and rebuilt it almost from scratch, despite waves of economic sanctions. Iran fought a ruinous eight-year war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties that further depleted its armory. Its Air Force is still weak, its ships and tanks are mediocre, and its military is not capable of invading another country and holding territory.
Instead, the regime has concentrated on developing missiles with longer reach, precision accuracy, and greater destructive power. Iran is now one of the worlds top missile producers. Its arsenal is the largest and most diverse in the Middle East, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported. Iran has proven that it is using its ballistic-missile program as a means to coerce or intimidate its neighbors, Malley told me. Iran can fire more missiles than its adversariesincluding the United States and Israelcan shoot down or destroy. Tehran has achieved what McKenzie calls overmatcha level of capability in which a country has weaponry that makes it extremely difficult to check or defeat. Irans strategic capacity is now enormous, McKenzie said. Theyve got overmatch in the theatrethe ability to overwhelm.
Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a brigadier general and a former sniper who heads Irans Aerospace Force, is known for incendiary bravado. In 2019, he boasted, Everybody should know that all American bases and their vessels in a distance of up to two thousand kilometres are within the range of our missiles. We have constantly prepared ourselves for a full-fledged war. Hajizadeh succeeded General Hassan Moghaddam, who founded Irans missile and drone programs, and who died in 2011, with sixteen others, in a mysterious explosion. They had been working on a missile capable of hitting Israel.
Israelis call Hajizadeh the new Suleimani. McKenzie called him reckless. In 2019, Hajizadehs forces downed a U.S. reconnaissance drone over the Persian Gulf. He also orchestrated the missile strikes on Al Asad. Hours after that attack, his forces shot down a Ukrainian Boeing 737 passenger plane, with a hundred and seventy-six people on board, as it took off from Tehrans international airport. Everyone perished. For three days, Iran refused to accept blame until, under pressure, Hajizadeh went on television to admit it.
Iran now has the largest known underground complexes in the Middle East housing nuclear and missile programs. Most of the tunnels are in the west, facing Israel, or on the southern coast, across from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf sheikhdoms. This fall, satellite imagery tracked new underground construction near Bakhtaran, the most extensive complex. The tunnels, carved out of rock, descend more than sixteen hundred feet underground. Some complexes reportedly stretch for miles. Iran calls them missile cities.
In 2020, the Revolutionary Guard marked the anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover by releasing a video of Hajizadeh inspecting a subterranean missile arsenal. As suspenseful music plays in the background, he and two other Revolutionary Guard commanders march through a tunnel lined with rows of missiles stacked on top of one another. A recording of General Suleimani echoes in the background: You start this war, but we create the end ofit. An underground railroad ferries Emad missiles for rapid successive launches. Emads have a range of a thousand miles and can carry a conventional or a nuclear warhead.
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The Looming Threat of a Nuclear Crisis with Iran - The New Yorker