Will Iran Be Next?

Atlantic Monthly Magazine
Dec. 2004

Soldiers, spies, and diplomats conduct a classic Pentagon war
game-with sobering results by James Fallows

…..

Throughout this summer and fall, barely mentioned in America’s
presidential campaign, Iran moved steadily closer to a showdown with
the United States (and other countries) over its nuclear plans.

In June the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran had not
been forthcoming about the extent of its nuclear programs. In July,
Iran indicated that it would not ratify a protocol of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty giving inspectors greater liberty within its
borders. In August the Iranian Defense Minister warned that if Iran
suspected a foreign power-specifically the United States or Israel-of
preparing to strike its emerging nuclear facilities, it might launch
a pre-emptive strike of its own, of which one target could be the
U.S. forces next door in Iraq. In September, Iran announced that it
was preparing thirty-seven tons of uranium for enrichment, supposedly
for power plants, and it took an even tougher line against the IAEA.
In October it announced that it had missiles capable of hitting targets
1,250 miles away-as far as southeastern Europe to the west and India
to the east. Also, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman rejected a
proposal by Senator John Kerry that if the United States promised to
supply all the nuclear fuel Iran needed for peaceful power-generating
purposes, Iran would stop developing enrichment facilities (which could
also help it build weapons). Meanwhile, the government of Israel kept
sending subtle and not-so-subtle warnings that if Iran went too far
with its plans, Israel would act first to protect itself, as it had
in 1981 by bombing the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak.

Preoccupied as they were with Iraq (and with refighting Vietnam),
the presidential candidates did not spend much time on Iran. But
after the election the winner will have no choice. The decisions
that a President will have to make about Iran are like those that
involve Iraq-but harder. A regime at odds with the United States,
and suspected of encouraging Islamic terrorists, is believed to be
developing very destructive weapons. In Iran’s case, however, the
governmental hostility to the United States is longer-standing (the
United States implicitly backed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq
War of the 1980s), the ties to terrorist groups are clearer, and
the evidence of an ongoing nuclear-weapons program is stronger. Iran
is bigger, more powerful, and richer than Iraq, and it enjoys more
international legitimacy than Iraq ever did under Saddam Hussein. The
motives and goals of Iran’s mullah government have been even harder
for U.S. intelligence agencies to understand and predict than Saddam
Hussein’s were.

And Iran is deeply involved in America’s ongoing predicament in Iraq.
Shiites in Iran maintain close cultural and financial contacts with
Iraqi Shiite communities on the other side of the nearly 1,000-mile
border between the countries. So far Iraq’s Shiites have generally
been less resistant to the U.S. occupation than its Sunnis. Most
American experts believe that if it wanted to, Iran could incite
Iraqi Shiites to join the insurgency in far greater numbers.

As a preview of the problems Iran will pose for the next American
President, and of the ways in which that President might respond,
The Atlantic conducted a war game this fall, simulating preparations
for a U.S. assault on Iran.

“War game” is a catchall term used by the military to cover a wide
range of exercises. Some games run for weeks and involve real troops
maneuvering across oceans or terrain against others playing the role
of the enemy force.

Some are computerized simulations of aerial, maritime, or land warfare.

Others are purely talking-and-thinking processes, in which a group of
people in a room try to work out the best solution to a hypothetical
crisis.

Sometimes participants are told to stay “in role”-to say and do only
what a Secretary of State or an Army brigade commander or an enemy
strategist would most likely say and do in a given situation. Other
times they are told to express their own personal views. What the
exercises have in common is the attempt to simulate many aspects
of conflict-operational, strategic, diplomatic, emotional, and
psychological-without the cost, carnage, and irreversibility of real
war. The point of a war game is to learn from simulated mistakes in
order to avoid making them if conflict actually occurs.

Our exercise was stripped down to the essentials. It took place in
one room, it ran for three hours, and it dealt strictly with how an
American President might respond, militarily or otherwise, to Iran’s
rapid progress toward developing nuclear weapons. It wasn’t meant to
explore every twist or repercussion of past U.S. actions and future
U.S. approaches to Iran.

Reports of that nature are proliferating more rapidly than weapons.

Rather, we were looking for what Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force
colonel, has called the “clarifying effect” of intense immersion in
simulated decision-making. Such simulations are Gardiner’s specialty.
For more than two decades he has conducted war games at the National
War College and many other military institutions. Starting in 1989,
two years before the Gulf War and fourteen years before Operation
Iraqi Freedom, he created and ran at least fifty exercises involving
an attack on Iraq. The light-force strategy that General Tommy Franks
used to take Baghdad last year first surfaced in a war game Gardiner
designed in the 1980s. In 2002, as the real invasion of Iraq drew
near, Gardiner worked as a private citizen to develop nonclassified
simulations of the situation that would follow the fall of Baghdad.
These had little effect on U.S. policy, but proved to be prescient
about the main challenges in restoring order to Iraq.

Gardiner told me that the war games he has run as a military instructor
frequently accomplish as much as several standard lectures or panel
discussions do in helping participants think through the implications
of their decisions and beliefs. For our purposes he designed an
exercise to force attention on the three or four main issues the next
President will have to face about Iran, without purporting to answer
all the questions the exercise raised.

The scenario he set was an imagined meeting of the “Principals
Committee”-that is, the most senior national-security officials of
the next Administration. The meeting would occur as soon as either
Administration was ready to deal with Iran, but after a November
meeting of the IAEA. In the real world the IAEA is in fact meeting in
November, and has set a deadline for Iran to satisfy its demands by
the time of the meeting. For the purposes of the simulation Iran is
assumed to have defied the deadline. That is a safe bet in the real
world as well.

And so our group of principals gathered, to provide their best judgment
to the President. Each of them had direct experience in making similar
decisions. In the role of CIA director was David Kay, who after the
Gulf War went to Iraq as the chief nuclear-weapons inspector for the
IAEA and the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), and went back
in June of 2003 to lead the search for weapons of mass destruction. Kay
resigned that post in January of this year, after concluding that
there had been no weapons stockpiles at the time of the war.

Playing Secretary of State were Kenneth Pollack, of the Brookings
Institution, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise
Institute. Although neither is active in partisan politics (nor is
anyone else who served on the panel), the views they expressed about
Iran in our discussion were fairly distinct, with Gerecht playing a
more Republican role in the discussions, and Pollack a more Democratic
one. (This was the war game’s one attempt to allow for different
outcomes in the election.)

Both Pollack and Gerecht are veterans of the CIA. Pollack was a
CIA Iran-Iraq analyst for seven years, and later served as the
National Security Council’s director for Persian Gulf affairs
during the last two years of the Clinton Administration. In 2002 his
book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq was highly
influential in warning about the long-term weapons threat posed by
Saddam Hussein. (Last January, in this magazine, Pollack examined
how pre-war intelligence had gone wrong.) His book about U.S.-Iranian
tensions, The Persian Puzzle, has just been published.

Gerecht worked for nine years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations,
where he recruited agents in the Middle East. In 1997, under the
pseudonym Edward Shirley, he published Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s
Journey Into Revolutionary Iran, which described a clandestine trip.
He has written frequently about Iran, Afghanistan, and the craft of
intelligence for this and other publications.

The simulated White House chief of staff was Kenneth Bacon, the chief
Pentagon spokesman during much of the Clinton Administration, who is
now the head of Refugees International. Before the invasion Bacon was
closely involved in preparing for postwar humanitarian needs in Iraq.

Finally, the Secretary of Defense was Michael Mazarr, a professor
of national-security strategy at the National War College, who has
written about preventing nuclear proliferation in Iran, among other
countries, and has collaborated with Gardiner on previous war games.

This war game was loose about requiring players to stay “in role.”

Sometimes the participants expressed their institutions’ views; other
times they stepped out of role and spoke for themselves. Gardiner
usually sat at the conference table with the five others and served
as National Security Adviser, pushing his panel to resolve their
disagreements and decide on recommendations for the President.
Occasionally he stepped into other roles at a briefing podium. For
instance, as the general in charge of Central Command (centcom)-the
equivalent of Tommy Franks before the Iraq War and John Abizaid now-he
explained detailed military plans.

Over the years Gardiner has concluded that role-playing exercises
usually work best if the participants feel they are onstage, being
observed; this makes them take everything more seriously and try
harder to perform. So the exercise was videotaped, and several people

were invited to watch and comment on it. One was Graham Allison, of
Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, a leading scholar of
presidential decision-making, who served as a Pentagon official in the
first Clinton Administration, specializing in nuclear-arms control. His
Essence of Decision, a study of how the Kennedy Administration handled
the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, is the classic work in its field;
his latest book, which includes a discussion of Iran, is Nuclear
Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. Two other observers
were active-duty officers: Marine Corps Colonel Thomas X. Hammes,
who has specialized in counterinsurgency and whose book about dealing
with Iran (and many other challenges), The Sling and the Stone, was
published this summer; and Army Major Donald Vandergriff, whose most
recent book, about reforming the internal culture of the Army, is
The Path to Victory (2002). The fourth observer was Herbert Striner,
formerly of the Brookings Institution, who as a young analyst at an
Army think-tank, Operations Research Organization, led a team devising
limited-war plans for Iran-back in the 1950s. Striner’s team developed
scenarios for one other regional war as well: in French Indochina,
later known as Vietnam.

Promptly at nine o’clock one Friday morning in September, Gardiner
called his group of advisers to order. In his role as National Security
Adviser he said that over the next three hours they needed to agree
on options and recommendations to send to the President in the face
of Iran’s latest refusal to meet demands and the latest evidence of
its progress toward nuclear weaponry. Gardiner had already decided
what questions not to ask. One was whether the United States could
tolerate Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power. That is, should Iran be
likened to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in whose possession nuclear weapons
would pose an unacceptable threat, or to Pakistan, India, or even
North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions the United States regrets but
has decided to live with for now? If that discussion were to begin,
it would leave time for nothing else.

Gardiner also chose to avoid posing directly the main question the game
was supposed to illuminate: whether and when the United States should
seriously consider military action against Iran. If he started with
that question, Gardiner said, any experienced group of officials would
tell him to first be sure he had exhausted the diplomatic options. So
in order to force discussion about what, exactly, a military “solution”
would mean, Gardiner structured the game to determine how the panel
assessed evidence of the threat from Iran; whether it was willing to
recommend steps that would keep the option of military action open,
and what that action might look like; and how it would make the case
for a potential military strike to an audience in the United States
and around the world.

Before the game began, Gardiner emphasized one other point about
his approach, the importance of which would become clear when the
discussions were over. He had taken pains to make the material he would
present as accurate, realistic, and true to standard national-security
practice as possible. None of it was classified, but all of it
reflected the most plausible current nonclassified information he
could obtain. The detailed plans for an assault on Iran had also
been carefully devised. They reflected the present state of Pentagon
thinking about the importance of technology, information networks, and
Special Forces operations. Afterward participants who had sat through
real briefings of this sort said that Gardiner’s version was authentic.

His commitment to realism extended to presenting all his information
in a series of PowerPoint slides, on which U.S. military planners are
so dependent that it is hard to imagine how Dwight Eisenhower pulled
off D-Day without them. PowerPoint’s imperfections as a deliberative
tool are well known. Its formulaic outline structure can overemphasize
some ideas or options and conceal others, and the amateurish graphic
presentation of data often impedes understanding. But any simulation of
a modern military exercise would be unconvincing without it. Gardiner’s
presentation used PowerPoint for its explanatory function and as a
spine for discussion, its best use; several of the slides have been
reproduced for this article.

In his first trip to the podium Gardiner introduced himself as the
director of central intelligence. (That was David Kay’s role too,
but during this phase he just sat and listened.) His assignment was
to explain what U.S.intelligence knew and didn’t know about Iran’s
progress toward nuclear weapons, and what it thought about possible
impediments to that progress-notably Israel’s potential to launch a
pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.

“As DCI, I’ve got to talk about uncertainty,” Gardiner began-the
way future intelligence officers presumably will after the Iraq-WMD
experience, when George Tenet, as CIA director, claimed that the case
for Iraq’s having weapons was a “slam-dunk.” “It’s an important part
of this problem. The [intelligence] community believes that Iran
could have a nuclear weapon in three years.” He let that sink in
and then added ominously, “Unless they have something we don’t know
about, or unless someone has given them or sold them something we
don’t know about”-or unless, on top of these “known unknowns,” some
“unknown unknowns” were speeding the pace of Iran’s program.

One response to imperfect data about an adversary is to assume
the worst and prepare for it, so that any other outcome is a happy
surprise. That was the recommendation of Reuel Gerecht, playing the
conservative Secretary of State. “We should assume Iran will move as
fast as possible,” he said several times. “It would be negligent of
any American strategic planners to assume a slower pace.” But that
was not necessarily what the DCI was driving at in underscoring
the limits of outside knowledge about Iran. Mainly he meant to
emphasize a complication the United States would face in making its
decisions. Given Iran’s clear intent to build a bomb, and given the
progress it has already made, sometime in the next two or three years
it will cross a series of “red lines,” after which the program will be
much harder for outsiders to stop. Gardiner illustrated with a slide
(figure 1).

Iran will cross one of the red lines when it produces enough enriched
uranium for a bomb, and another when it has weapons in enough places
that it would be impossible to remove them in one strike. “Here’s
the intelligence dilemma,” Gardiner said. “We are facing a future in
which this is probably Iran’s primary national priority. And we have
these red lines in front of us, and we”-meaning the intelligence
agencies-“won’t be able to tell you when they cross them.” Hazy
knowledge about Iran’s nuclear progress doesn’t dictate assuming the
worst, Gardiner said. But it does mean that time is not on America’s
side. At some point, relatively soon, Iran will have an arsenal that
no outsiders can destroy, and America will not know in advance when
that point has arrived.

Then the threat assessment moved to two wild-card factors: Iran’s
current involvement in Iraq, and Israel’s potential involvement with
Iran. Both complicate and constrain the options open to the United
States, Gardiner said. Iran’s influence on the Shiite areas of Iraq
is broad, deep, and obviously based on a vastly greater knowledge of
the people and customs than the United States can bring to bear. So
far Iran has seemed to share America’s interest in calming the Shiite
areas, rather than have them erupt on its border. But if it needs a
way to make trouble for the United States,one is at hand.

As for Israel, no one can be sure what it will do if threatened. Yet
from the U.S. perspective, it looks as if a successful pre-emptive
raid might be impossible-or at least so risky as to give the most
determined Israeli planners pause. Partly this is because of the same
lack of knowledge that handicaps the United States. When Menachem Begin
dispatched Israeli fighter planes to destroy Iraq’s Osirak plant,
he knew there was only one target, and that if it was eliminated,
Iraq’s nuclear program would be set back for many years. In our
scenario as in real life, the Americans thought Ariel Sharon and his
successors could not be sure how many important targets were in Iran,
or exactly where all of them were, or whether Israel could destroy
enough of them to make the raid worth the international outrage and
the likely counterattack. Plus, operationally it would be hard.

But for the purposes of our scenario, Israel kept up its threats to
take unilateral action. It was time again for PowerPoint. Figure 2
shows the known targets that might be involved in some way in Iran’s
nuclear program. And figure 3 shows the route Israeli warplanes would
have to take to get to them. Osirak, near Baghdad, was by comparison
practically next door, and the Israeli planes made the round trip
without refueling. To get to Iran, Israeli planes would have to
fly over Saudi Arabia and Jordan, probably a casus belli in itself
given current political conditions; or over Turkey, also a problem;
or over American-controlled Iraq, which would require (and signal)
U.S. approval of the mission.

With this the DCI left the podium-and Sam Gardiner, now sitting at
the table as National Security Adviser, asked what initial assessments
the principals made of the Iranian threat.

On one point there was concord. Despite Gardiner’s emphasis on the
tentative nature of the intelligence, the principals said it was
sufficient to demonstrate the gravity of the threat. David Kay,
a real-life nuclear inspector who was now the DCI at the table,
said that comparisons with Iraq were important-and underscored how
difficult the Iranian problem would be.

“It needs to be emphasized,” he said, “that the bases for conclusions
about Iran are different, and we think stronger than they were
with regard to Iraq.” He explained that international inspectors
withdrew from Iraq in 1998, so outsiders had suspicions rather than
hard knowledge about what was happening. In Iran inspectors had been
present throughout, and had seen evidence of the “clandestine and very
difficult-to-penetrate nature of the program,” which “leaves no doubt
that it is designed for a nuclear-weapons program.” What is worse,
he said, “this is a lot more dangerous than the Iraqi program, in that
the Iranians have proven, demonstrated connections with very vicious
international terrorist regimes who have shown their willingness
to use any weapons they acquire” against the United States and its
allies. Others spoke in the same vein.

The real debate concerned Israel. The less America worried about
reaction from Europe and the Muslim world, the more likely it was to
encourage or condone Israeli action, in the hope that Israel could
solve the problem on its own. The more it worried about long-term
relations with the Arab world, the more determined it would be to
discourage the Israelis from acting.

Most of the principals thought the Israelis were bluffing, and that
their real goal was to put pressure on the United States to act.
“It’s hard to fault them for making this threat,” said Pollack, as
the Democratic Secretary of State, “because in the absence of Israeli
pressure how seriously would the United States be considering this
option? Based on my discussions with the Israelis, I think they know
they don’t have the technical expertise to deal with this problem. I
think they know they just don’t have the planes to get there-setting
aside every other problem.”

“They might be able to get there-the problem would be getting home,”
retorted Gerecht, who had the most positive view on the usefulness
of an Israeli strike.

Bacon, as White House chief of staff, said, “Unless they can take out
every single Iranian missile, they know they will get a relatively
swift counterattack, perhaps with chemical weapons. So the threat
they want to eliminate won’t be eliminated.” Both he and Pollack
recommended that the Administration ask the Israelis to pipe down.

“There are two things we’ve got to remember with regard to the
Israelis,” Kay said. “First of all, if we tell them anything, they are
certain to play it back through their network that we are ‘bringing
pressure to bear’ on them. That has been a traditional Israeli
response. It’s the nature of a free democracy that they will do that.

The second thing we’ve got to be careful of and might talk to the
Israelis about: our intelligence estimate that we have three years
to operate could change if the Iranians thought the Israelis might
pre-empt sooner. We’d like to have that full three years, if not
more. So when we’re talking with the Israelis, toning down their
rhetoric can be described as a means of dealing with the threat.”

Woven in and out of this discussion was a parallel consideration of
Iraq: whether, and how, Iran might undermine America’s interests there
or target its troops. Pollack said this was of great concern. “We
have an enormous commitment to Iraq, and we can’t afford to allow
Iraq to fail,” he said. “One of the interesting things that I’m
going to ask the CentCom commander when we hear his presentation is,
Can he maintain even the current level of security in Iraq, which
of course is absolutely dismal, and still have the troops available
for anything in Iran?” As it happened, the question never came up in
just this form in the stage of the game that featured a simulated
centcom commander. But Pollack’s concern about the strain on U.S.
military resources was shared by the other panelists. “The second side
of the problem,” Pollack continued, “is that one of the things we have
going for us in Iraq, if I can use that term, is that the Iranians
really have not made a major effort to thwart us . If they wanted to
make our lives rough in Iraq, they could make Iraq hell.” Provoking
Iran in any way, therefore, could mean even fewer troops to handle
Iraq-and even worse problems for them to deal with.

Kay agreed. “They may decide that a bloody defeat for the United
States, even if it means chaos in Iraq, is something they actually
would prefer. Iranians are a terribly strategic political culture .
They might well accelerate their destabilization operation, in the
belief that their best reply to us is to ensure that we have to go
to helicopters and evacuate the Green Zone.”

More views were heard-Gerecht commented, for example, on the
impossibility of knowing the real intentions of the Iranian
government-before Gardiner called a halt to this first phase of the
exercise. He asked for a vote on one specific recommendation to the
President: Should the United States encourage or discourage Israel in
its threat to strike? The Secretary of Defense, the DCI, the White
House chief of staff, and Secretary of State Pollack urged strong
pressure on Israel to back off. “The threat of Israeli military action
both harms us and harms our ability to get others to take courses
of action that might indeed affect the Iranians,” Kay said. “Every
time a European hears that the Israelis are planning an Osirak-type
action, it makes it harder to get their cooperation.” Secretary of
State Gerecht thought a successful attack was probably beyond Israel’s
technical capability, but that the United States should not publicly
criticize or disagree with its best ally in the Middle East.

Gardiner took the podium again. Now he was four-star General Gardiner,
commander of CentCom. The President wanted to understand the options
he actually had for a military approach to Iran. The general and his
staff had prepared plans for three escalating levels of involvement:
a punitive raid against key Revolutionary Guard units, to retaliate
for Iranian actions elsewhere, most likely in Iraq; a pre-emptive
air strike on possible nuclear facilities; and a “regime change”
operation, involving the forcible removal of the mullahs’ government
in Tehran. Either of the first two could be done on its own, but the
third would require the first two as preparatory steps.

In the real world the second option-a pre-emptive air strike against
Iranian nuclear sites-is the one most often discussed. Gardiner said
that in his briefing as war-game leader he would present versions
of all three plans based as closely as possible on current military
thinking. He would then ask the principals to recommend not that an
attack be launched but that the President authorize the preparatory
steps to make all three possible.

The first option was straightforward and, according to Gardiner,
low-risk. The United States knew where the Revolutionary Guard units
were, and it knew how to attack them. “We will use Stealth airplanes,
U.S.-based B-2 bombers, and cruise missiles to attack,” Gardiner
said. “We could do this in one night.” These strikes on military
units would not in themselves do anything about Iran’s nuclear
program. Gardiner mentioned them because they would be a necessary
first step in laying the groundwork for the ultimate scenario of
forced regime change, and because they would offer the United States a
“measured” retaliatory option if Iran were proved to be encouraging
disorder in Iraq.

The pre-emptive air strike was the same one that had been deemed
too demanding for the Israelis. The general’s staff had identified
300 “aim points” in Iran. Some 125 of them were sites thought to be
involved in producing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The
rest were part of Iran’s air-defense or command system. “I call this a
low-risk option also,” Gardiner said, speaking for CentCom. “I’m not
doing that as political risk-that’s your job. I mean it’s a low-risk
military option.” Gardiner said this plan would start with an attack
on air-defense sites and would take five days in all.

Then there was option No. 3. Gardiner called this plan “moderate
risk,” but said the best judgment of the military was that it would
succeed. To explain it he spent thirty minutes presenting the very
sorts of slides most likely to impress civilians: those with sweeping
arrows indicating the rapid movement of men across terrain. (When
the exercise was over, I told David Kay that an observer who had not
often seen such charts remarked on how “cool” they looked. “Yes, and
the longer you’ve been around, the more you learn to be skeptical
of the ‘cool’ factor in PowerPoint,” Kay said. “I don’t think the
President had seen many charts like that before,” he added, referring
to President Bush as he reviewed war plans for Iraq.)

The overall plan of attack was this: a “deception” effort from the
south,to distract Iranian troops; a main-force assault across the long
border with Iraq; airborne and Special Forces attacks from Afghanistan
and Azerbaijan; and cruise missiles from ships at sea. Gardiner
presented more-detailed possibilities for the deployment. A relatively
light assault, like the one on Afghanistan, is depicted in figure 4. A
“heavier” assault would involve more troops and machines attacking
across two main fronts (figure 5).

In all their variety, these and other regime-change plans he described
had two factors in common. One is that they minimized “stability”
efforts-everything that would happen after the capital fell. “We want

to take out of this operation what has caused us problems in Iraq,”
Gardiner of CentCom said, referring to the postwar morass. “The idea
is to give the President an option that he can execute that will
involve about twenty days of buildup that will probably not be seen
by the world. Thirty days of operation to regime change and taking
down the nuclear system, and little or no stability operations. Our
objective is to be on the outskirts of Tehran in about two weeks. The
notion is we will not have a Battle of Tehran; we don’t want to do
that. We want to have a battle around the city. We want to bring our
combat power to the vicinity of Tehran and use Special Operations to
take the targets inside the capital. We have no intention of getting
bogged down in stability operations in Iran afterwards. Go in quickly,
change the regime, find a replacement, and get out quickly after
having destroyed-rendered inoperative-the nuclear facilities.” How
could the military dare suggest such a plan, after the disastrous
consequences of ignoring “stability” responsibilities in Iraq? Even
now, Gardiner said after the war game, the military sees post-conflict
operations as peripheral to its duties. If these jobs need to be done,
someone else must take responsibility for them.

The other common factor was the need for troops, machinery, and
weapons to be nearby and ready to move. Positioning troops would not
be that big a problem. When one unit was replacing another in Iraq,
for a while both units would be in place, and the attack could happen
then. But getting enough machinery into place was more complicated,
because airfields in nearby Georgia and Azerbaijan are too small to
handle a large flow of military cargo planes (figure 6).

As centcom commander, Gardiner cautioned that any of the measures
against Iran would carry strategic risks. The two major dangers were
that Iran would use its influence to inflame anti-American violence
in Iraq, and that it would use its leverage to jack up oil prices,
hurting America’s economy and the world’s. In this sense option
No. 2-the pre-emptive air raid-would pose as much risk as the full
assault, he said. In either case the Iranian regime would conclude
that America was bent on its destruction, and it would have no reason
to hold back on any tool of retaliation it could find. “The region
is like a mobile,” he said. “Once an element is set in motion, it is
impossible to say where the whole thing will come to rest.” But the
President had asked for a full range of military options, and unless
his closest advisers were willing to go to him empty-handed, they
needed to approve the steps that would keep all the possibilities
alive. That meant authorizing the Department of Defense to begin
expanding airfields, mainly in Azerbaijan, and to dedicate $700 million
to that purpose. (As it happens, this is the same amount Tommy Franks
requested in July of 2002, to keep open the possibility of war in
Iraq.) “This is not about executing the plan,” Gardiner of centcom
said. “We’re preparing options for the President; the whole issue of
execution is separate. We need some money to build facilities.”

Gardiner remained at the podium to answer questions as the CentCom
commander, and the discussion began. The panelists skipped immediately
to the regime-change option, and about it there was unanimity:
the plan had been modeled carefully on the real assault on Iraq,
and all five advisers were appalled by it.

“You need to take this back to Tampa,” David Kay said, to open
the discussion. Tampa, of course, is the headquarters for CentCom
units operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Or put it someplace else
I’d suggest, but we’re in public.” What was remarkable about the
briefing, he said, was all the charts that were not there. “What
were the countermoves?” he asked. “The military countermoves-not
the political ones you offloaded to my Secretaries of State but the
obvious military countermoves that the Iranians have? A very easy
military counter is to raise the cost of your military operation
inside Iraq. Are you prepared to do that?”

The deeper problem, Kay said, lay with the request for money to “keep
options open.” “That, quite frankly, is a bunch of bullshit,” he said.
“Approval of the further planning process forecloses a number of
options immediately. I would love to see a strategic communications
plan that would allow us to continue diplomatic and other options
immediately with our European allies when this leaks; inevitably this
will leak.”

The next twenty minutes of discussion was to the same effect. Who,
exactly, would succeed the mullahs in command? How on earth would
U.S. troops get out as quickly as they had come in? “Speaking as the
President’s chief of staff, I think you are doing the President an
enormous disservice,” Kenneth Bacon said. “One, it will leak. Two,
it will be politically and diplomatically disastrous when it leaks. I
think your invasion plan is a dangerous plan even to have on the
table in the position of being leaked . I would throw it in Tampa
Bay and hope the sharks would eat it.”

“This is a paranoid regime,” Kenneth Pollack said of Iran. “Even if
the development of the Caucasus airfields . even if it weren’t about
them, they would assume it was about them. So that in and of itself
will likely provoke a response. The Iranians are not inert targets! If
they started to think we were moving in the direction of a military
move against them, they would start fighting us right away.”

Michael Mazarr, as Secretary of Defense, said he did not want the
authority that was on offer to his department. “Tell the President my
personal judgment would be the only circumstances in which we could
possibly consider launching any significant operation in Iran would
be the most extreme provocation, the most imminent threat,” he said.

Even the hardest-liner, Reuel Gerecht, was critical. “I would agree
that our problems with the Islamic republic will not be over until
the regime is changed,” he said. If the United States could launch
a genuine surprise attack-suddenly, from aircraft carriers, rather
than after a months-long buildup of surrounding airfields-he would
look at it favorably. But on practical grounds, he said, “I would
vote against the regime-change options displayed here.”

Further unhappy back-and-forth ensued, with the CentCom commander
defending the importance of keeping all options open, and the
principals warning of trouble when news of the plan got out. When
Gardiner called an end to this segment, there was little objection to
the most modest of the military proposals-being ready, if need be,
for a punitive strike on the Revolutionary Guards. The participants
touched only briefly on the Osirak-style strike during the war game,
but afterward most of them expressed doubt about its feasibility. The
United States simply knew too little about which nuclear projects
were under way and where they could be destroyed with confidence. If
it launched an attack and removed some unknown proportion of the
facilities, the United States might retard Iran’s progress by an
unknown number of months or years-at the cost of inviting all-but
Iranian retaliation. “Pre-emption is only a tactic that puts off the
nuclear development,” Gardiner said after the exercise. “It cannot
make it go away.

Since our intelligence is so limited, we won’t even know what we
achieved after an attack. If we set it back a year, what do we do a
year later? A pre-emptive strike would carry low military risk but
high strategic risk.”

During the war game the regime-change plan got five nays. But it
was clear to all that several other big issues lay on the table,
unresolved. How could the President effectively negotiate with the
Iranians if his own advisers concluded that he had no good military
option to use as a threat? How could the world’s most powerful
and sophisticated military lack the ability to take an opponent by
surprise? How could leaders of that military imagine, after Iraq, that
they could ever again propose a “quick in-and-out” battle plan? Why
was it so hard to develop plans that allowed for the possibility that
an adversary would be clever and ruthless? Why was it so hard for the
United States to predict the actions and vulnerabilities of a regime
it had opposed for twenty-five years?

At noon the war game ended. As a simulation it had produced
recommendations that the President send a go-slow signal to the
Israelis and that he not authorize any work on airfields in Central
Asia. His advisers recommended that he not even be shown Centcom’s
plans for invading Iran.

The three hours of this exercise were obviously not enough time for
the panel of advisers to decide on all aspects of a new policy toward

Iran. But the intended purpose of the exercise was to highlight the
real options a real President might consider. What did it reveal?
Gardiner called for a wrap-up from participants and observers
immediately after the event. From their comments, plus interviews with
the participants in the following week, three big themes emerged:
the exercise demonstrated something about Iraq, something about the
way governments make decisions, and something about Iran.

Iraq was a foreground topic throughout the game, since it was where a
threatened Iran might most easily retaliate. It was even more powerful
in its background role. Every aspect of discussion about Iran was
colored by knowledge of how similar decisions had played out in Iraq.

What the United States knew and didn’t know about secret weapons
projects. What could go wrong with its military plans. How much
difficulty it might face in even a medium-size country. “Compared with
Iraq, Iran has three times the population, four times the land area,
and five times the problems,” Kenneth Pollack said during the war
game. A similar calculation could be heard in almost every discussion
among the principals, including those who had strongly supported the
war in Iraq. This was most obvious in the dismissal of the full-scale
regime-change plan-which, Gardiner emphasized, was a reflection of
real-life military thinking, not a straw man. “I have been working on
these options for almost eighteen months,” he said later. “I tried
them in class with my military students. They were the best I could
do. I was looking for a concept that would limit our involvement in
stability operations. We just don’t have the forces to do that in
Iran. The two lesser concepts”-punitive raids on the Revolutionary
Guard and pre-emptive air strikes-“were really quite good from a
military perspective.” And of course the sweeping third concept, in
the very similar form of Tommy Franks’s plan, had been approved by
a real President without the cautionary example of Iraq to learn from.

Exactly what learning from Iraq will mean is important but impossible
to say. “Iraq” could become shorthand for a comprehensive disaster-one
of intention, execution, and effect. “Usually we don’t make the
same mistakes immediately,” Graham Allison said. “We make different
mistakes.” In an attempt to avoid “another Iraq,” in Iran or elsewhere,
a different Administration would no doubt make new mistakes. If George
Bush is re-elected, the lessons of Iraq in his second term will depend
crucially on who is there to heed them. All second-term Presidents
have the same problem, “which is that the top guys are tired out and
leave-or tired out and stay,” Kay said. “You get the second-best and
the second-brightest, it’s really true.” “There will be new people,
and even the old ones will behave differently,” Gardiner said. “The
CIA will not make unequivocal statements.

There will be more effort by everyone to question plans.” But Kay said
that the signal traits of the George W. Bush Administration-a small
group of key decision-makers, no fundamental challenge of prevailing
views-would most likely persist. “I have come to the conclusion that
it is a function of the way the President thinks, operates, declares
his policy ahead of time,” Kay said. “It is inherent in the nature
of George Bush, and therefore inherent in the system.”

What went wrong in Iraq, according to our participants, can in almost
all cases be traced back to the way the Administration made decisions.
“Most people with detailed knowledge of Iraq, from the CIA to the State
Department to the Brits, thought it was a crazy quilt held together
in an artificial state,” Allison said. Because no such people were
involved in the decision to go to war, the Administration expected a
much easier reception than it met-with ruinous consequences. There was
no strong institutional system for reconciling differences between the
Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and other institutions, and
the person who theoretically might have done this, Condoleezza Rice,
was weak. “If you don’t have a deliberate process in which the National
Security Adviser is playing a strong role, clarifying contrary views,
and hammering out points of difference, you have the situation you
did,” Allison said. “There was no analytic memo that all the parties
looked at that said, ‘Here’s how we see the shape of this problem; here
is the logic that leads to targeting Iraq rather than North Korea.'”

“Process” sounds dull, and even worse is “government decision-making,”
but these topics provoked the most impassioned comments from panelists
and observers when they were interviewed after the war game. All were
alarmed about the way governments now make life-and-death decisions;
this was, after Iraq, the second big message of the exercise.

“Companies deciding which kind of toothpaste to market have much more
rigorous, established decision-making processes to refer to than the
most senior officials of the U.S. government deciding whether or not
to go to war,” Michael Mazarr said. “On average, the national-security
apparatus of the United States makes decisions far less rigorously
than it ought to, and is capable of. The Bush Administration is more
instinctual, more small-group-driven, less concerned about being sure
they have covered every assumption, than other recent Administrations,
particularly that of George H. W. Bush. But the problem is bigger
than one Administration or set of decision-makers.”

Gardiner pointed out how rare it is for political leaders to ask,
“And what comes after that? And then?” Thomas Hammes, the Marine
expert in counterinsurgency, said that presentations by military
planners feed this weakness in their civilian superiors, by assuming
that the adversary will cooperate. “We never ‘red-celled’ the enemy
in this exercise” (that is, let him have the first move), Hammes said
after the Iran war game. “What if they try to pre-empt us? What if we
threaten them, and the next day we find mines in Baltimore Harbor and
the Golden Gate, with a warning that there will be more? Do we want
to start this game?” Such a failure of imagination-which Hammes said
is common in military-run war games-has a profound effect, because
it leads to war plans like the ones from Gardiner’s CentCom, or from
Tommy Franks, which in turn lull Presidents into false confidence.
“There is no such thing as a quick, clean war,” he said. “War will
always take you in directions different from what you intended. The
only guy in recent history who started a war and got what he intended
was Bismarck,” who achieved the unification of Germany after several
European wars.

Gardiner pointed out that none of the principals had even bothered to
ask whether Congress would play a part in the decision to go to war.
“This game was consistent with a pattern I have been seeing in games
for the past ten years,” he said. “It is not the fault of the military,
but they have learned to move faster than democracy was meant to move.”

And what did the exercise show about Iran? In the week after the
war game I interviewed the partici- pants about the views they had
expressed “in role” and about their personal recommendations for the
next President’s approach. >>From these conversations, and from the
participants’ other writings and statements about Iran, the following
themes emerged.

About Iran’s intentions there is no disagreement. Iran is trying
to develop nuclear weapons, and unless its policy is changed by the
incentives it is offered or the warnings it receives, it will succeed.

About America’s military options there is almost as clear a view. In
circumstances of all-out war the United States could mount an invasion
of Iran if it had to. If sufficiently provoked-by evidence that
Iran was involved in a terrorist incident, for example, or that it
was fomenting violence in Iraq-the United States could probably be
effective with a punitive bomb-and-missile attack on Revolutionary
Guard units.

But for the purposes most likely to interest the next American
President-that is, as a tool to slow or stop Iran’s progress toward
nuclear weaponry-the available military options are likely to fail
in the long term.

A full-scale “regime change” operation has both obvious and hidden
risks.

The obvious ones are that the United States lacks enough manpower
and equipment to take on Iran while still tied down in Iraq, and
that domestic and international objections would be enormous. The
most important hidden problem, exposed in the war-game discussions,
was that a full assault would require such drawn-out preparations
that the Iranian government would know months in advance what was
coming. Its leaders would have every incentive to strike pre-emptively
in their own defense. Unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a threatened Iran
would have many ways to harm America and its interests.

Apart from cross-border disruptions in Iraq, it might form an
outright alliance with al-Qaeda to support major new attacks within
the United States. It could work with other oil producers to punish
America economically. It could, as Hammes warned, apply the logic of
“asymmetric,” or “fourth-generation,” warfare, in which a superficially
weak adversary avoids a direct challenge to U.S. military power
and instead strikes the most vulnerable points in American civilian
society, as al-Qaeda did on 9/11. If it thought that the U.S. goal
was to install a wholly new regime rather than to change the current
regime’s behavior, it would have no incentive for restraint.

What about a pre-emptive strike of our own, like the Osirak raid? The
problem is that Iran’s nuclear program is now much more advanced than
Iraq’s was at the time of the raid. Already the U.S. government has no
way of knowing exactly how many sites Iran has, or how many it would
be able to destroy, or how much time it would buy in doing so. Worse,
it would have no way of predicting the long-term strategic impact of
such a strike. A strike might delay by three years Iran’s attainment
of its goal-but at the cost of further embittering the regime and
its people. Iran’s intentions when it did get the bomb would be all
the more hostile.

Here the United States faces what the military refers to as a
“branches and sequels” decision-that is, an assessment of best
and second-best outcomes. It would prefer that Iran never obtain
nuclear weapons. But if Iran does, America would like Iran to see
itself more or less as India does-as a regional power whose nuclear
status symbolizes its strength relative to regional rivals, but whose
very attainment of this position makes it more committed to defending
the status quo. The United States would prefer, of course, that Iran
not reach a new level of power with a vendetta against America. One
of our panelists thought that a strike would help the United States,
simply by buying time. The rest disagreed. Iran would rebuild after a
strike, and from that point on it would be much more reluctant to be
talked or bargained out of pursuing its goals-and it would have far
more reason, once armed, to use nuclear weapons to America’s detriment.

Most of our panelists felt that the case against a U.S. strike was all
the more powerful against an Israeli strike. With its much smaller
air force and much more limited freedom to use airspace, Israel
would probably do even less “helpful” damage to Iranian sites. The
hostile reaction-against both Israel and the United States-would be
potentially more lethal to both Israel and its strongest backer.

A realistic awareness of these constraints will put the next President
in an awkward position. In the end, according to our panelists, he
should understand that he cannot prudently order an attack on Iran. But
his chances of negotiating his way out of the situation will be greater
if the Iranians don’t know that. He will have to brandish the threat
of a possible attack while offering the incentive of economic and
diplomatic favors should Iran abandon its plans. “If you say there is
no acceptable military option, then you end any possibility that there
will be a non-nuclear Iran,” David Kay said after the war game. “If
the Iranians believe they will not suffer any harm, they will go
right ahead.” Hammes agreed: “The threat is always an important
part of the negotiating process. But you want to fool the enemy,
not fool yourself. You can’t delude yourself into thinking you can do
something you can’t.” Is it therefore irresponsible to say in public,
as our participants did and we do here, that the United States has no
military solution to the Iran problem? Hammes said no. Iran could not
be sure that an American President, seeing what he considered to be
clear provocation, would not strike. “You can never assume that just
because a government knows something is unviable, it won’t go ahead
and do it. The Iraqis knew it was not viable to invade Iran, but they
still did it. History shows that countries make very serious mistakes.”

So this is how the war game turned out: with a finding that the
next American President must, through bluff and patience, change the
actions of a government whose motives he does not understand well,
and over which his influence is limited. “After all this effort,
I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers,” Sam Gardiner
said of his exercise. “You have no military solution for the issues
of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work.”

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