Iraq War II, Part 7: A Golden Opportunity
To mark the 20th anniversary of the "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion" of Iraq, as George W. Bush himself now characterizes it, we are serializing that chapter from my 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism over the next few weeks exclusively here at Substack.
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen.
Listen to the Audiobook chapter
The Iranians held a million-man vigil in Tehran on September 12, 2001. They saw America’s catastrophe as their opportunity to normalize relations since the U.S. now had their primary enemies, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq, as well as bin Laden’s group, in common. They thought they had a chance to create a new relationship with the United States. As reported by journalist Gareth Porter, in April 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq, Iran delivered to the United States what is now known as the “golden offer.” Iran’s government sent this proposal to the Americans by way of the Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann. When he brought it to the State Department, he got a dressing down for daring even to make the delivery.
The offer said that the Iranians were willing to negotiate on everything: their nuclear program, support for Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine and Lebanon, a new policy of officially ignoring Israel, working together with the U.S. against the Taliban in Afghanistan and on the future of Iraq. They also offered to trade information on al Qaeda fighters they had captured fleeing Afghanistan for information on members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), then under American protection in Iraq.
As has been documented in numerous places, even including the Pentagon’s RAND Corporation, MEK is a formerly communist, extremely cultish Iranian terrorist group that had killed Americans in Iran before and during the 1979 revolution. They then worked with the mullahs for a time before betraying them for Saddam Hussein, when they fought on Iraq’s side in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and helped to crush the post-Iraq War I Shi’ite and Kurdish uprising in 1991. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, they had fallen into the hands of the Americans and the Israelis. Iran was offering to trade information on bin Laden’s son, Hamza, Saif al-Adl and other prominent al Qaeda prisoners they were holding on house arrest for information on the MEK in exchange.
The Bush administration refused the opportunity to make peace with Iran and possibly the chance to get their hands on important al Qaeda figures at the same time. The hawks preferred confrontation. After a May 2003 al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, the Defense Department pretended to believe that it must have been orchestrated out of Iran under their government’s supervision, falsely putting them on the opposite side of the war against al Qaeda from the United States.
After the U.S. invaded Iraq and inherited the MEK from Saddam Hussein, Cheney and Rumsfeld began using them for intelligence missions inside Iran. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, they were even brought to the U.S. for military training. Israel famously used them to launder the revelation of construction of the Iranian nuclear centrifuge facility at Natanz, which had, in fact, already been publicly revealed. Since then, the MEK has often proclaimed other “intelligence” about Iran’s nuclear program, usually unreliable, such as the so-called “smoking laptop” which they provided to the IAEA in 2004. They have also made various false claims about nuclear facilities in Iran, such as in 2015, when they released a stock photo of a vault door in an attempt to show proof of a secret uranium enrichment site in Tehran. During Barack Obama’s first term, the Israelis started using MEK cultists to murder Iranian nuclear scientists in an assassination campaign between 2010–2012. They killed four, including a graduate student, and narrowly missed an attempt on the director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. Finally, the Obama administration leaked a story about it to NBC News, essentially burning the operation and demanding its end. The MEK was likely involved in the assassination of another Iranian nuclear scientist in November 2020 as well.
The common propaganda campaign has it that Iran is “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” This is simply laughable. They back Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But though both have used terrorist tactics in the past, both groups are now elected political parties. And while they provide determined armed resistance to Israel, neither is an international terrorist group nor do either of them target the United States of America.
Claims that Iran backs al Qaeda are lies pushed by hawks like Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and neoconservative groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. They have been discredited by in-depth studies completed by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the New America Foundation and Reuters and official statements by the CIA and Pentagon. There is also the fact of multiple attacks by al Qaeda and associated groups against Iran over the years. Former Bush NSC official Flynt Leverett has confirmed to the author that Iran was opposed to al Qaeda and was very cooperative with the War on Terrorism until the administration turned on them. They targeted the Iranians with new sanctions, named them as an enemy in Bush’s official national security strategy, putting them on the shortlist for regime change, and pretended for years to believe they were in violation of their sworn forbearance of the pursuit of nuclear weapons in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, a possible tripwire for war.
The worst thing one can accuse the Iranian government of in the last 20 years is that after Bush rejected their overtures, they implemented their own Iraq policy based on “strong federalism,” which helped tear that country apart. Iran’s strategy was mostly centered around having their favored groups cooperate with America’s war. We were fighting it for them.
Stay tuned to this space for the rest of Enough Already, Chapter 3 Iraq War II. They will be published every few days until the anniversary of the invasion in mid-March.
Looking to read ahead? Get a copy of my 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism on Amazon.
Ready to support? Become a paid subscriber and you’ll get access to every episode of The Scott Horton Show a day early and ad-free.