adviser. The new arrivals took a harder
line on Iran, and some of their counter-
parts in the Administration, the former
senior official said, worried that “they
weren’t giving Trump any other options.
Trump was learning on the job, and they
were baiting him to do something.”
Trump withdrew from the Iran nu-
clear agreement in May, 2018. Some
dissenters within the Administration
predicted that the decision would cause
Iran to become more aggressive, both
as a regional power and in the devel-
opment of its nuclear capacities. “They’re
not going to say, ‘O.K., cool, let’s talk
about this,’” the former U.S. diplomat
said. “Given what we were about to
do—massive economic sanctions, total
strangulation—my assumption was that
Iran would fight back.”
I
n the next eighteen months, Trump
and Suleimani edged closer to con-
frontation. In 2018, Israeli intelligence
agencies told the Americans that Su-
leimani was trying to install long-range
rockets and so-called killer drones—
which explode on contact—in Iraq.
Some leaders at the Pentagon and the
State Department were skeptical, fear-
ing that Israel was preparing to take
steps that could further destabilize Iraq:
if Israel conducted air strikes to take
out suspected weapons, Suleimani’s
proxies could attack U.S. personnel for
the first time since 2011. U.S. officials
told their Israeli counterparts, “Let us
check it out before you do anything.”
The Israelis agreed to wait.
In the White House, resistance to a
more aggressive Iran policy was fading.
Mattis quit in December, 2018. Trump
wanted to do more to help Israel and
Sunni allies confront Iran. In April, the
Administration added the Revolution-
ary Guard Corps, including the Quds
Force, to its list of foreign terrorist or-
ganizations. “Bolton and Pompeo knew
that that designation opened up the
targeting aperture,” the former senior
Trump Administration official said.
But, at the Pentagon and the State De-
partment, some officials had resisted
that step, on the ground that it could
set a dangerous precedent, allowing
other countries to treat American forces
as terrorists. The U.S. also started to
provide actionable intelligence to Israel
to assist its air strikes against the Quds
Force. Mattis and his allies had delayed
that step, too, until lawyers assessed its
implications. If the U.S. fed actionable
intelligence into Israel’s targeting de-
cisions—what the military calls the “kill
chain”—then Americans would share
responsibility for the results. Mattis had
worried, as the former U.S. diplomat
put it, that “the Israelis could spark
something that would burn us.”
For months, Trump hesitated to use
force against Iran. On June 13th, when
two oil tankers were attacked near the
Strait of Hormuz, Pompeo blamed Iran,
but Trump did not order a strike. A
week later, the Revolutionary Guard
Corps shot down a U.S. Global Hawk
drone with a surface-to-air missile.
Trump, at the urging of Pompeo and
Bolton, ordered a retaliatory strike, but
shortly before the launch of cruise mis-
siles the Pentagon called a delay, to as-
sess a security threat at the British Em-
bassy in Tehran. After an hour, they
resumed the final countdown. At this
point, Trump changed his mind. The
plan was abandoned. In a tweet, he wrote,
“I am in no hurry.” Pompeo and Bolton
were displeased, the former senior Trump
Administration official said.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime
Minister, was getting impatient. The
Israelis were concerned that Trump’s
inaction would embolden Suleimani.
They had also come to suspect that
Trump was seeking negotiations with
the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani,
much as he had with the leader of North
Korea, Kim Jong-un. Israeli intelligence
officials considered that prospect—what
they called an open-ended “engagement
with no results”—to be the “most dan-
gerous” scenario.
In the summer of 2019, after a year
of warning that Suleimani posed a grow-
ing threat, Israel took matters into its
own hands, expanding its campaign into
Iraq—precisely the scenario that some
U.S. military leaders and diplomats had
cautioned against. On July 19th, Israel
destroyed a weapons depot north of
Baghdad, where the Popular Mobiliza-
tion Forces (P.M.F.), a Shia militia under
Suleimani’s control, was thought to be
“Enough with the hard-luck stories about spanking
and cursive and appointment television, Dad.”
• •
48 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
