Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon
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it resumed under his successor, Clinton.
After Washington tightened sanctions,
Iran orchestrated the 1996 bombing o
the Khobar Towers complex, in Saudi
Arabia, then in use by American military
personnel enforcing a no-Áy zone over
Iraq. Nineteen members o the U.S. Air
Force were killed. (As it has under
Trump, American pressure invited an
Iranian response.) Yet by the time blame
for the attack could be authoritatively
pinned on Iran, in 1997, retaliation had
lost its attraction—all the more so since
Mohammad Khatami, who had pledged
to end Iran’s provocative foreign policy,
had been elected president in the in-
terim. Clinton moved swiftly to capital-
ize on Khatami’s reform program but had
little leeway to reduce the congressio-
nally mandated sanctions, an Iranian sine
qua non for meaningful diplomatic
progress. What might have been an
opportunity to normalize the bilateral
relationship Äzzled.
President George W. Bush never
really had chance to implement an Iran
policy before the 9/11 attacks derailed his
plans. Once Bush regained his balance,
however, the United States and Iran
cooperated closely in Afghanistan follow-
ing the 2001 U.S. invasion. But in May
2003, U.S. intelligence intercepted a
congratulatory message from al Qaeda
militants under house arrest in Iran to
the terrorists who had assaulted a housing
compound in Riyadh. Bush promptly
shut down U.S. cooperation with Iran in
Afghanistan, Iran began shipping weap-
ons to Shiite insurgents in Iraq, and the
chance for cooperation vanished.
The failures o U.S.-Iranian rap-
prochement cannot be laid solely at the
feet o Washington, o course. Since 1979,
Iran has often gone out o its way toallowed Israel to send Iran a vast quan-
tity o American-made weapons to aid in
the war against Saddam. Despite the fact
that Iran and Syria colluded in separate
attacks in 1983 against the U.S. embassy
and a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut,
killing 17 embassy personnel and 241
U.S. troops, Reagan never retaliated. By
his second term, he was once again
looking for an opening to Iran. His
administration had two main reasons for
resuming ties: it needed Iran’s help to
free U.S. hostages held by Iranian
proxies in Lebanon, and it wanted to
increase U.S. leverage in Tehran at a
time when it seemed as i the Soviets
might try to ingratiate themselves with
the clerical regime. In 1985, the United
States resumed selling military equip-
ment to Iran via Israeli intermediaries,
an operation that continued for over a
year, until it was exposed by a Lebanese
newspaper. The revelation o these sales
nearly destroyed Reagan’s presidency—
especially once it emerged that the
National Security Council staer Oliver
North had used money from the sales to
illegally fund the Nicaraguan contras.
The usual story about the Iran-contra
scandal is that Reagan was desperately
concerned about the U.S. hostages in
Lebanon, but it may be closer to the truth
to say that Reagan’s approach to Iran
paralleled his approach to the Soviet
Union. He believed that both regimes
were unsustainable and that the best
way to hasten their demise was through
dialogue backed by military strength.
His problem, o course, was that Iran had
no Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist
Soviet premier who became Reagan’s
negotiating partner.
Although U.S. Iran policy fell into a
lull under President George H. W. Bush,