Jay Solomon, one of America's top national security journalists, has covered Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Over the last few years, he has focused especially on Iran, its larger regional project, and U.S.-Iran relations, including the deal over the regime's nuclear program, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Solomon's stories about Iran continue to lead the news. His report last month showing how the Obama White House shipped $400 million to Iran on wooden pallets at the same time the clerical regime released U.S. hostages strongly suggested the administration paid ransom.
His just-published first book The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East is the fall season's top book on national security and has already hit a number of bestseller lists. Recently, I sat down with Solomon here in Washington, D.C. to talk about his book, Iran, the Obama administration, and the direction of American foreign policy.
**Lee Smith: You made news again recently when you told Andrea Mitchell that had the White House attacked Bashar al-Assad in 2013 when he violated Obama's red line over the use of chemical weapons, the Iranians would have walked out of the nuclear talks. And the administration said it wasn't true.**
Jay Solomon: Iranian officials told me that even had the diplomats doing the negotiations wanted to stay in talks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have pulled the plug. I don't see how you can make the case that the administration's Syria policy is separate from the nuclear deal. Obama sent a letter to Khamenei saying he wouldn't target Assad. And Pentagon officials told us they were concerned that operations in Syria risked undermining the nuclear negotiations.
**LS: You've written the definitive account of a key moment in American foreign policy. When did you first get a sense that Iran was a big issue?**
JS: Back in the summer of 2006, when I went to Beirut to report on Israel's month-long conflict with Hezbollah. Up until then, my experience was covering Asia, particularly Indonesia, the two Koreas, and India, and I'd never covered Lebanon or the Middle East before this. There was all this talk about Hezbollah being an independent actor but I was there for six weeks and saw that the Iranian and Syrian influence was real. In Indonesia, I saw that the politics could be very brutal, but it wasn't like here, where there were assassinations. The outside influence was blatant, I thought at first it couldn't be real, but it was. I met with members of Lebanon's [Sunni-majority] Future movement and they told me about all of their people—politicians, police officers, etc.—who were on Syrian hit lists and I thought these guys are being paranoid. But when I came back two years later in 2008, many of the people they said were on the hit list were all dead. 2006 was eye opening—I saw Iran was very much in a regional conflict.
**LS: In your book John Kerry says he's certain that without the nuclear deal the United States would have been a war with Iran.**
JS: I never saw any indication that either Presidents Bush or Obama were on the verge of ordering military operations against Iran. In a sense, Iraq became a proxy war between Iran and the United States, and the book is critical of Bush's policies on Iraq. But I never got a good explanation from Bush people why they didn't push back harder against Iranian influence in Iraq. The Pentagon clearly saw "ratlines" carrying in supplies and IEDs from Iran. So the idea that Obama administration might have been on the verge of war with Iran never made much sense. The Iranians took 52 Americans hostage in 1979 and killed 241 Marines in 1983 and then Secretary of State George Shultz was pushing for a response to the Iranians. But President Reagan never called for strikes. If the U.S. didn't do anything then, it's unlikely we were going to something militarily now. I think that's largely a myth. The history of U.S.-Iran relations is that all administrations have been very restrained.
LS: What about Israel? Was Jerusalem close to war with Iran at any point?
JS: There was an escalation in 2011. There were a number of attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, and many were assassinated, allegedly by the Israelis. Someone seemed to know exactly what Iran and these scientists were doing. They all allegedly worked on nuclear weapons research and testing at the Parchin military site, south of Tehran. Then the Iranians fought back and ordered a wave of their own plots, in Asia and Europe and even Washington, D.C., where they purportedly wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador. In late 2011, the Israelis conducted a long-range exercise that could only be interpreted as a test run for an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, and the White House got spooked. I believe that's why in 2012 we saw a major push from the administration for engagement. They were scared that if the Israelis attacked, the United States would get dragged in.
LS: You argue in the book that the administration feared the same thing about sanctions.
JS: The book illustrates just out how successful sanctions really were. A lot of people thought they wouldn't work at all; this includes both Republican and Democrats and many in Israel. Many in Congress would say that they forced the White House to impose sanctions, which is true to some extent. But there was a concern voiced even inside the Bush administration that taking Iranian oil off line would cause a spike in global prices and hurt our economic recovery. What both the Bush and Obama administrations did, particularly the Treasury Department, was very impressive in that they hurt Iran without causing this wider oil shock. Remember, that sanctions were only in place for a little more than a year before the negotiations started. The strongest sanctions were all imposed around the same time, around July 2012—the EU oil embargo, sanctions on the central bank of Iran, and banning Iran from the SWIFT banking system.
When Rouhani was elected president in 2013, his people were really nervous. Ahmadinejad's policies had created a huge whole in the banking system, and Rouhani people were worried they wouldn't be able to fix it. Sanctions were biting. And they were only in place a year before the administration started to provide relief—$700 million a month, which is how the White House essentially subsidized Iran's role in negotiations.
I'm still not certain why the White House didn't use the Kirk-Menendez legislation that threatened more Iran sanctions if there was no deal in a year. They could have gone to the Iranians and said, "Hey you have to give me something more here because I have these hardliners at home who won't give me a break." They Iranians played the same game, using Khamenei as the foil.
**LS: You spent a lot of time in Asia and you also mentioned that your father, Richard Solomon, was a China expert who Kissinger brought into the State Department when Nixon was opening to Beijing. A lot of supporters of the nuclear deal contend that the White House's outreach to Iran is similar to Nixon and Kissinger's efforts to come to an accommodation with the Chinese.**
JS: My father is a China hand and actually wrote about this recently. He'd say that we had real shared interests with China in the 1970s—concerns about the Soviet Union, among other things. It's hard to see where there's similar shared interests with Iran. People say we share an interest in stopping the Islamic State. But I'm not sure Iran sees the threat the same way.
My concern is that the real analogy in Asia could be relations with North Korea, not China. We reached an agreement with North Korea in the 1990s that essentially was a trade of economic incentives for their nuclear program. But the deal never resulted in any real change in the North Korea regime or its stance towards Washington. There was all this euphoria at the time of the Agreed Framework, but it was essentially just a transaction, and both sides eventually opted out. There's a risk the same could happen with the Iran deal.
LS: What do you see as the future of U.S.-Iran relations now?
JS: Rouhani and Zarif want an economic opening, but they're also committed to the revolution, the theocratic system, and the nuclear program. They'd rather do business with the West because China and Russia have lesser technologies. Some Iranians grumble about getting cheated by them. Rouhani might normalize relations with the U.S. if he could. But I think the last thing Khamenei wants is all this Western business and influence in Iran, threatening the revolution. I could see Rouhani getting reelected in 2017. Ahmadinejad mismanaged the economy and united countries against Iran. So if Rouhani helps to relieve outside pressure for another four years, why not?
On the other hand, it seems clear the Iranians are escalating now at the end of Obama's term. Harassing U.S. Navy ships, arresting of dual nationals, testing ballistic missiles, installing the S-300s at Fordow. And there's been little pushback from the administration. The Iranians seem to be setting a firm line out so that whoever comes into the White House next understands that there's a new paradigm.