US Loses Iraq War

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How U.S. messed up and lost the war in Iraq. It blamed Iran.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/topic/wikileaks_diplomatic_cables/


SPIEGEL - 12/05/2010

At Sea in the Desert

US Diplomats Bewildered and Bamboozled in Baghdad

Roughly 5,500 classified cables from the US Embassy in Baghdad paint a grim picture of why America's stunning military victory over Iraq devolved into disaster: The Americans allowed themselves to get entangled in the Sunni-Shiite conflict while being systematically outmaneuvered by the Iranians.

There hadn't been a US Embassy in Baghdad for 14 years when the United States and Iraq resumed diplomatic relations on June 30, 2004.

On that day, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari wrote to his American counterpart, Secretary of State Colin Powell, that it was "great honor" to accredit US Ambassador John Negroponte. "I look forward to developing friendly and constructive relations between our two nations," Zebari wrote.

But it was under bizarre circumstances that these relations got started, as can be seen, for example, by the location the Americans chose for their new embassy: an ostentatious former palace of Saddam Hussein nestled in a bend of the Tigris River. And the plans of the US diplomats moving into this palace were every bit as grandiose as the statues the deposed dictator had left behind.

Still, they had little idea of the challenges that lay ahead. Indeed, America's relations with the liberated Iraq have been anything but "friendly" and "constructive." Within just five years, the State Department went through five ambassadors and an army of analysts and consultants. And what made them fail can be gleaned from over 5,500 secret and confidential dispatches from the embassy in Baghdad.

New Kids on the Block

When the first diplomats arrived, Iraq was in ruins. Most of the ministry buildings had been looted, schools and universities had been gutted by flames, and police officers and soldiers could do little more than sit at home while the country fell apart. The Iraqis -- whether Arab or Kurd, Sunni or Shiite -- were all fighting for influence and resources. A rebellion had begun -- and one that the Americans couldn't fathom.

One of the first names to emerge in the diplomatic reports coming out of Baghdad was that of a young Shiite leader named Muqtada al-Sadr. Little was initially known about him, other than that he came from a family with a long line of religious clerics and that there was a warrant out for his arrest. But, in the months and years to follow, he would go on to become a crucial figure in the religious war that the country was headed into.

"Last week, influential Shia leaders … asked Prime Minister Allawi to defuse the tension … by dropping, at least temporarily, the charges against Muqtada al-Sadr," Ambassador Negroponte wrote during his second week on the job. "They told Allawi it would be preferable for Sadr's militia, the Jaysh Al Mahdi (JAM), to become a political movement." In retrospect, this was good advice. But, in what turned out to be a crucial mistake, nobody followed it.

Over the coming years, the man who read the petition to the Americans ("he "wouldn't let us have a copy"), Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie, was to become a key source for the Americans on information about the Iraqi government. Rubaie would eventually serve under three consecutive prime ministers. And he was also extremely talkative. In fact, before long, US diplomats started groaning about Rubaie's "rhetorical acrobatics" and "theatrical sighing."

It remains unclear what Rubaie personally thought of Muqtada al-Sadr even three years later, after al-Sadr's militia had murdered thousands of people. But he advised his own government and the coalition troops not to take an "excessively kinetic" stance toward the Mahdi Army, believing it would only increase the risk of "uncontrolled violence."

Whom to Follow?

Early on, Rubaie pointed out a fundamental conundrum that has plagued all postwar Iraqi governments: The Iraqi leaders had to ask themselves who they should follow. And their choices were either the Americans, who had liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, or Iran, their powerful neighbor that would still be there long after the US military has withdrawn.

For Iraq's Sunni minority, the choice was clear: Shiite Iran is the enemy. But, among Iraq's Shiite leaders, Rubaie told the Americans there were two camps: the "moderates" leaning toward America and the "conservatives" toward Iran. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the first elected prime minister, belonged to the second camp. Rubaie said that al-Jaafari wanted a security strategy that was jointly coordinated with Iran -- in other words, direct collaboration between their two intelligence agencies.

Rubaie also suggested that the US and Iran should use Iraq as an occasion for putting aside their differences. Some things might stand in the way of this, he admitted, such as Iran's nuclear program and the activities of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in Iraq ("a great danger"). But, Rubaie said ironically, the fact that the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came from the ranks of the Revolutionary Guards could perhaps give him the "flexibility to make the tough decisions required" to reduce the mistrust between Washington and Tehran. But, irony aside, this was a colossal misjudgment.


Part 2: A Short-Term Marriage with Iran

The Americans received different advice from another prominent Iraqi. In September 2003, the man told a staff member at the US Embassy in Amman, Jordan, that the Shiites were fundamentally grateful to America for unseating the regime led by Saddam Hussein and the country's Sunni minority. But, he added, the growing instability and sluggish pace of reconstruction in the country could heavily burden this relationship. For this reason, he advised the Americans to make a point of fostering contact with Shiite clerics.

The man also told the Americans that Shiite clerics enjoyed a greater amount of influence over their adherents than their Sunni colleagues did over theirs, explaining that: "Any Sunni can consult with God himself and decide to blow himself up in a terrorist attack." But among the Shiites, he went on, such a decision is not just a personal matter, which is why Shiite clerics can stir up -- or, more importantly, calm down -- their supporters. The Americans did not heed this advice, either -- or at least not quickly enough.

The Benefits of Loyalty to Iran

While the Americans were trying to figure out what to do, their rivals, the Iranians, were single-mindedly setting up their network in Iraq. Over time, it was becoming increasingly close-knit, bringing in individual parties and politicians, and it would eventually encompass entire provinces.

A diplomatic report from the southern province of Muthanna illustrates the creative nature of the Iranians' approaches. An influential sheik there had just returned from a trip to Iran. The official reason for his trip was a medical checkup, but the Americans learned through foreign channels that it was "more for pleasure than for medical treatment and included one or more short-term marriages … and other entertainment." In the Islamic world, "short-term marriage" is a euphemism for visiting prostitutes. Other tribal leaders had reportedly enjoyed similar perks as guests of the Iranian government.

The Americans, on the other hand, had deeply disappointed the sheik: "After he and other tribal sheikhs visited the White House and met then-President Bush in 2008, he expected to benefit financially from the Americans." But, in the end, they "did nothing for him." The embassy's comment to Washington was that: "Southern Iraqi sheikhs are well know for shifting their loyalties based on financial considerations."

Iran spends mountains of money on loyalty. According to an embassy report from November 2009, every year, Tehran pumps $100 million to $200 million (€76 million to €151 million) into Iraq for that purpose. And the man in charge of dispensing these funds is Qasem Soleimani, a brigadier general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Christopher Hill, then-US ambassador to Iraq, described Soleimani as having been "the point man directing the formulation and implementation of the IRIG's (Iranian government) Iraq policy, with authority second only to Supreme Leader Khamenei." Soleimani employs, Hill continued, "the full range of diplomatic security, intelligence, and economic tools to influence Iraqi allies and detractors in order to shape a more pro-Iran regime in Baghdad and the provinces."

The nature of Iran's ties with Baghdad is illustrated by a list of party leaders with whom General Soleimani reportedly maintains "long-standing close ties."

Indeed, this Who's Who of Iraqi politics begins with President Jalal Talabani, includes the vice president and the prime minister, and ends with the speaker of the parliament.

'A Significant Security Threat'

The Americans were extremely eager to figure out the loyalties of political leaders in Baghdad, particularly when it came to the three postwar prime ministers. For a long time, their favorite was the secular Shiite Ayad Allawi. In the immediate wake of the war, the US helped him become the interim prime minister, and it was hoping to see him emerge as the winner of the first free parliamentary elections. The embassy wrote that his election alliance stood for "promising vision for a democratic, inclusive and secular Iraq."

But Allawi lost the first election. After talking with his allies, US diplomats realized that perhaps he didn't have the leadership qualities that they had initially thought he did. His "continued absence" from Iraq while living in exile for almost 30 years undermined his authority, they wrote. The winner of those elections and the second postwar prime minister was the religious Shiite Ibrahim al-Jaafari. During his term of office, from 2005 to 2006, the situation in Iraq dramatically deteriorated.

Cables from the US diplomats reveal what went wrong. For example, according to one report from July 2005, the embassy received "frequent and fervent" requests from Jaafari and his advisers to have the US military release a certain Mehdi Abdhmend al-Khalisi from custody. The man was reportedly a "a close personal friend" of the prime minister -- and likewise supposedly innocent.

The embassy looked into the case and discovered the following: al-Khalisi had lived in Iran for 23 years and was widely believed to be the leader of a Tehran-supported group that carried out assassinations. According to one source, he was even responsible for an attack on six British police officers. In the end, the multinational forces informed the Iraqi government, including the prime minister, "that Mr. al-Khalisi poses a significant security threat."


Part 3: The Maliki Era

Moreover, there were also a number of shady characters within Jaafari's government itself. For example, in September 2005, after the US Embassy in Amman had been reporting for weeks on suspicious movements of cash from Iraq, the US Embassy in Baghdad sent a memo to Washington entitled "Allegations of corruption in the ministry of defense." According to the report, the procurement director at Iraq's Ministry of Defense had spent $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion purchasing used military equipment at grossly inflated prices even after having been explicitly advised by representatives of the multinational forces not to do so. The purchases involved "Polish helicopters, Pakistani pistols, mortars and vehicles and guns and Chinese ammunition" -- in other words, junk. And a number of high-ranking politicians had reportedly also benefited from the deal.

Maliki the Untrusted

In April 2006, Jaafari was replaced by the largely unknown Shiite politician Nouri al-Maliki. When Maliki took office, the violence in Iraq was reaching a climax -- with sectarian violence claiming over 3,000 civilian victims every month -- and Washington's confidence had hit rock bottom. On Oct. 14, the US ambassador and the senior coalition commander, General George W. Casey, urged the new prime minister "to take decisive political and military steps to curb ethno-sectarian violence."

But Maliki brushed them off, claiming that the problem of civilian casualties was being "overblown by the media." He also said that he was disturbed by criticism from Western media sources and their hints about an upcoming change in the US government's strategy in Iraq. General Casey advised him to ignore this "chatter," reassuring him that America stood behind him and adding that, if necessary, his staff would stress this point in a number of interviews with the press.

American diplomats were particularly attentive when Maliki talked about his visit to Tehran in June 2008. The minutes of the conversation were not only sent to the State Department, but also dispatched as "priority" messages to the CIA and a number of American military organizations.

According to the report, "The Prime Minister portrayed himself as taking a very tough stance with the Iranians." For example, he allegedly accused Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's religious leader, of supporting particularly dangerous units of the Mahdi Army and of continuing to smuggle weapons across the border. According to Maliki, the supreme leader had "sworn 'by every oath he knew' … that he had issued a fatwa against any activities that could harm the security of Iraq."

Still, the tone of this and many other diplomatic reports on Maliki reveal just how lukewarm the Americans were about him. In fact, they didn't trust him. Moreover, the image that Maliki tried to project of himself -- as being an Iraqi patriot transcending all religious differences -- stood in stark contrast to how he administered the government in Baghdad.

Maliki the Biased

For example, Maliki only rarely had anything good to say about Iraq's Sunnis or neighboring Sunni countries. His suspicions continuously fell on al-Qaida, a Sunni organization, and its alleged supporters in Syria, a predominantly Sunni country -- even when his own interior minister and General David Petraeus, the supreme commander of the US troops in Iraq, contradicted him. In a protocol from November 2009, the general conceded to Maliki that al-Qaida had become stronger, but "he added that foreign fighter flows from Syria were down and more should be done to counter malign Iranian influences."

What's more, in early 2010, Maliki tried to purge 36 staff members -- including a conspicuously large number of Sunnis -- from the headquarters of Iraq's intelligence agency for allegedly having ties to Saddam's banned Baath Party. At the same time, he installed 47 members of his own Islamic Dawa Party -- all of whom were Shiites -- in key positions at the intelligence agency.

According to one embassy dispatch: "In the hyper-sensitive atmosphere surrounding elections, each of these moves by the prime minister is being looked at with high suspicion across the entire political spectrum." It went on to say that "by drumming out experienced and proficient officers," he had caused "serious harm" to Iraq's intelligence institutions.

Maliki the Impulsive

The authors of the report repeatedly described Maliki as "impulsive." Two dispatches show just how radically he could alter his stances. For example, one from October 2006 discusses how Maliki had complained that, "I do not have enough forces and those I have are weak." Another one, from July 2008, recounts how, during a meeting of Iraq's National Security Council, Maliki ordered "an immediate freeze on the growth of Iraqi security forces."

The reason behind Maliki's change of heart could be gleaned from a statement that his defense minister once made: Iraq's military structure is the way it is, he said, to prevent another military putsch. And there's some truth in that: Rulers in modern Iraq have tended to be deposed -- or even executed -- by their own militaries.

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SPIEGEL - 10/25/2010

A 'Dumb War'

Taking Stock of the Iraq Invasion

With its invasion of Iraq, the United States rid the Iraqi people of a tyrant. But it also broke the law and destroyed tens of thousands of lives. With the release of close to 400,000 Iraq logs by WikiLeaks and the coming publication of George W. Bush's memoir, it is time to take stock of a war that was catastrophic for Iraq and America's standing in the world.

In early October, there were 500 unidentified bodies in the Baghdad city morgues. According to one doctor, just as many bodies are being delivered to morgues today as in 2007. At least 630 people were shot to death with silenced pistols in the last three months alone. Although most were guards at checkpoints, the victims also included politicians and their relatives, as well as a television reporter who suddenly collapsed in the middle of a broadcast, in broad daylight. The source of the fatal shot could not be located. The atmosphere is eerie.

"I have friends who returned from their self-imposed exile in Damascus last year. Now they're packing their bags again," says Ahmed, a young attorney who is sitting under a ceiling fan in the Shah Bandar Café in downtown Baghdad.

People are crowding past the displays in the book bazaar outside the café, where vendors sell everything from prayer books with gold embossing to English language courses, editions of Nietzsche and a Saddam biography. The best selling title these days is a book titled "Turban and Civil Uniform," a settling of accounts with bigots and Philistines.

The Shah Bandar Café has been a popular spot among the educated and anyone who wants to appear as such since the days of the monarchy. Professors, pensioners and ordinary families sit under the faded portraits of poets, smoking water pipes and drinking tea.

"I was in prison under Saddam," Ahmed, the attorney, says. "Back then we wouldn't have been able to talk here. The secret police were everywhere. Today you can say what you want in Iraq ..."

A man sitting next to him finishes his sentence: "... because no one is listening, anyway."

That, at least, would seem to be a step forward. The indifference of elected politicians toward the people is one of the traits of Iraq's new democracy. Another is that, in the future, regime change will not be a guarantee of better times -- just different times.

A City Full of Corpses

The white-haired owner of the Café Shah Bandar, Mohammed al-Khashali, sits slumped in his chair in front of the cash register near the exit. He complains about Iraqi politicians and the obliviousness that comes with power. Then he tells the story of how, in March 2007, a blue pickup truck came to a stop in front of his café, prompting him to rename it the Shah Bandar Martyr's Café a few days later.

The blast killed dozens of people. "Including my four sons," says Khashali, "and a grandson." He says this almost matter-of-factly, without even expecting a reaction.

The city is full of corpses, except that today they are no longer being found in palm gardens early in the morning. And every sentence about the purpose or senselessness of the Iraq war, about the merits and crimes of the liberators and occupiers, is uttered against the background of a still-growing army of the dead.

America's war in Iraq lasted seven years, longer than its war against Adolf Hitler. The Iraq war has claimed the lives of 4,426 US soldiers and about 100,000 Iraqi civilians. Now DER SPIEGEL, the New York Times the Guardian and other media have been given access to almost 400,000 documents compiled by the website WikiLeaks: the war logs of soldiers in the US military. According to an initial analysis of these documents, the number of dead is even higher than previously believed.

What was the outcome of this war? Iraq is rid of a tyrant. Today Iraqis can vote for their leaders, and millions have already made use of this right.

But for this war the United States violated international law, vilified allies and mocked the United Nations. It squandered its authority as a military and moral superpower. It spent more than $1 trillion (€720 billion). It was triumphant at first, but then it gave up hope for a moment and allowed terrorists to push it to the brink of an historic defeat. Then it rallied once again -- not to emerge victorious but to avert defeat, a strategy that resulted in many, many casualties.

Four of the victims, Ghanem, Kadhim, Mohammed and Bilal, were Mohammed al-Khashali's sons. Another, Katib, was his grandson.

A Moral Appraisal

Was it worth it? Does the outcome justify this war?

The war would not have taken place without three men, former US President George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, his defense secretary for many years, and his vice-president, Dick Cheney. All three will publish their memoirs in the coming weeks and months: Bush in November, Rumsfeld in January and Cheney next spring. They will not be able to avoid a moral appraisal of the Iraq war. Bush's book is titled "Decision Points." Rumsfeld, according to a statement from his publisher, begins his memoirs in 1983, the year of his first encounter with then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

What exactly these three men have written in their defense isn't yet know. But does anyone seriously expect mea culpas? "The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency," Bush said on the fifth anniversary of the invasion, "it is the right decision now, and it will be the right decision ever." Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed similar sentiments in his autobiography, published in early September. "I did what I believed to be correct, even if the public disagreed," Blair wrote. "Of course Iraq is a better place today than under Saddam."

It makes perfectly good sense that Bush's and Blair's discussions of Iraq always end with Saddam Hussein. It's even legitimate, to a certain degree. The overthrow of the most brutal of all Arab dictators is the least controversial chapter of the Iraq war. The notion that he could still be in power today and, at 73, would be gradually putting his house in order, is intolerable, even for staunch opponents of the Iraq war.

But, strategically speaking, even this aspect has generated criticism to this day. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, himself involved in attempts to assassinate Saddam, still insists that it would have been better to bring down the leaders of the regime with a special forces mission -- instead of waging a war, destroying the army and severing the last bands holding the country together.

But regime change was only one of the goals America and its coalition of the willing had in mind when they marched into Iraq. The invaders had more in store for the country. They wanted, as Bush put it, to bring freedom to the Middle East, a freedom that wasn't "America's gift to the world," but "God's gift to mankind."

They wanted, as the Iraq War Resolution passed by the US Congress and signed into law on Oct. 16, 2002 states, to disarm Saddam Hussein's regime, put an end to human rights violation and terror in Iraq and, like the rest of the Middle East, make it democratic. History will judge this war on the basis of these goals outlined in the resolution ratified by both houses of Congress. The events are still too recent to have become history. Indeed, the United States only withdrew its last combat unit two months ago. But more than seven years after the beginning of the invasion, now that the most detailed and comprehensive chronology of this war, documents produced by the US Armed Forces themselves, is available, it is time to take stock.


Part 2: A New Regime of Terror

The first chapter of this war, the story of the disarming of Saddam Hussein, is also the shortest one. The dictator no longer had any weapons of mass destruction. None of the 391,832 military reports now released mention an appreciable discovery of biological, chemical or nuclear materials. The documents reinforce the conclusion that David Kay, the first director of the "Iraq Survey Group" formed to search for weapons of mass destruction, cited when he stepped down in January 2004: "I don't think they existed."

With audacious irony, Bush initially tried to gloss over the disgrace, even posing for photographs that showed him searching the cabinets in the Oval Office. One of the captions read: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."

But despite Bush's flippant approach to it, the affair led to a catastrophic loss of credibility for the United States and its intelligence services. His first secretary of state, Colin Powell, would eventually become a proxy for that loss of credibility, after having told the United Nations Security Council: "There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Powell, who resigned in late 2004, later said that his appearance before the UN was a "blot" on his record.

The disarming of Saddam Hussein, cited as the central goal leading up to the invasion, was not enough to justify this war.

The argument of human rights violations as a justification for war was a different story. In the summer of 2003, the Iraqis looked on in horror as American experts excavated one mass grave after another between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. They had long known of the existence of the graves, which contained their husbands, brothers and sons. But this was the first time in the history of the Middle East that a regime was directly confronted, in a legally binding way, with the evidence of its brutality, in a way that gave at least some satisfaction to the victims. It was a real achievement.

An Atmosphere of Total Lawlessness

But while human rights activists and forensic scientists continued to dig for the victims of Saddam's murderous regime in Iraq's deserts, their survivors were already beginning to suffer under a new regime of terror. With their overly hasty disbanding of the Iraqi army and destruction of public order, the occupiers had plunged the country into an atmosphere of total lawlessness.

Looters and criminals, the legacy of the overthrown regime, were the first to fill the vacuum, but an army of Islamist terrorists soon followed suit and made its way to Baghdad. One year after the invasion, the situation in Iraq was diametrically opposed to the allied nations' declared goal of ridding Iraq of Islamist terror. Jihadists, the mortal enemies of both the United States and the ousted dictator, were a new part of the mix. They had not been there previously, but now they were coming to Iraq by the hundreds. And when they arrived they sparked an inferno that the newly released military reports document more bluntly than any previous accounts.

They unleashed a sectarian conflict that claimed 3,000 lives a month at its height in 2006. The security forces, painstakingly rebuilt after they had been disbanded, intervened in the war on behalf of the Shiites, striking back with a brutality on a par with that of Saddam's Sunni-controlled regime. More than 2 million Iraqis fled abroad from the liberated Iraq, and at least as many moved to the relatively calm northern part of the country. At the time, even victims of the old regime longed for its return.

The United States experienced its own lapse in the spring of 2004, when it was still officially an occupying power. Two words -- Abu Ghraib -- have come to symbolize the enormity of that fall from grace. The way the soldiers, who had marched into the country as liberators, trampled on human beings and human rights in that torture prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad did irreparable damage -- to the victims themselves, to the further course of the war, to the West's relationship with the Islamic world and to America's mystique as a moral superpower.

A Horrifying Record

The United States, unlike the regimes of the Middle East, found its own strength to unfold its torture scandal. But was it worth it? Did this war bring human rights to Iraq? It did, at least on the surface. Today Iraqis have the free and general right to vote. Under the law, they also enjoy freedom of opinion and freedom of the press.

But the record is horrifying. One is eager to read the chapters on Abu Ghraib in Bush's, Cheney's and Rumsfeld's books, to discover what words they found to address the widows, the amputees and the emotionally scarred.

There was also a fourth reason for going to war, a reason that made sense to many in the turbulent days before the invasion, even those deeply reluctant to join the contingent of Bush allies. The plan to establish a bridgehead for democracy in the Middle East in Iraq contained not only the core of American promises of salvation. It seized upon a fundamental experience that the Germans, the Japanese and, after the end of World War II, the people of Eastern Europe had made. Who was prepared to deny the Iraqis the right to freedom and democracy? Did anyone imagine that Arabs could only be ruled by autocrats?

The democracy argument contained an element of fairness and sustainability that went beyond the claims of the intelligence agencies, which were already flimsy enough then.

Did the war justify the argument?


Part 3: Iran Is True Winner of Iraq War

It certainly is a positive outcome of the invasion is that the Iraqis have voted three times since 2003. After the last election, in March of this year, the candidates spent seven months conferring. For the past three weeks, it has seemed apparent that incumbent President Nouri al-Maliki will continue in office for another term.

But many Iraqis are deeply upset about the way Maliki was chosen and the consequences it will have. It is a warning sign for the future of Iraq and a travesty of the democratic auspices of 2003. Maliki's election contradicts the election results (he was defeated by a narrow margin), thereby cementing the dominance of one sectarian group over another.

The parties to the sectarian war spent the entire summer unsuccessfully seeking a compromise. Then, in early September, Iran intervened. Tehran wants to see a Shiite autocrat like Maliki in power in Baghdad, and not his secular rival, Allawi, whose coalition had won the vote.

Only days after the withdrawal of the last US combat unit at the end of August, an ayatollah in the Iranian holy city of Qom took an enemy of Maliki, Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, aside. Until then, his resistance had stood in the way of Maliki's re-election. But now his fellow Shiites were able to convince al-Sadr. To be on the safe side, another Shiite leader was brought in: the Lebanese Hassan Nazrallah, head of the radical Islamist group Hezbollah.

Together with the Kurds, Maliki is now able to form a government. This leaves the Sunnis, most of whom had voted for secular candidates, out in the cold.

Maliki, who already began to exhibit strongly authoritarian traits in his first term, is now having full-body portraits of himself suspended from the fronts of bombed-out buildings. Not much more can happen to him now. He has the support of Iran, which, partly because America has rid it of its enemy Saddam, is the true winner of the Iraq war.

A Country too Weak for Democracy

The Arab television channels paid close attention to the flawed attempt to decide the election. It was accompanied by violence not unlike the violence that followed the 2005 election -- and it confirmed, once again, the religious realities in Iraq and the influence of its neighbors. Iraq is not an example other countries in the region would want to follow.

The country spawned by this war is too weak for democracy. Perhaps it would be strong enough if the United States intervened once again, not militarily, as it did in 2003, but armed with all of its expertise on the Middle East, expertise it possessed at the time but, in its rush to invade Baghdad, negligently swept aside.

But that is a feat America will no longer accomplish -- not in Iraq, not in China and not in Burma. When Barack Obama, a democrat and proponent of human rights, talks about democracy and human rights today, no one, neither at home nor abroad, seems to be listening anymore.

This is precisely what this war has brought about. No one has described the aporia into which his predecessor steered the moral superpower more aptly than Obama himself. "I am not opposed to all wars," he said at a demonstration against the Iraq war in 2002. "I'm opposed to dumb wars."

The Iraq war came about at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons -- and the consequences were catastrophic. Much of what happened could have been predicted. This is why the Iraq war was a dumb war.

Horse Racing Supplants Human Rights Abuses

The road from Baghdad to Abu Ghraib passes explosive barrier walls painted in patriotic colors, warehouses, cement depots and truck repair shops. Every few hundred meters, guards are dozing in oversized pickups or standing behind concrete-filled oil drums, wearing new uniforms and gesturing as nonchalantly as their role models, the former occupiers. The Abu Ghraib Hippodrome is far from downtown Baghdad, past Amiriya, a Sunni neighborhood that was one of the last to surrender to the Americans.

Horse races are held here twice a week now. It's a sign of progress that Iraqis can now be more concerned about the starting lineup in a horse race than about rival militias.

The road passes piles of sand with the same pale yellow color as the sky, past junkyards, heaps of garbage and discarded parts of cars. The houses are fortresses, with their own generators and tall, welded gates. Nevertheless, bougainvillea trees bloom across the walls, and one man is even washing his car. Otherwise the street is completely empty, except for the occasional car lurching through the potholes, driving a little too fast for such a poor road.

"We should turn around," the driver says. Then he gets lost. There are no signs, only the empty windows of houses. It isn't a good idea to ask for directions in Amiriya. The driver passes the same street corner for the third time. The interpreter is also getting nervous. He starts raising his voice, curses and slams his fist on the dashboard. It isn't a good idea, being seen with foreigners.

Things are getting worse every day, he says: the magnetic bombs attached to cars, the killings with silenced weapons, the instability, the agonizingly long wait for a new government. This isn't his neighborhood. He is afraid, and his fear is both crippling and contagious. But maybe it's just his imagination. Maybe things will turn out well. Everything is possible in this devastated country. The interpreter fidgets with his mobile phone and wipes his forehead. Then he shouts out the words he has been wanting to say all along: "You can leave again, but we have to stay behind."

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SPIEGEL - 10/22/2010

A Day in Hell

The cruelty of war, documented in dry military lingo -- the WikiLeaks documents cleary show just how much the people of Iraq suffered in recent years. SPIEGEL ONLINE has documented the torture, murder and terror experienced on a single day during the Iraq war -- Nov. 23, 2006, as it was seen by US soldiers.

The war never sleeps, including this Thursday.

It's seven minutes past midnight, and US soldiers are on an operation in the northwestern Iraqi city of Haditha. They apprehend two men that intelligence reports say are insurgents. The men are then taken to a nearby operating base for interrogation. "No casualties or damages reported," the military report of the operation reads. That's all. No other details about the men or the operation.

The log of the event at 0:07 hours is classified as secret -- just like the 359 other logs that were filed on Nov. 23, 2006, in the US Army database. They cover routine operations such as the arrest, but also attacks in which hundreds of people will be killed.

More than 390,000 documents from 2004-2009 recently made public by the website WikiLeaks show the Iraq war from a rarely seen perspective: that of the soldiers fighting it. They log every battlefield drama, whether in Baghdad or Basra, Fallujah or Haditha, in a template containing 32 standard categories: X enemies killed, X US soldiers killed, X civilians killed, types of incidents, short summaries and more.

It is a conflict compressed into a grid. It's not a perfect grid because soldiers are likely to have made mistakes in their reports or may have bent the truth. In 2006, a UN report calculated 34,452 civilian deaths as a result of violence in Iraq, referring to data from the Iraqi Health Ministry. That's a rate of 94 deaths per day. The number of civilian deaths according to US Army documents total just 25,178 in 2006. It's impossible to say whose figures are correct -- it all depends on how you count.

Of course, the logs don't tell the entire story. The material posted by WikiLeaks is only made up of documents marked secret, not top secret. That means many major events are omitted. The true significance of the documents lies in the fact that they provide a previously unavailable view of the recent history of this war-torn country.

Suddenly, it is possible to track in minute detail how the US military portrayed the situation on days such as Nov. 23, 2006, a day during the bloodiest period of the Iraqi civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, and before the now legendary US "surge" policy that finally helped to improve the situation.

The documents show, among other things, how omnipresent homemade bombs -- what the US military calls "improvised explosive devices" or IEDs -- were each day in Iraq. On that Thursday alone, US forces dealt with 118 such infernal devices, half of which exploded. The field reports describe events such as these:


1 a.m.: A bomb explodes in Balad Ruz, Diyala province, near a private residence. No injuries reported.

2:19 a.m.: A bomb explodes in Baghdad wounding US soldiers.

At 6:41 a.m. the sun rises over Baghdad, it's a fresh 46 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius). Three minutes later the following report arrives:

6:44 a.m.: Another explosion, this time the log records one death and two injuries. The soldiers make a mistake and fill the document out incorrectly. In the table accounting for killed and wounded, all fields indicate zero.

That is followed by more explosions at 7:07 a.m. when a patrol drives over a booby trap -- no one is wounded.

At 7:31 a.m. a convoy southeast of Tikrit comes under fire and a bomb explodes; no one is wounded.

At 7:45 a.m. an explosion in a Baghdad garage kills five members of the Iraqi security forces.

At 7:55 a.m., another explosion, with five Iraqi nationals injured.

So it continues, incident after incident. Not all of the reports are about IEDs laid for unsuspecting US troops. Some troops are shot, some come across suspicious items and people; there are raids, air strikes and vehicle patrols.

9 a.m., Baghdad: Five unidentified dead civilians are discovered. Their bodies show signs of torture and gunshot wounds. The bodies are turned over for forensic examinations. "No other information," reads the report.

9:40 a.m., northeast of Baqouba: A boy dies from an IED explosion in Muqdadiyah, Diyala province. His corpse is brought to a local hospital. "The child was four years old," the log notes.

9:45 a.m.: A foot patrol comes under fire in Barwanah; the rounds hit five meters (16 feet) in front of the soldiers. Two insurgents are spotted firing AK-47 automatic rifles from a house 200 meters away. The US Marines respond with fire from M-249 machine guns. Both insurgents flee the house, and the patrol is unable to locate them after searching several buildings and the surrounding area. No injuries.

1:45 p.m.: A watch post at Camp Summerall in Bayji, northwest of Baghdad, discovers a man digging by the side of the road 300 meters (985 feet) from the base and fires warning shots. "The individual dropped the shovel and ran away. No BDA," which means "body damage assessment." The log also notes that the individual was estimated to be between 10 and 12 years old.

1:45 p.m., west of Fallujah: A four-vehicle patrol traveling in a convoy with a seven-ton military truck loaded with fuel near the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah encounters a Chevrolet Suburban SUV in taxi colors which makes a U-turn and speeds toward the convoy. Two vehicles in the convoy are able to swerve, but the seven-ton fuel truck can't. "The driver [of the truck] and the passenger were able to exit the vehicle before it was engulfed in flames," the log notes. The report indicates one enemy was killed.


It's a typical day's work. The daily routine is brutal in this war.

Then, in the afternoon, the sky over Baghdad is heavy with smoke and all hell breaks loose.

The log of the incident, which will be reported worldwide, begins at 3:38 p.m. A car bomb explodes in Baghdad, the log says. It reads like dozens of other reports on this day. It says the damage caused by the explosion is not yet known and neither is anything about the number of casualties.

The weather report on this day on the website Weather Underground says "smoke" at 3:55 p.m.

An update follows at 4:56 p.m.: Six bombs have exploded in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City. At 5:04 p.m., public authorities close Baghdad Airport. At the same time, the first report of the attack appears on SPIEGEL ONLINE. A report with the headline "The Day of Terror: Curfew After the Worst Attacks Since the Beginning of the War" is published in the hours following.

The Associated Press writes that the "fiery explosions sent up huge plumes of black smoke over northeastern Baghdad, and left streets covered with burning bodies and blood." The survivors of the blasts, some of them terribly mutilated, are treated in hospitals. The bombers struck a crowded market, where many people had been buying food for the weekend.

At 7:15 p.m. another report follows with updated figures: 133 dead, 201 injured. The report's summary reads: Six car bombs, 181 civilians killed, 247 civilians wounded and the degree of combat damage unknown.

The report reads like a sober inventory list, describing the climax of one of the bloodiest days in the Iraqi civil war.

The field reports on this day alone list 318 deaths, of which 281 were civilians. During these weeks Shiites and Sunnis attack each other relentlessly, but the war logs rarely mention the religious affiliation of the attackers or victims. Many are found tortured and murdered and the logs don't give any hint of the circumstances surrounding the incidents.

The incidents are reported around the clock. At the end of the day, 70 deaths are reported as sectarian murders throughout the country, most of which take place in the heart of Iraq while only a few are reported in the north and south. The vast majority happened during the day, the incidents drop during the night.

11:30 p.m.: A US military unit follows up on information that an IED could have been planted along Route Tampa, an important supply route for the military. The unit finds a "landmine that looks like a frisbee with three wires emerging from a black bag." In the log, the word "frisbee" is misspelled "fisbee." The unit requests a bomb disposal team. The bomb experts arrive at 1:10 a.m. with a rapid deployment force from Romania. About five and a half hours later, the team declares the assumed bomb is a dummy.

11:59 p.m.: According to the logs, the US military ended the day with two incidents in which no one was killed. The soldier filing the log reports that three rockets landed in the al-Rashid airbase on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. No damage and no injuries are reported. At the same time, a soldier reports the findings of a raid in Mosul, northern Iraq: All involved in the raid have returned and there was "nothing significant to report."

What remains of Nov. 23, 2006, in the collective memory of the US military? Incidents: 360. Deaths: 318. Minimum injured: 373.

A normal day in Iraq, where at that time the war never slept.

--

SPIEGEL - 12/03/2010

America's 'Iran Watchers'

A Coordinated Effort to Get Information about Tehran

In 2006, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice realized that Washington needed to know a lot more about Iran. Since then, observation posts in surrounding countries have been supplying information, including rumors of a slap for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In no other country in the Middle East were US diplomats as well sourced as they were in Iran -- yet in no other country were they as off target. The fact that they didn't see the Islamic Revolution coming in 1979 -- that they didn't even see it as a possibility -- surely ranks among the biggest intelligence misjudgements in the history of US foreign policy. Even today, the painful effects of this failure can still be felt.

Such an oversight should never happen again, then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in 2006, four years after a group of Iranian exiles divulged the true scope of Iran's nuclear program. Rice added that the Iranian challenge was being given top priority, but added that the roughly 27 years since the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran had severely eroded the State Department's knowledge of the country. To compensate for this deficiency, it set up a whole series of observation posts in countries surrounding Iran.

Since then, teams of experts known as "Iran watchers" have been monitoring the Islamic republic from US embassies in Baku (Azerbaijan), Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Baghdad and London, as well as at US consulates in Dubai and Istanbul. In these outposts, they speak with opponents and former loyalists of the regime, Shiite clerics, truck drivers, students and frustrated merchants in bazaars.

What have they found out? Does the US know what is going on in Iran, a country notoriously difficult to understand?

Rumors of Palace Intrigue

In February 2010, an electrifying communiqué arrived in Washington from Baku. According to a local source who "has reported accurately on several sensitive political and economic issues in the past," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had surprised his colleagues at a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. The Iranian people, he said according to the source, feel "suffocated" -- a reference to the repression that followed the contested presidential election of June 2009. He then proposed relaxing restrictions on the media.

"You are wrong!" the chief of staff of the Revolutionary Guards snapped back at Ahmadinejad. "(In fact) it is YOU who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!" And then he slapped the president in the face, the informant alleged. Some Iranian blogs had also reported that the meeting had been abruptly broken up, the US source said. But they mentioned nothing about the reason -- the alleged slap.

Intimate details from within Iranian circles of power are, of course, of particular interest to the Iran watchers. In one report, they noted how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's religious leader, "is subject to severe bouts of depression, and takes morphine (not opium) regularly."

Another report counters that view. Khamenei is healthy, doesn't smoke and exercises regularly, claimed another source who said he had spoken with Ali Khomeini, the grandson of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini. A third report adds that Khamenei is much less powerful than is often claimed, that he enjoys only "limited political maneuverability" and that he is "primarily focused on protecting his and his son Mojtaba's future."

Conflicting Messages

The regime in Tehran pursues its interests with subtlety. Within Iran, for example, Kurds are allowed to smuggle with impunity in order to avoid unrest. Likewise, it recruits people from the murky milieu of Iran's martial-arts clubs to take care of assignments such as the assassination of regime critics. Within its neighboring states, it maintains a network of "money launderers and sanctions busters" who work to increase the wealth of the Revolutionary Guards. The US Embassy in Baku alone has a list of 11 men involved in such activities.

When it comes to leading members of the Iranian opposition, even sympathetic sources are skeptical. For example, they report that Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader who lost to Ahmadinejad in the 2009 elections, is "stubborn, but not charismatic," that dissident reformer Mahdi Karroubi is "courageous" but doesn't enjoy enough institutional ties in the theocratic state, and that former President Mohammad Khatami is "cautious and weak." Moreover, although they view ex-president and Ahmadinejad opponent Hashemi Rafsanjani as a skilled tactician and fund-raising virtuoso for the opposition, they still believe he lacks "sufficient popular legitimacy."

Members of both camps, it would seem -- both the conservatives and the reformers -- make regular visits to the southern Iraqi city of Najaf to meet with Grand Ayatollah Ali-al Sistani, the Iranian-born cleric who is viewed as one of the most respected Shiite authorities. So far, however, he has withheld support for either side. He sees the post-election situation in Iran as "very sad."

'An Important View'

In the summer of 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton singled out the observation post in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, for praise for its "extremely useful" reports on the Iranian presidential election. The "Iran watchers" there had conveyed "an important view of working class Iranians' views on the elections" to Washington.

Their views are sometimes very different than those held by the members of the Western-oriented elite. One man from the north-eastern city of Mashhad, for example, told an "Iran watcher" on the Turkmeni border with Iran that "some people might not like individual leaders or clerics, but overall, they want an Islamic form of government."

One student, a follower of the opposition Green Movement, reported that his father even used bribes to buy his release from police custody. When he got home, his father told him: "I can't afford your revolution."

It also isn't true that all minorities in Iran are opposed to the regime, sources have told the US. The Kashgai, for example, are no longer the "nightmares" they once were for Persian authorities -- rather they no longer harbor any separatist views and are satisfied with the ruling regime. The sources report that most Kashgai probably voted for Ahmadinejad as a result of gratitude for improved health, education and infrastructure services." The "Iran watchers" quote one Kashgai trader as saying: "We are not Persians, but we are Iranians."

Religious Conflict and a Drug Epidemic

The situation in the primarily Sunni province of Baluchestan, on the border with Pakistan, however, is quite different. One source from the Ministry of Transportation in Tehran reported that state authorities have lost all control in the southeastern corner of the country: He "claimed that many guard and police posts in Sistan-Baluchestan areas are no longer occupied at night due to the increased danger of attack."

The source says that one reason for the precarious situation is the "arrogant" and anti-Sunni policies of the Shiite regime in Tehran. A businessman from the region adds that Ahmadinejad made a point of installing an ally of his, Habibullah Dehmorda, as governor there, describing him as a "stupid, brutal, Sunni-hater." Dehmorda has since been replaced.

The second reason is the drug trade, which happens to be one of the main issues the "Iran watchers" focus on. Tehran is powerless against the mass of drugs spilling over into the country from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Between 2005 and 2010, there was a significant increase in the amount of confiscated drugs -- but that was still just a fraction of the drugs that were smuggled into and consumed within the country itself. There are 50,000 Iranians enrolled in programs for recovering addicts, and 150,000 people are registered in methadone programs. Even those figures, according to US dispatches, represent just a small part of the problem.

'Our Target'

Indeed, the Iranian Interior Ministry has even gone so far as to ask the Americans -- through intermediaries -- for cooperation on the problem. Given the massive refugee and drug problems that Afghanistan is causing both countries, the time is now "ripe" for them to put their enmity aside. What's more, such collaboration could help counter the prevailing negative opinion of America in the region. According to the US documents, even Javad Zarif, Iran's former ambassador to the United Nations, has heavily campaigned for a joint effort with the Americans.


One advisor to two high-ranking regime officials even proposed a remarkable deal to the US Embassy in London. He has repeatedly referred to his desire for "a constructive and cooperative relationship with the US," particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, noting how Iran has considerable influence in both of those countries.

According to the advisor, Tehran views the Shiite militias in Iraq as "our allies, whom we created against Saddam." The advisor, according to the dispatches, even admitted that Iran had coordinated attacks by these militias on British soldiers in southern Iraq.

He also said that, in the end, America would have no choice but to join Iran in fighting the drug trade, otherwise things would become even more unpleasant. The US, he said, had become much too involved in Iraq. "You cannot stay and you cannot leave," he said. "Your forces there and in the region are our target."

--

12/03/2010

'Operation Scorched Earth'

A US Hand in Yemen's Civil War

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt

Yemen is becoming an important refuge for al-Qaida terrorists, but authorities in the country are more interested in pursuing its war against Shiite rebels in the north. American weapons are used in the fight -- and the US secretly pursues terrorists on their own.

His Excellency Ali Abdullah Saleh, the first and so far only president of the Republic of Yemen, ruler over 23 million inhabitants and 50 million firearms, is not a good man to have as an enemy -- but having him as a friend is even worse. In Yemen he is called "The Boss."

Since 2004, the boss has been fighting a ruthless war against the Houthi rebels in the north. They are Shiites -- and politically marginalized. In August 2009, this conflict entered a new phase when the Yemeni army launched a new offensive designed to wipe out all Houthi resistance. The president categorically rejects negotiations with the rebels: "The war will never stop no matter how much money or martyrs it costs," he said a year ago.

Saleh appears indifferent to the ravages of the war, the civilian casualties, the streams of refugees and the devastating damage to the region's infrastructure. He is pouring an increasing number of weapons into the battle against the Houthi stronghold of Sadah, and sending in an increasing number of soldiers into his deadlocked conflict with the rebels. He is also paying less and less attention to the fight against the terror group known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

"We are fighting on behalf of you, the Americans, and Israel," he said in a conversation with the US ambassador, according to one of the tens of thousands of US diplomatic dispatches that have now been made public by WikiLeaks. Saleh maintains that the war against the Houthis is actually a proxy war between Iran and the US. The Americans, however, feel that the Yemeni president is fighting a senseless war, a viewpoint that is made crystal clear by hundreds of reports that the US Embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa has sent to Washington over the past few years. Nevertheless, the Americans play a role in the war. The internal embassy documents show that Saleh has mis-appropriated the American anti-terror aid for his own purposes -- a situation which has made it necessary for the US military to secretly hunt down al-Qaida terrorists on their own.

Dares Not Enter His Office

Yemen is a country in freefall, on the way to becoming a second Afghanistan or Somalia -- an alarming situation given its close proximity to the world's largest oil reserves.

It was from Yemen that terrorists airmailed two parcel bombs addressed to targets in the US. The packages were intercepted in late October in Dubai and the UK. Evidence indicates that al-Qaida was behind the plot. Yemen was also where the "underwear bomber" was outfitted with plastic explosives intended to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight in December 2009. Al-Qaida leaders are moving their operations from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen: Nasir al-Wuhayshi, for example, Osama bin Laden's private secretary and confidant. In the province of Abyan, where the jihadist Tariq al-Fadhli calls the shots, not even the provincial governor dares enter his own office.

The country is difficult to control due to its many clans and rugged mountainous regions. The US has sought to increase the anti-terror capabilities of the Yemeni army by providing significant aid and training. But a large amount of the materiel provided by the Americans has actually been deployed for the war in Sadah -- as have some of the units trained by US specialists. Indeed, the dispatches make it clear that the campaign is one which likely could not be maintained without US support.

Washington is aware of the problem, yet tacitly accepts it. "A concerted US anti-terrorism campaign in Yemen will free Saleh to continue to devote his limited security assets to the ongoing war against Houthi rebels in Saada," reads one of the dispatches. "The net effect, and one we strongly suspect Saleh has calculated, of both the American and Yemeni 'iron fist' unleashed at the same time in Yemen will be a clear message to the southern movement or any other party interested in generating political unrest in the country that a similar fate awaits them."

'Extra Muscle' in the Fight against the Houthis

US Special Forces and British army instructors are in the country and training the Yemenites to combat terror. The US has spent a total of $160 million on this effort since 2002 -- but in December 2009, it became clear that two of the four specially trained anti-terror units were fighting in the war against the Houthis. They had originally been dispatched to Sadah in July specifically to find nine hostages, including a number of Germans. "The Yemeni government has attempted to use its elite counter-terrorism forces to provide needed extra muscle," reads one of the embassy dispatches.

The US is displeased -- less because of the civil war than because of the fact that their special forces have been misappropriated and can no longer be used for their intended mission against AQAP.

The same is true of military hardware provided by the US. A high-ranking Yemeni officer leaked to the US diplomat something that President Saleh has denied: that American military equipment -- contrary to official US government policy -- is also being used against the Houthis. The officer urged the Americans to train the anti-terror units in the future in "unconventional warfare" as they did in Afghanistan, "suggesting the counter-terrorism unit expects to continue to use its forces in Saada," the embassy dispatch commented. "While US concerns over diversion of troops and equipment have been acknowledged, they have clearly not resulted in a significant change of Yemeni government focus from the Houthis to AQAP."

Washington has known at least since late December 2009 that President Saleh was deploying American weapons and US-trained troops against the rebels. Nevertheless, the US has recently extended its collaboration with him. At a meeting in January of this year, US General David Petraeus promised the president $150 million for 2010 alone.

'I Promise'

America is also helping Yemen to acquire helicopter gunships. "The US could convince Saudi Arabia and the UAE to supply six helicopters each if the American 'bureaucracy' prevented quick approval, Saleh suggested," according to a US Embassy report on a meeting between Saleh and Petraeus in January of this year. "The general responded that he had already considered Yemen's request for helicopters and was in discussions with Saudi Arabia on the matter." Saleh then assured his American guest: "'We won't use the helicopters in Saada, I promise. Only against al-Qaida.'" Hardly any leader lies as brazenly as the president of Yemen. He lies to the people, the parliament and his allies.

At the top of his list of favorite lies: The Houthis are a new Hezbollah.

He has a range of proof, including a video in which Houthis chant "death to America, death to Israel." There is also a DVD that President Saleh personally presented to General Petraeus in the summer of 2009: It allegedly shows Houthi rebels in Hezbollah uniforms -- but oddly enough the deputy director of the Yemeni intelligence agency NSB has no knowledge of the video, according to the US dispatches. Later that same year, Republican US Senator John McCain, while on a visit to the country, was informed that the intelligence agency had eliminated two Iranian networks in Yemen. Shortly thereafter, Yemeni media reported that six warehouses had been discovered with Iranian machine guns, short-range missiles and ammunition. Proof, though, was not forthcoming. It was classified as top secret, the Yemenis said. Alternately, they claimed it was being used as evidence in a trial.

"Most recently, the Yemeni government has failed to substantiate its extravagant, public claims that an Iranian ship seized in the Red Sea off its coast on Oct. 25 was carrying Iranian military trainers, weapons and explosives destined for the Houthis," reads one dispatch. "In fact, sensitive reporting suggests that the ship was carrying no weapons at all."

Part 2: US Boots on the Ground in Yemen

An additional dispatch reads: "Since the outbreak of hostilities in 2004, the Yemeni government has used many different arguments, including the Houthis' alleged ties to Iran and Hezbollah, to attempt to convince the US government to declare the Houthis a Foreign Terrorist Organization."

The ambassador doesn't mince words in the dispatch. "It is the embassy's firm belief that if Yemen had any concrete evidence that the Houthis had connections to either Hezbollah or Iran, it would have produced it immediately; the lack of such evidence likely indicates that the Yemeni government lacks any real proof of such links." Tehran's influence, the dispatch reads, "is limited to informal religious ties between Yemeni and Iranian scholars and negligible Iranian investment in the energy and development sectors."

The lie about Iran is nevertheless useful to Saleh. It guarantees support for his anti-Houthi campaign from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of whom are opponents of Iranian hegemony.

The Saudis are aware that Saleh is being disingenuous, but they are pursuing their own objectives: a 10 kilometer (six mile) buffer zone that extends into Yemen territory. When Houthi rebels storm the border, the Saudis use this as a pretext to push into Yemen. President Saleh has nothing against the strategy; on the contrary, he is "thrilled" when the Saudi air force bombs Houthi positions. In return for Saleh's acquiescence, Saudi Arabia provides money and arms.

Following the Arms

In late 2009, in fact, Saudi Arabia announced it was providing Yemen with arms worth $62 million. Furthermore, the Saudis have offered to act as an intermediary for arms deals with the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovakia. "It is almost certain that a large amount of the weapons now on offer will find their way into Yemen's thriving grey arms market, or be re-exported, a traditional revenue stream for the Saleh government," reads a particularly pointed embassy dispatch. "From there, it is anyone's guess as to where the weapons will surface, potentially even in the hands of extremist groups bent on attacking Western interests in Yemen -- and ironically, Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries in the Gulf."

On the long term, the US is concerned that Saleh's lie could become a "self-fulfilling prophecy," and a regional war could erupt between Shiites and Sunnis, fueled by propaganda from the Yemeni president: "We can think of few ways to more effectively encourage Iranian meddling in the Houthi rebellion than to have all of Yemen's Sunni neighbors line up to finance and outfit Ali Abdullah Saleh's self-described "Operation Scorched Earth" against his country's Shia minority," reads one of the dispatches.

Next on the list of Saleh's favorite untruths is that "there are no American boots on Yemeni soil."

That, at least, is how Deputy Prime Minister for Security and Defense Affairs Rashad al-Alimi likes to phrase it. The government is anxious to give the impression that its collaboration with the US is limited to training, technical support and information exchange.

Our Bombs, Not Yours

The US dispatches, however, make it clear that the US, at the invitation of Yemen, have begun to hunt down terrorists in the country and launch air strikes. US fighter jets, for instance, attacked suspected al-Qaida camps in Arhab and in the provinces of Abyan and Shabwa on Dec. 17 and 24, 2009.

Two weeks later, Petraeus met with Saleh: "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," said the Yemeni president, according to one of the dispatches. Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs Rashad al-Alimi then added that he "lied" to the parliament by saying that, while the bombs may have been manufactured in America, they had been used by the Yemeni government.

Saleh's administration has no interest in making public just how much leeway it gives the Americans within the country. It was only when Petraeus suggested positioning US personnel in al-Qaida areas, equipped with information provided by the drones, that the president sidestepped the proposal. "You cannot enter the operation area," Saleh said.

Then Saleh offered one of his typical compromises: US fighter jets and drones could remain on standby outside Yemeni territory -- and thus out of sight -- and attack as soon as al-Qaida targets were reported.

It is an ideal state of affairs for the US. Following criticism of the large numbers of civilian casualties sustained during an attack on Dec. 17 -- a total of 49 civilians, including 18 children, were reportedly killed -- it was noted that the Yemeni government had "weathered the storm of criticism," according to a dispatch. "While the US has escaped the brunt of criticism to date, continued leaks from Washington and international media coverage of American involvement could stir up anti-American resentment in Yemen and test the Yemeni government's professed commitment to going after AQAP."

Civilian Victims

Indeed, that is the third lie on the list: There are no civilian victims.

The Yemeni government does not spare civilians, neither when fighting the Houthis nor when conducting operations against al-Qaida. In the wake of the US attacks on an al-Qaida camp on Dec. 17 and 24 -- an operation that President Saleh explicitly praised -- an embassy official wrote in a dispatch that, "Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs Rashad al-Alimi told the ambassador that civilians killed in the air strikes were most likely poor Bedouin from the area providing logistical support to the terrorists and AQAP." Officially, however, the Yemenites deny that there were any civilian casualties, aside from relatives of the al-Qaida fighters.

Large numbers of civilians also died during Saudi air strikes against Houthi rebels in late 2009, apparently because the Yemenites, by all appearances, had purposely provided false target information.

The embassy documents provide details of a conversation between the US ambassador in Riyadh and the deputy defense minister of Saudi Arabia, Prince Khalid bin Sultan. "The ambassador highlighted US concerns about providing Saudi Arabia with satellite imagery of the Yemen border area," reads one dispatch. Washington was worried about how the Saudis would use such information.

The ambassador cited Saudi air strikes against a clinic in Yemen. He showed the prince satellite images of bombed-out buildings. "This looks familiar," the prince said, according to the dispatch. "If we had the Predator (drones), maybe we would not have this problem."

"We tried very hard not to hit civilian targets," the prince assured the ambassador. The document reads further: "The Saudis had 130 deaths and the Yemenis lost as many as one thousand. 'Obviously,' Prince Khaled observed, 'some civilians died, though we wish that this did not happen.'"

Whiskey, Not Drugs

According to the Saudis, the attack on the clinic was conducted "based on information received from Yemen that it was being used as an operational base by the Houthis." There were numerous other cases of erroneous target data. In the end, though, the US handed over the satellite images of the border region to the Saudis -- although it knew that these could be used to launch air strikes against Houthi positions.

Given Saleh's brazen lies, why does the US continue to support him? One document provides the answer. "The United States sees no real alternative to supporting Saleh," it reads. As such, the Yemeni president is free to continue playing on the fears of terrorism among his Arab neighbors and the US. He accuses his American allies of being "'hot-blooded and hasty when you need us' but 'cold-blooded and British when we need you.'"

Saleh accuses the US of producing "only words, but no solutions," and by solutions the president means armored vehicles, weapons, fighter jets, and helicopter gunships to be used in operations against Houthis.

Should his demands be rejected, he rants and raves -- as the ambassador noted following a conversation with Saleh -- and accuses the Americans of wanting to keep al-Qaida in the country to justify their presence in the region. "I gave you a green light," Sadeh said according to a dispatch from the US Embassy in Sanaa. "We have given you air, sea and land access, and still you don't want to hit them." Alternately, he threatened to start negotiating with members of al-Qaida.

Afterwards, the dispatch noted that Saleh was once again in "vintage" form: "at times disdainful and dismissive and at others, conciliatory and congenial."

The president even has a sense of humor. Indeed, after four containers from Djibouti filled with explosives -- possibly destined for the rebels -- arrived in Yemen, Saleh ordered the Americans: "Tell (Djiboutian President) Ismail Guelleh that I don't care if he smuggles whiskey into Yemen -- provided it's good whiskey -- but not drugs or weapons."

--

NEW YORK TIMES - December 5, 2010

Meddling Neighbors Undercut Iraq Stability

WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a regional menace that sent shudders through its neighbors. Today’s Iraqi leaders are struggling to restrain the ambitions of the countries that share Iraq’s porous borders, eye the country’s rich resources and vie for influence.

“All Iraq’s neighbors were interfering, albeit in different ways, the Gulf and Saudi Arabia with money, Iran with money and political influence, and the Syrians by all means,” Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president and the senior Kurdish official in the government, told Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in a Dec. 10, 2009, meeting, according to a diplomatic cable. “The Turks are ‘polite’ in their interference, but continue their attempts to influence Iraq’s Turkmen community and Sunnis in Mosul.”

With American troops preparing to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011, the meddling threatens to aggravate the sectarian divisions in the country and undermine efforts by Iraq’s leaders to get beyond bitter rivalries and build a stable government. It also shows how deeply Iraq’s leaders depend on the United States to manage that meddling, even as it exposes the increasing limits on America’s ability to do so.

Cables obtained by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations describe flustered Iraqi leaders complaining of interference by manipulative neighbors, some of whom — in the view of the United States — do not want it to regain its previous position of power.

“The challenge for us is to convince Iraq neighbors, particularly the Sunni Arab governments, that relations with a new Iraq are not a zero-sum game, where if Iraq wins, they lose,” noted a Sept. 24, 2009, cable from Ambassador Christopher R. Hill, which was aptly titled “The Great Game, in Mesopotamia.” American diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks show that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s fears about outside interference are so great that he asked President Obama during a July 2009 visit to Washington to stop the Saudis from intervening. Saudi Arabia’s efforts to rally the Sunnis, the Iraqi leader complained, were heightening sectarian tensions and providing Iran with an excuse to intervene in Iraqi politics, according to an account of the Oval Office session Mr. Maliki shared with Ambassador Hill.

The suspicions have often been mutual. “I don’t trust this man,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, according to a cable about a March 15, 2009, meeting at the king’s private palace in Saudi Arabia. “He is an Iranian agent.”

Jockeying for influence in Iraq by outside countries has been going on ever since Mr. Hussein was ousted, hardly surprising given Iraq’s strategic position in the Middle East, its vast oil reserves, its multisectarian population and the fact that it is a nascent, if unsteady, democracy largely surrounded by undemocratic neighbors.

The Iranians, who waged a bloody eight-year war with Mr. Hussein, have no desire to see a strong Iraq emerge from the ashes of his regime, especially one that has ties with the United States.

So they have sought to influence its politics by funneling cash to Iraqi political factions, ordering assassinations and shipping arms to militants, some of which an Oct. 23, 2008, cable from Dubai warned might be disguised as medical supplies. The Saudis, who see Iran as the chief threat in the region, have used their satellite television stations and deep pockets to support Sunni groups. Syria, which Iraqi leaders have repeatedly complained to American diplomats is dominated by a Baathist regime sympathetic to the ousted Baathists in Iraq, has allowed insurgent fighters to sneak into Iraq. Even Turkey, which has good relations with the Iraqi government, has secretly financed nationalist and anti-Kurdish Sunni political parties.

Some top Iraqi politicians have tried to cast themselves as the right ones to resist Iranian influence and help Iraq improve ties with its Arab neighbors.

Ayad Allawi, who leads the Iraqiya Party, has emphasized his relationship with Arab leaders while his supporters have cast Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party supporters as fearful of interacting with the Arab world, the cables show. Mr. Maliki’s aides have presented themselves and their boss as being more savvy about resisting Iranian pressure than many of their rivals — if only the Americans can keep the Saudis in line.

Iran, by the United States’ reckoning, has done the most to try to shape Iraqi politics. A Nov. 13, 2009, cable sent by Ambassador Hill, which called Iran “a dominant player in Iraq’s electoral politics,” estimated that Iran’s annual support to political groups in Iraq was $100 million to $200 million. Some $70 million of that, the cable asserts, is directed to the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq, a leading Shiite party that has also worked closely with American officials, and its former militia, the Badr Corps.

Using an acronym for the Iranian government, the ambassador acknowledged Iran’s pragmatism: “The IRIG recognizes that influence in Iraq requires operational (and at times ideological) flexibility. As a result, it is not uncommon for the IRIG to finance and support competing Shia, Kurdish, and to some extent, Sunni entities, with the aim of developing the Iraqi body politic’s dependency on Tehran’s largesse.”

In a Sept. 24, 2009, cable titled “Prime Minister Accuses Iran of Trying to DeStabilize Iraq,” Ambassador Hill reported that Mr. Maliki had told him that Iran was trying to use its money and influence to try to “control” the Iraqi Parliament and was prepared to provide military support to Shiite militants if political efforts failed. Iran, Ambassador Hill quoted Mr. Maliki as saying, was trying to rally the Shiites to counter the “Saudi project to align the Sunni states.”

Some cables nonetheless reflect American concern that Dawa Party officials inserted into government posts by Mr. Maliki may have close ties to Iran. A February cable prepared by the embassy’s political officer notes that Mr. Maliki has moved to replace intelligence officers accused of having Baathists ties with Dawa Party loyalists. After pushback from Iraqi officials, and, apparently, interventions by American officials, the number of suspected Baathists who were to be fired was reduced. But a military intelligence headquarters was forced to hire 47 Dawa political officers who had been in exile in Iran, “where they may have received intelligence training,” the cable notes.

American diplomats and generals have told Arab leaders in the region that the best way to counter Iran’s ambitions is to establish a good working relationship with Mr. Maliki, which means sending ambassadors to Baghdad and refraining from financing and mobilizing opposition groups or insurgents that seek to undermine him. But as Ambassador Hill acknowledged in his cable on the “Great Game,” American diplomats “still have work to do to convince them that a strong, stable, democratic (and inevitably Shia-led) Iraq is the best guarantee that Iraq will be able to shake Iranian manipulations and see its future bound up with that of the West and its moderate Arab neighbors.”

Of all the Arab leaders in the region, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the cables suggest, was the most sympathetic to the American approach, a policy that reflects Egypt’s deep suspicions of Iran. Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief, told Gen. David H. Petraeus in a June 2009 meeting that Egypt’s goal was “to bring Iraq back to the Arab World.”

Toward this end, Egypt promised to send a new ambassador to Baghdad, a noteworthy move given that the previous Egyptian ambassador was kidnapped by insurgents and killed in 2005. In a conversation with King Abdullah, President Mubarak advised the Saudi monarch “not to search for another man,” but instead to accept Mr. Maliki, Mr. Suleiman confided.

The Saudis, on the other hand, have good ties with Mr. Maliki’s principal rival. They may have been unwilling to deal with Mr. Maliki or send an ambassador to Baghdad, but a Feb. 23, 2010, American Embassy cable from Riyadh notes that King Abdullah rolled out the red carpet for Mr. Allawi.

Like the Iranians, the Saudis have not hesitated to use their money and political influence inside Iraq, according to American diplomats. “For now the Saudis are using their money and media power (al-Arabiyya, al-Sharqiya satellite channels, and other various media they control or influence) to support Sunni political aspirations, exert influence over Sunni tribal groups, and undercut the Shia-led Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and Iraqi National Alliance (INA),” Ambassador Hill’s “Great Game” cable noted.

And Mr. Talabani complained in a Dec. 14, 2009, meeting with a senior State Department official that the Saudis “had pressured Kuwait to backtrack on initial agreements with Iraq on issues dating to the Saddam-era,” a cable noted. (The cable quoted Mr. Talabani as saying that Qatar and Bahrain were seeking better ties with Iraq “despite Saudi opposition.”)

Syria has been another difficult neighbor. It has long been accused by the Iraqis of harboring senior Iraq Baath Party members aligned with the former regime, and allowing foreign fighters to sneak into Iraq. The Obama administration sought to improve ties with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and even sent a team from the United States Central Command to Syria to discuss ways to better control the border. But after a series of bombings in Baghdad in August 2009, which Mr. Maliki attributed to Syria, the Iraqis refused to take part in the talks.

In a December 2009 meeting with Jeffrey D. Feltman, an assistant secretary of state, Mr. Maliki, who lived in Syria for 16 years during Mr. Hussein’s rule, described the Syrians as more difficult to deal with than the Iranians and recounted that the Syrians had boasted to him during his years in exile that they were skilled in negotiating with the Americans, a cable said.

Of all Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey has forged one of the best relationships with the Iraqi government and with Kurdish officials in northern Iraq. Turkey, the cables note, also played an important role in helping the United States and Iraq negotiate the security agreement that provides for the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011.

But Turkey has been unable to resist the temptation to intervene in Iraqi politics. Turkey, an April 2009 cable noted, “played an unhelpful role in recent Iraqi provincial elections through its clandestine financial support of the anti-Kurd al Hadba Gathering,” a Sunni-led political group that prevailed in provincial elections in Nineveh Province in Iraq.

According to a Jan. 31, 2010, cable from Ambassador Hill, Turkey’s ambassador to Baghdad, Murat Ozcelik, also opposed Mr. Maliki’s bid to win re-election in his talks with American diplomats. While Turkey had supported Mr. Maliki in the past, Mr. Ozcelik said it was backing his rivals now because the Turks believed that if Mr. Maliki was re-elected he “would focus on increasing his own power and would not be cooperative in resolving outstanding issues,” Ambassador Hill reported.

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Around the World, Distress Over Iran

New York Times - November 28, 2010

In late May 2009, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, used a visit from a Congressional delegation to send a pointed message to the new American president.

In a secret cable sent back to Washington, the American ambassador to Israel, James B. Cunningham, reported that Mr. Barak had argued that the world had 6 to 18 months “in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable.” After that, Mr. Barak said, “any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage.”

There was little surprising in Mr. Barak’s implicit threat that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. As a pressure tactic, Israeli officials have been setting such deadlines, and extending them, for years. But six months later it was an Arab leader, the king of Bahrain, who provides the base for the American Fifth Fleet, telling the Americans that the Iranian nuclear program “must be stopped,” according to another cable. “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it,” he said.

His plea was shared by many of America’s Arab allies, including the powerful King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who according to another cable repeatedly implored Washington to “cut off the head of the snake” while there was still time.

These warnings are part of a trove of diplomatic cables reaching back to the genesis of the Iranian nuclear standoff in which leaders from around the world offer their unvarnished opinions about how to negotiate with, threaten and perhaps force Iran’s leaders to renounce their atomic ambitions.

The cables also contain a fresh American intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program. They reveal for the first time that the United States believes that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could let it strike at Western European capitals and Moscow and help it develop more formidable long-range ballistic missiles.

In day-by-day detail, the cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of news organizations, tell the disparate diplomatic back stories of two administrations pressed from all sides to confront Tehran. They show how President George W. Bush, hamstrung by the complexities of Iraq and suspicions that he might attack Iran, struggled to put together even modest sanctions.

They also offer new insights into how President Obama, determined to merge his promise of “engagement” with his vow to raise the pressure on the Iranians, assembled a coalition that agreed to impose an array of sanctions considerably harsher than any before attempted.

When Mr. Obama took office, many allies feared that his offers of engagement would make him appear weak to the Iranians. But the cables show how Mr. Obama’s aides quickly countered those worries by rolling out a plan to encircle Iran with economic sanctions and antimissile defenses. In essence, the administration expected its outreach to fail, but believed that it had to make a bona fide attempt in order to build support for tougher measures.

A Sense of Urgency

Feeding the administration’s urgency was the intelligence about Iran’s missile program. As it weighed the implications of those findings, the administration maneuvered to win Russian support for sanctions. It killed a Bush-era plan for a missile defense site in Poland — which Moscow’s leaders feared was directed at them, not Tehran — and replaced it with one floating closer to Iran’s coast. While the cables leave unclear whether there was an explicit quid pro quo, the move seems to have paid off.

There is also an American-inspired plan to get the Saudis to offer China a steady oil supply, to wean it from energy dependence on Iran. The Saudis agreed, and insisted on ironclad commitments from Beijing to join in sanctions against Tehran.

At the same time, the cables reveal how Iran’s ascent has unified Israel and many longtime Arab adversaries — notably the Saudis — in a common cause. Publicly, these Arab states held their tongues, for fear of a domestic uproar and the retributions of a powerful neighbor. Privately, they clamored for strong action — by someone else.

If they seemed obsessed with Iran, though, they also seemed deeply conflicted about how to deal with it — with diplomacy, covert action or force. In one typical cable, a senior Omani military officer is described as unable to decide what is worse: “a strike against Iran’s nuclear capability and the resulting turmoil it would cause in the Gulf, or inaction and having to live with a nuclear-capable Iran.”

Still, running beneath the cables is a belief among many leaders that unless the current government in Tehran falls, Iran will have a bomb sooner or later. And the Obama administration appears doubtful that a military strike would change that.

One of the final cables, on Feb. 12 of this year, recounts a lunch meeting in Paris between Hervé Morin, then the French defense minister, and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Mr. Morin raised the delicate topic of whether Israel could strike Iran without American support.

Mr. Gates responded “that he didn’t know if they would be successful, but that Israel could carry out the operation.”

Then he added a stark assessment: any strike “would only delay Iranian plans by one to three years, while unifying the Iranian people to be forever embittered against the attacker.”

In 2005, Iran abruptly abandoned an agreement with the Europeans and announced that it would resume uranium enrichment activities. As its program grew, beginning with a handful of centrifuges, so, too, did many Arab states’ fears of an Iranian bomb and exasperation over American inability to block Tehran’s progress.

To some extent, this Arab obsession with Iran was rooted in the uneasy sectarian division of the Muslim world, between the Shiites who rule Iran, and the Sunnis, who dominate most of the region. Those strains had been drawn tauter with the invasion of Iraq, which effectively transferred control of the government there from Sunni to Shiite leaders, many close to Iran.

In December 2005, the Saudi king expressed his anger that the Bush administration had ignored his advice against going to war. According to a cable from the American Embassy in Riyadh, the king argued “that whereas in the past the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein had agreed on the need to contain Iran, U.S. policy had now given Iraq to Iran as a ‘gift on a golden platter.’ ”

Regional distrust had only deepened with the election that year of a hard-line Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

During a meeting on Dec. 27, 2005, with the commander of the United States Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid, military leaders from the United Arab Emirates “all agreed with Abizaid that Iran’s new President Ahmadinejad seemed unbalanced, crazy even,” one cable reports. A few months later, the Emirates’ defense chief, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, told General Abizaid that the United States needed to take action against Iran “this year or next.”

The question was what kind of action.

Previously, the crown prince had relayed the Emirates’ fear that “it was only a matter of time before Israel or the U.S. would strike Iranian nuclear facility targets.” That could provoke an outcome that the Emirates’ leadership considered “catastrophic”: Iranian missile strikes on American military installations in nearby countries like the Emirates.

Now, with Iran boasting in the spring of 2006 that it had successfully accomplished low-level uranium enrichment, the crown prince began to argue less equivocally, cables show. He stressed “that he wasn’t suggesting that the first option was ‘bombing’ Iran,” but also warned, “They have to be dealt with before they do something tragic.”

The Saudis, too, increased the pressure. In an April 2008 meeting with Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the incoming Central Command chief, the Saudi ambassador to Washington recalled the king’s “frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran,” and the foreign minister said that while he preferred economic pressure, the “use of military pressure against Iran should not be ruled out.”

Yet if the Persian Gulf allies were frustrated by American inaction, American officials were equally frustrated by the Arabs’ unwillingness to speak out against Iran. “We need our friends to say that they stand with the Americans,” General Abizaid told Emirates officials, according to one cable.

By the time Mr. Bush left office in January 2009, Iran had installed 8,000 centrifuges (though only half were running) and was enriching uranium at a rate that, with further processing, would let it produce a bomb’s worth of fuel a year. With that progress came increased Israeli pressure.

After the Israeli defense minister issued his ultimatum in May 2009, the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, followed up in November.

“There is still time for diplomacy, but we should not forget that Iran’s centrifuges are working day and night,” he told a delegation led by Representative Ike Skelton, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

That, in turn, led Arab leaders to press even more forcefully for the United States to act — before Israel did. Crown Prince bin Zayed, predicting in July 2009 that an Israeli attack could come by year’s end, suggested the danger of appeasing Iran. “Ahmadinejad is Hitler,” he declared.

Seemingly taken aback, a State Department official replied, “We do not anticipate military confrontation with Iran before the end of 2009.”

So it was that the United States had put together a largely silent front of Arab states whose positions on sanctions and a potential attack looked much like Israel’s.

Banks and Businesses

Despite an American trade embargo and several rounds of United Nations sanctions, the Bush administration had never forged the global coalition needed to impose truly painful international penalties on Iran. While France and Britain were supportive, countries like Germany, Russia and China that traded extensively with Iran were reluctant, at best.

In the breach, the United States embarked on a campaign to convince foreign banks and companies that it was in their interest to stop doing business with Iran, by demonstrating how Tehran used its banks, ships, planes and front companies to evade existing sanctions and feed its nuclear and missile programs.

The cables show some notable moments of success, particularly with the banks. But they also make it clear that stopping Iran from obtaining needed technology was a maddening endeavor, with spies and money-laundering experts chasing shipments and transactions in whack-a-mole fashion, often to be stymied by recalcitrant foreign diplomats.

One cable details how the United States asked the Italians to stop the planned export to Iran of 12 fast boats, which could attack American warships in the gulf. Italy did so only after months of “foot-dragging, during which the initial eleven boats were shipped,” the embassy in Rome reported.

Another cable recounts China’s repeated refusal to act on detailed information about shipments of missile parts from North Korea to Beijing, where they were loaded aboard Iran Air flights to Tehran.

The election of Mr. Obama, at least initially, left some countries wondering whether the sanctions push was about to end. Shortly after taking office, in a videotaped message timed to the Persian New Year, he reiterated his campaign offer of a “new beginning” — the first sustained talks in three decades with Tehran.

The United Arab Emirates called Mr. Obama’s message “confusing.” The American Embassy in Saudi Arabia reported that the talk about engaging Iran had “fueled Saudi fears that a new U.S. administration might strike a ‘grand bargain’ without prior consultations.”

In Europe, Germany and others discerned an effort to grab market share. “According to the British, other EU Member states fear the U.S. is preparing to take commercial advantage of a new relationship with Iran and subsequently are slowing the EU sanctions process,” the American Embassy in London reported.

The administration, though, had a different strategy in mind.

The man chosen to begin wiping out the confusion was Daniel Glaser, a little-known official with a title that took two breaths to enunciate in full: acting assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes.

The first big rollout of his message appears to have come in Brussels on March 2 and 3, 2009, during what the cables called “an unprecedented classified briefing” to more than 70 Middle East experts from European governments.

Mr. Glaser got right to the point. Yes, engagement was part of the administration’s overall strategy. “However, ‘engagement’ alone is unlikely to succeed,” Mr. Glaser said. And to those concerned that the offer of reconciliation was open-ended, one cable said, he replied curtly that “time was not on our side.”

The relief among countries supporting sanctions was palpable enough to pierce the cables’ smooth diplomatese. “Iran needs to fear the stick and feel a light ‘tap’ now,” said Robert Cooper, a senior European Union official.

“Glaser agreed, noting the stick could escalate beyond financial measures under a worst case scenario,” a cable said.

The Czechs were identified as surprisingly enthusiastic behind-the-scenes allies. Another section of the same cable was titled “Single Out but Understand the E.U. Foot-Draggers”: Sweden, considered something of a ringleader, followed by Cyprus, Greece, Luxembourg, Spain, Austria, Portugal and Romania.

The decoding of Mr. Obama’s plan was apparently all the Europeans needed, and by year’s end, even Germany, with its suspicions and longstanding trading ties with Iran, appeared to be on board.

China’s Concerns

Still, there could be little meaningful action without Russia and China. Both are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, where multilateral action would have to pass, and both possess a global reach that could effectively scuttle much of what the United States tried on its own.

The cables indicate that the administration undertook multilayered diplomatic moves to help ensure that neither would cast a Council veto to protect Iran.

As of early 2010, China imported nearly 12 percent of its oil from Iran and worried that supporting sanctions would imperil that supply. Obama administration officials have previously said that the year before, a senior adviser on Iran, Dennis B. Ross, traveled to Saudi Arabia to seek a guarantee that it would supply the lost oil if China were cut off.

The cables show that Mr. Ross had indeed been in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, in April 2009. While there is no direct account of those meetings, a suggestion of dazzling success turns up later, in cables describing meetings between Saudi and Chinese officials.

The offer may have come during a Jan. 13 meeting in Riyadh between Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi of China and King Abdullah and other senior Saudi officials, one of whom told Mr. Yang, “Saudi Arabia understood China was concerned about having access to energy supplies, which could be cut off by Iran,” according to one cable.

The conversation, evidently shaped by Mr. Ross’s request, developed from there, the cable indicated. A later cable noted simply, “Saudi Arabia has told the Chinese that it is willing to effectively trade a guaranteed oil supply in return for Chinese pressure on Iran not to develop nuclear weapons.”

That left Russia.

Dealing With Russia

Throughout 2009, the cables show, the Russians vehemently objected to American plans for a ballistic missile defense site in Poland and the Czech Republic. Conceived under President Bush and billed as a shield against long-range Iranian missiles that American intelligence said were under development, the site was an irritant to Russia, which contended that it was really designed to shoot down Russian missiles.

In talks with the United States, the Russians insisted that there would be no cooperation on other issues until the Eastern Europe site was scrapped. Those demands crested on July 29, when a senior Russian official repeatedly disrupted a meeting with Russia’s objections, according to one cable.

Six weeks later, Mr. Obama gave the Russians what they wanted: he abruptly replaced the Eastern Europe site with a ship-borne system. That system, at least in its present form, is engineered to protect specific areas against short- and medium-range missiles, not pulverize long-range missiles soaring above the atmosphere. Mr. Obama explained the shift by saying that intelligence assessments had changed, and that the long-range missile threat appeared to be growing more slowly than previously thought.

The cables are silent on whether at some higher level, Russia hinted that Security Council action against Iran would be easier with the site gone. But another secret meeting with the Russians last December, recounted in the cables, may help explain why Mr. Obama was willing to shift focus to the short- and medium-range threat, at least in the near term.

In the meeting, American officials said nothing about a slowing of the long-range threat, as cited by Mr. Obama. In fact, they insisted that North Korea had sent Iran 19 advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that could clear a path toward the development of long-range missiles. According to unclassified estimates of their range, though, they would also immediately allow Iran to strike Western Europe or easily reach Moscow — essentially the threat the revamped system was designed for.

Russia is deeply skeptical that Iran has obtained the advanced missiles, or that their North Korean version, called the BM-25, even exists. “For Russia, the BM-25 is a mysterious missile,” a Russian official said. (That argument was dealt a blow last month, when North Korea rolled out what some experts identified as those very missiles in a military parade.)

Whatever the dynamic, Mr. Obama had removed the burr under the Russians’ saddle, and in January 2010, one cable reported, a senior Russian official “indicated Russia’s willingness to move to the pressure track.”

The cables obtained by WikiLeaks end in February 2010, before the last-minute maneuvering that led to a fourth round of Security Council sanctions and even stiffer measures — imposed by the United States, the Europeans, Australia and Japan — that experts say are beginning to pinch Iran’s economy. But while Mr. Ahmadinejad has recently offered to resume nuclear negotiations, the cables underscore the extent to which Iran’s true intentions remain a mystery.

As Crown Prince bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi put it in one cable: “Any culture that is patient and focused enough to spend years working on a single carpet is capable of waiting years and even decades to achieve even greater goals.” His greatest worry, he said, “is not how much we know about Iran, but how much we don’t.”

see:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/statessecrets.html

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