Q. & A. on Iran
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers Q. & A. ON IRAN CAN WE GET OUT WITH A WHOLE SKIN? WHERE is Iran? A long way from the United States, and walking distance from the Soviet Union. What is the...
...role had been insupportable, then he should have broken relations and expelled all U.S...
...If the Ayatollah felt the U.S...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 8...
...One result of the clarity of the situation is that we have forgone the self-questioning which accompanied so much of what happened in Indochina, and one result of that, I suspect, is a half-guilty suspicion recent history won't bear looking into...
...Back in 1964 the CIA briefly contemplated a lightning raid to rescue five Americans held captive by Simba rebels in Stanleyville, the Congo, but rejected the proposal as impractical...
...banks...
...The Shah's military ambitions, it is said, were an American inspiration to recapture oil dollars, support the U.S...
...Doubtless some of this is true...
...Our real enthusiasm is for getting out, not for going in...
...Khomeini already has what matters—power...
...It is not even certain if he ordered the U.S...
...18 January 1980: 7 Public comment on the crisis has so far centered on the fact that the U.S...
...On a cost-effectiveness basis the Ayatollah's demands don't make sense, which suggests he is really after something else...
...This is, in fact, distressingly common...
...The Soviet Union occupied Azerbaijan during the Second World War and withdrew only under pressure from the United States...
...But culpability is not the same thing as responsibility...
...What is the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini up to...
...hostages are being held illegally...
...When the Ayatollah toppled the Shah we stood on the sidelines, urging moderation and reform...
...The Israeli raiding party flew over a country which elected not to sound the alarm—Kenya—and then attacked a tiny group of Palestinians which was holding its hostages in an airport terminal, not a walled embassy compound held by hundreds of armed students...
...This suggests that the relationship between the United States and Iran was entirely a political one, that the Shah was free to take our advice or leave it, as he liked...
...It was the Shah, not the U.S...
...What this all adds up to is a conclusion the Israelis couldn't do it either, and that the United States has no real military option in the present crisis, unless we want to consider some sort of violent retribution an option...
...The American military's raid on a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp at Son Tay would have succeeded if the prisoners had still been there, but Son Tay was in the middle of nowhere and the prisoners would have been in separate cells, making it impossible for their captors to kill them en masse...
...The United States, unlike the Soviet Union, has shown it has no appetite for occupying and holding a hostile nation...
...The U.S...
...It is just what happened to the South Vietnamese army, after all, which had also been force-fed huge inventories of modern arms...
...The confusion stems from the fact that he is demanding something—the body of the Shah—which is entirely symbolic, and therefore too trivial to justify such awful risks...
...It is apparently the destiny of these peoples to tremble on the edge of Russia, or be absorbed within it...
...Our reasons for overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh—that he was too close to the Communists, that he planned to nationalize Iranian oil—were too shallow in the first instance, and shortsighted in the second...
...Who will win their freedom first-the Lithuanians, or the Azerbaijanis...
...The question here is whether the Iranians would resist, not whether their troops could defeat our troops in a setpiece battle...
...We can drop bombs just about anywhere on earth, and so far it hasn't done us much good...
...This sounds, in fact, more than a little like the relationship between the Soviet Union and East Germany, whose membership in the Warsaw pact, foreign policy, and repression of internal dissent are all mandated by Moscow...
...Could the Israelis do it...
...forces would find the going easy, if President Carter were to decide to intervene...
...The American fleets in the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea are not intended to impress the Ayatollah so much as they are, one suspects, the Russians...
...We supported a man whose rule was in some respects a brutal tyranny, and are culpable, just as other countries are when they do the same thing...
...The Soviet Union retains certain rights of intervention from a treaty with Iran of the 1920s...
...Let's hope so...
...The Shah is a frail old man, and his personal fortune, however ill-begotten, cannot amount to much beside the funds frozen by U.S...
...What the Russians might get out of it is almost certainly being debated in Washington at this very moment by men poring over large maps as they spin out awful scenarios: the Soviets consolidate their control of Afghanistan, occupy Iran down to the Gulf under a 99-year friendship treaty with the Ayatollah guaranteeing complete religious freedom to Shiite Moslems and political freedom to the Tudeh party, thereby ending Soviet oil supply problems for the rest of the century, and putting a lump in the throat of everyone on the Arabian peninsula...
...The Soviet Union has been supporting Khomeini...
...Whatever his true goal, it is something we can't or shouldn't deliver...
...Some analysts think his handling of the crisis betrays the desperation of a leader trying to distract his people from the reality of a fragile country rapidly slipping towards social and economic chaos, with famine, anarchy and civil war waiting in the wings...
...Iran ' is the largest country to suffer a revolution since China, and in some ways it's even more important...
...There is something in us that rebels at the prospect of holding a people in thrall...
...nationals...
...The American military sometimes sounds as if it took this to be a weakness on our part, but I can't help thinking it's all bluster...
...But perhaps it will all blow over...
...What did the Shah get for the billions he spent on modern arms...
...At the moment it really does seem to be coming apart...
...We almost certainly, should have left him to gilded exile in Rome...
...The Shah nationalized the oil anyway, and then tripled the price in 1973...
...arms industry, and build a bulwark between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf...
...But the drift of the Pentagon stories seems to be that U.S...
...Entebbe Airport was not in downtown Kampala...
...Neither is ever going to be "free...
...But if Iran really starts to break apart, somebody will move in...
...The best the United States can hope for is to get out with a whole skin, by which we ought to mean not only our hostages but the reimposition of order in Iran, supported by a robust and well-run oil industry...
...Those who know aren't saying, and his actions do not yet form a pattern sufficiently clear to announce itself...
...The difference, I think, has to do with the organs of control...
...Others suggest he is pursuing a messianic ambition to rally all Islam around himself...
...The United.States and the Soviet Union both seem to be run by sober men with a sense of balance, but the crisis in Iran offers the sort of rewards which can turn men's heads...
...Is it all our fault...
...Russia militarily occupies its clients in Eastern Europe, and is willing to crush revolt with tanks...
...We are told that the Shah's army is breaking up, that the officers are demoralized or divided, that the soldiers are deserting, that the men still in uniform refuse to obey orders, that the lingering "backwardness" of Iran is causing a logistical breakdown, that modern helicopters, hovercraft, and jet fighters have been disabled by lack of maintenance...
...Of course this cannot alter the fact they enjoy—a certain bitter irony there—the privileges of diplomatic immunity, or the fact they were granted immunity by the very government which is now illegally holding them, but it's clear the Iranians are groping for the color of law...
...Some Americans take pleasure in the separatist tendencies of the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis, the Arabs along the Gulf, and other minorities in Iran, as if their defection might topple the Ayatollah without any other consequences...
...Does this sound to you as if the Azerbaijanis could break with Khomeini's Iran without inviting Russian intervention...
...Is the crisis in Iran a tempest in a teapot...
...The Iranians have charged the Shah with being a virtual puppet of the United States, a cringing, timid figure, for all his megalomania, who didn't just take but humbly solicited his orders from the American ambassador...
...and that what happened in Iran was fundamentally the doing of Iranians...
...Ambassador, who tyrannized over Iran...
...Even the Iranians seem to recognize this fact, which is why they have charged the hostages with being spies...
...This I very much doubt...
...Stories coming out of the Pentagon suggest the answer is not much, but I'm not sure they ought to be trusted...
...His secret police, the SAVAK, was the invention of the CIA, which tutored it in computerized file-keeping and the mechanics of torture...
...It is also true that the Shah's army proved useless when it came to defending his throne...
...What he did instead, is not our fault...
...Embassy takeover in Tehran, or was taken by surprise, like the rest of us...
...The United States, through the CIA, restored the Shah to power in 1953 after he had fled the country in a moment of funk...
...The Iranians might disband their army altogether, and still prove a lump impossible to swallow...
...won any number of set-piece battles in Vietnam, and ought to have learned to distinguish the battles from the war...
...We might even call it universal...
Vol. 107 • January 1980 • No. 1
