THE LESSON OF IRAN
Stone, I. F.
The lesson of Iran Enormous military power can be meaningless I.F. Stone When Congress begins its debate on proposals to reinstitute the draft, I hope opponents will not overlook the lessons to...
...It is the effort to maintain outmoded systems of government by force and modern technology, repressing the new middle class, the working class, and the new youth by censorship and terror...
...He was, in effect, offering the Saudis the same prescription that did in the Shah...
...Instead, he offered transparent fictions...
...The armed forces were a privileged sector...
...It was not for lack of weapons that the Shah fell and the Saudis may someday be endangered...
...Our silliest gesture as the Iranian storm clouds gathered was to move some of our warships toward the Persian Gulf — a gunboat reflex, a bit of macho muscle-flexing straight out of the Nineteenth Century...
...So quickly can the intimidating facade of dictatorship collapse when discontent has rotted away the pillars of habit and loyalty, whether dynastic or ideological...
...When even bank clerks went on a political strike, it should have been obvious that this was no artificially inseminated revolution but the deepest kind of grass-roots movement...
...It would be wonderful if we had a chance to make up for past hypocrisies and pursue a fresh course to help those forces in Iran that would like to avoid a reversion to a medieval clericalism...
...The most striking, the most hopeful, and the most relevant of these lessons is how impotent enormous military power can be...
...But the American giant has not been rendered helpless by a lack of military power: We are, if anything, a musclebound giant — a dinosaur with too little up front in the way of a brain...
...Stone's 1946 book, "Underground to Palestine, " was recently reissued by Pantheon...
...ing F-14 Tomcat fighter planes equipped with ultra-high-technology Phoenix missiles...
...The danger is not external aggression but internal rot...
...It did not prevent revolution...
...The Shah had invested billions in what was the world's fourth or fifth-largest military establishment, buttressed by the most extensive internal spy system outside the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Ask yourself this question: If, thanks to a resumed draft, we had three million men under arms instead of two million, and if we had several mobile divisions equipped with the air and sea lift capability for swift and distant intervention, could American troops in Iran have done anything more than intensify the bloodshed, the damage, and the hatred...
...The lesson here is that the greater our military power, the more difficult it becomes to fight the undertow that pulls us into trying to solve complex political problems by brute force...
...The fears about Iranian oil may well prove as unfounded as the fears about the Suez Canal when the Egyptians took it over in 1956...
...it fomented it...
...One reporter in Teheran, William Claiborne of The Washington Post, put it succinctly when he cabled, "One of the world's best-equipped armies capitulated to a few thousand determined street fighters...
...and to honor the will of the Iranian people...
...It was a victory to thrill a democrat's heart — and a warning to every tyranny in the world from Somoza's to the 'We are lucky we did not have the troops' Kremlin's...
...But already we hear the familiar cry that we must not be "a helpless giant," and that cry will resonate in the coming debate over the revival of military conscription...
...It would have been splendid if, in this moment of truth, our President had spoken for us words of candor and apology, regretting that our CIA had restored, and our military, financial, and intelligence institutions had maintained for a quarter century, a regime so demonstrably hateful to every sector of Iranian society...
...It is a pity that our past record should taint these ideals and make their achievement more difficult...
...All melted away before a spontaneous revolutionary army that sprang up as if from nowhere, armed with Molotov cocktails and some of the Shah's own weaponry...
...His words must have been read with incredulous scorn in Teheran...
...There is no sign of any change in the policies or — a better term — the mindless conditioned reflexes that contributed to our monumental pratfall in Iran...
...One honest word would have been refreshing, clearing the air for better relations...
...Stone When Congress begins its debate on proposals to reinstitute the draft, I hope opponents will not overlook the lessons to be drawn from the fall of the Shah of Iran...
...There is a new youth in Iran that wants the basic liberties they learned to appreciate in our universities even while we were helping the Shah extinguish them...
...We are lucky we did not have the troops...
...Only a few days earlier, the Shah's Imperial Guard — his prize-pet "Immortals" — had goose-stepped proudly through Teheran's streets in their dazzling uniforms, as if to dare any dissenter to show his head...
...No revolution ever took power so quickly and with so little bloodshed, so sick was every class, rich and poor, of the corruption and brutality of the Shah's regime...
...It may not be as quick to buy expensive military toys, or to borrow billions for lavish extravaganzas, but it certainly will be impelled to resume the production and sale of its most precious resource to obtain the funds it needs for reconstruction and development...
...Secretary of Defense Harold Brown went off at once to Saudi Arabia, where he pledged, as The New York Times reported, "that the Carter Administration would take concrete steps in the next few months to defend and arm Saudi Arabia and other friendly Persian Gulf states...
...The new regime already shows signs of moderation...
...Within the same week they surrendered the Shah's favorite palace and their own heavily fortified headquarters without a fight...
...We are lucky that Vietnam deprived us of the will — or willful idiocy — to jump into another morass...
...What the CIA taught the Shah's SAVAK in Iran, and what it no doubt has been teaching its counterparts in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, is exactly what brought on the Iranian explosion...
...The more military power we possess, the more irresistible these invitations to disaster...
...Our policy," he told us, "has been not to interfere in the internal affairs of Iran...
...the higher officers helped themselves liberally at the public till, and they had the most up-to-date weaponry, includI.F...
...But instead of candor and apology, we heard from Jimmy Carter the same kind of bland mendacities we used to get from Richard Nixon...
Vol. 43 • April 1979 • No. 4
