د عدلي الهواري

The policy of containing the Soviet Union and reducing its influence throughout the world colored the thinking of the U.S. foreign policymakers. This policy did not only produce an arms race between the two superpowers and their respective blocs in Europe, it also led to dividing the world into two camps: pro-West and pro-Soviet Union. Consequently, if a country, national liberation movement, or just an internal movement opposing a ruler considered a friend of the United States was not unequivocally pro-West, in letter and in spirit, then the tendency was, more often than not, to consider the country or movement as pro-Soviet Union.

Such colored thinking conditioned and blinkered the U.S. foreign policymakers, and made them susceptible to misjudging the nature of events, disputes, and movements in different parts of the world, as was the case in Iran between 1978-1980.

This tendency to misunderstand and misjudge situations was criticized by Cyrus Vance, secretary of state between 1977 and 1980, for failing to understand the forces of change in the Third World. “All through the 1960s and early 1970s,” Vance correctly observed, “new forces and actors appeared in areas of the world that had been on the periphery.” He pointed out that understanding these forces “required a broader American conception of US security interests and of the scope of our foreign policy than merely the US-Soviet or East-West geopolitical confrontation.”[1]

It would be tempting, therefore, to suggest that misjudging the nature of the radical movement in Iran was inevitable. But before jumping to conclusions, it would be necessary to look at the US-Iran relations from the time of President Truman, father of the policy of containment, until the downfall of the Shah of Iran in 1979.

Between 1942 and 1949, America’s political and economic involvement in Iran increased steadily. Every administration contributed to deepening or broadening these relations. President Truman’s contribution was his opposition to the Russian occupation of Azerbaijan after the Second World War. He helped bring about the Russian withdrawal from the area.[2]

A few years later, the US became an important market for Iran’s oil.[3] When Iran in the 1950s saw a dispute between the Shah and his Prime Minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, who nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, President Eisenhower stopped buying Iranian oil for more than a year, thus contributing to the removal of the prime minister from power.[4]

During Kennedy’s administration, the Shah was pressed to introduce democratic changes. Kennedy, according to Stempel, wanted to “prevent a build up of the military establishment in Iran” on the basis of the belief that “a progressive outlook would stabilize the society more than continued authoritarian control.”[5]

Johnson on the other hand pressed big corporations, like McDonnell Douglas and Boeing, to sell more of their products to Iran. This was at a time when the US was becoming deeply involved in Vietnam and therefore needed the support of its allies to stop the deterioration in the American balance of payments.[6]

In 1972, President Nixon adopted a policy of selling the Shah anything he wanted.[7] Fred Halliday explained why such a policy was adopted:

Iran is indisputably the most prominent example of what is known as the Nixon Doctrine: this can be described as the theory that selected third world capitalist states should play an active military and political role, relying in the first instance on their resources, and that they should in this way spread the load of maintaining capitalist stability which the USA had born almost alone since the Second World War.[8]

How different were things under Jimmy Carter, the president whose campaign had two major themes: human rights and limitations on America’s arms sales—two themes that made the Shah feel uneasy even before Carter was elected in November 1976?[9]

In his summary of the views of the new president vis-a-vis Iran, William Sullivan, the US ambassador to Iran between 10 June 1977 and April 1978 said:

The president made clear that he regarded Iran as strategically important to the United States and our allies. He also warmly endorsed the shah as a close friend and a trusted ally, and stressed the importance he placed on the continuing role of Iran as a force for stability and security in the Persian Gulf region.[10]

Sullivan had three areas of concern about which he sought the[11] views of his president:

a) the level of military sales to Iran;

b) Iran’s desire to acquire nuclear-power plants from the United States; and

c) cooperation between the two countries’ intelligence organizations, the CIA and SAVAK.

In his answers to all these questions, Carter was “specific and quick,” Sullivan said.[12]

As far as the arms sales were concerned, Carter wanted to be “quite generous with the Iranians, and there was nothing currently on their shopping list under consideration that he felt it necessary to deny them. This specifically included the AWACS aircraft that were still being introduced into the United States Air Forces.”[13]

With regard to acquiring nuclear-power plants, Carter found no reason to object to this “on the condition that they [the Iranians] accept appropriate international safeguards concerning their use and the disposition of spent fuel.”[14]

Addressing the third and last topic, Carter pointed out that he “had examined the issue and reached the conclusion that the intelligence we receive, particularly from our listening posts focused on the Soviet Union, was of such importance that we should continue the collaboration between our two intelligence agencies.”[15]

With this sort of guidance, how could the American ambassador to Iran fail to predict what was happening or about to happen in Iran? Perhaps the failure could be attributed to lack of adequate information about Iran, its culture, and its people. Indeed, one could find evidence to support this argument. William Sullivan’s selection as the American ambassador to Iran could be cited to support this suggestion.

One should wonder first what sort of qualifications Carter sought in the prospective American ambassador to Iran. Sullivan’s nomination to the post “surprised” him. “The nearest I have served to Tehran,” Sullivan willingly confessed, “was in Calcutta thirty years before. I never lived in the Islamic world and knew little about its culture or its ethos.”[16]

With such a frank and startling admission, the nagging question was “why me?” Sullivan asked his boss, Cyrus Vance this very simple question. Vance replied: “it had been decided to send a professional who had considerable experience in dealing with authoritarian governments and with leaders who were forceful personalities.”[17]

When the new ambassador arrived in Tehran, he began familiarizing himself with the staff of the embassy and their work. He found out the following:[18]

a) the largest contingent was in the military mission (to assist in the training of Iranian military forces and prepare them for the absorption of sophisticated military equipment the United States was selling to Iran.)

b) few of those serving in Iran had had previous experience in the country, and fewer spoke Farsi or knew the culture of Iran.

c) many of the Iranian nationals working in the embassy were Armenian Christians; and

d) very few of the senior positions among the Iranian staff were filled by Muslims.

Should one therefore conclude that the ambassador and his staff were ill-prepared for the task of discerning what was going on in Iran?

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the ambassador and his staff were ill-prepared for this task, how could one explain a very similar failure on the part of another western ambassador, the British Anthony Parsons, who, in contrast with Sullivan, had the knowledge and experience of the region and its culture?

As far as the availability of information inside Iran was concerned, Parsons indicated that there were about 20,000 Britons working throughout Iran?[19] Parsons indicated that he “went out of [his] way not to use a number of obvious British sources of information gathering.”[20]

While he explained that “we did not use these people as ‘agents’ in the technical sense of the word,”[21] he also pointed out that “we were interested to hear what they had to say about local conditions and of course we knew what questions to ask and what areas of conversation to develop, as we did with all our many Iranian contacts; but there was nothing covert or sinister about this.”[22]

In 1978, there were 45,000 Americans in Iran[23] and, therefore, one could say that they were a very good source of information which would make up for any deficiency in the official mechanism of information gathering in Iran.

Why then there was a failure in judging the nature of what was happening in Iran? Or, to be more accurate, was there a failure or misjudgment? Anthony Parsons asked the question and tried very hard in his book to answer it. “Why,” Parsons asked, “ did I, with all my experience of the region, fail to see what was about to happen under my eyes?”[24]

He ruled out lack of information as an answer: “I have come to the conclusion,” Parsons said, “that our inability to anticipate what happened between January 1978 and February 1979 did not, in fact, result from lack of information.[25]

He was even “surprised at the volume of material on the domestic situation, the number of times we addressed various contingencies, and the detailed extent of our knowledge.[26] His conclusion was that the “lack of perception derived not from a failure of information but from a failure to interpret correctly information available to us.[27]

Parsons said he did not interpret things correctly, because he “did not draw the appropriate lesson from Iran’s past but generalized over much from my experience in Turkey and the Arab world.”[28]

Contrary to what Parsons tried to do in his book, i.e., trying to answer the basic question of why those concerned failed to predict what was to happen and misjudged the nature of what was happening in Iran, none of the American officials who wrote about their roles in the saga of Iranian-American relations during President Carter’s administration asked the question as directly as Parsons did, nor did they offer any possible explanation for what would appear to be a gross misjudgment. In the many different memoirs, one would only find a lot of recriminations: the ambassador blaming Washington; Washington blaming the ambassador; the National Security Council blaming the State Department and vice versa; and so on and so forth.

Although Parsons came very close to answering his question very convincingly, I would argue that the problem was not a problem of interpretation either. I would be inclined to suggest that a built-in bias toward resisting changes which the American foreign policymakers found incompatible with their strategic plans, their management of the competition with the Soviet Union, and the US economic interests, would explain the ostensible misjudgment and the actions taken consequently.

I would even assert that even after the Cold War had ended, American foreign policymakers would still be susceptible to making similar errors and misjudgments. Hypothetically speaking, what would the US do if it found out that the Saudi people neither liked the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, nor the type of relations between both countries? Would the US in such a hypothetical case, respond by packing the bags and leaving Saudi Arabia? This would be unthinkable, wouldn’t it?

= = =

Notes

[1] Cyrus R. Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 23.

[2] John D. Stempel, Inside the Iranian Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981), 59.

[3] Stempel, Iranian Revolution, 61.

[4] Stempel, Iranian Revolution, 59.

[5] Stempel, Iranian Revolution, 66-67.

[6] Stempel, Iranian Revolution, 68.

[7] Stempel, Iranian Revolution, 68.

[8] Fred Halliday. Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1979), 248.

[9] Gary Sick, All Fall down: America’s Fateful Encounter in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1985), 22.

[10] William H. Sullivan, Mission to Iran (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), 20.

[11] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 20-21.

[12] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 20-21.

[13] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 21.

[14] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 22.

[15] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 22.

[16] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 12-13.

[17] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 16.

[18] Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 39-40.

[19] Anthony Parsons, The Pride and the Fall: Iran, 1974-79 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), 38.

[20] Parsons, Iran 1974-79, 38.

[21] Parsons, Iran 1974-79, 21.

[22] Parsons, Iran 1974-79, 21.

[23] Keesing’s Contemporary Archives (London: Keesing’s/Longman, 1979), 29733.

[24] Parsons. Iran 1974-79, 132.

[25] Parsons. Iran 1974-79, 133.

[26] Parsons. Iran 1974-79, 134.

[27] Parsons. Iran 1974-79, 134.

[28] Parsons. Iran 1974-79, 134.