Carter's Iran legacy

Matthias Küntzel:

...

Whereas these epic passages make the book (Mark Bowden's new book Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam.) a genuine pleasure to read, it is Bowden's look back at Jimmy Carter's Iran policy that gives the book its particular political relevance. Certain similarities with the dilemmas of America's current Iran policy are impossible to overlook.

...

The contrast between the reality and the phantasm could hardly have been greater. At the time of the embassy seizure, the Iran section at the CIA consisted of exactly four people -- who, moreover, were fumbling around in the dark since none of them spoke Farsi. In previous years, too, the CIA had failed actively to gather intelligence. Thus it announced in August 1978 -- just six months before the revolution! -- that Iran "is not in a revolutionary or even prerevolutionary situation." The intelligence reports from France and Israel, which correctly predicted the imminent overthrow of the shah, were stubbornly dismissed as "alarmist."3

The tendency toward wishful thinking continued even after the revolution in February 1979. Whereas Tehran increasingly viewed the U.S. through the darkly hued optic of its paranoid phantasms and loudly demonized America as its Enemy No. 1, Washington plugged its ears and looked back through rose-colored glasses. The American Representative to the UN, Andrew Young, described Khomeini as "some kind of saint," while National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was favorably disposed toward him, since he seemed to Brzezinski to represented an effective barrier against Soviet influence. "We can get along with Khomeini!" was the motto in that summer of 1979. Businesspeople were encouraged to invest in Iran. Members of Congress were subtly discouraged from making critical comments. Critical journalists who refused to follow the line were denigrated. The following episode, as described by Michael Ledeen and William Lewis, is illustrative of the atmosphere:

There was considerable consternation and disgruntlement in the State Department and the cia when three American newspapers published extensive accounts of Khomeini's writings. The articles showed that Khomeini's books revealed him as a violently anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic individual, who offered an unattractive alternative to the shah. Yet as late as the first week in February 1979, when Khomeini was returning in triumph to Tehran, Henry Precht [the head of the State Department's Iran desk] told an audience of some two hundred persons at the State Department "open forum" meeting that the newspaper accounts were severely misleading, and he went so far as to accuse Washington Post editorial columnist Stephen Rosenfeld of wittingly disseminating excerpts from a book that Precht considered at best a collection of notes taken by students, and at worst a forgery. Precht was hardly an isolated case, for the conviction was widespread that Khomeini's books were either false, exaggerated, or misunderstood.4

Thus, the State Department and the CIA defended their false picture of Khomeini against all intrusion of reality. Remarkably, somewhat later the CIA asked Rosenfeld if he could lend the agency the edition of the book he had cited, since it did not have its own copy. So much for the most omniscient and cunning intelligence agency of the most omniscient and cunning government in the world.

...

This is a very brief excerpt from a very long article. It goes on to show Carter's incompetence in dealing with the hostage crisis. His incompetent approach is much the same as he counsels today in dealing with the intransigent Muslim religious bigots. He seems to have learned nothing from a very painful experience.