TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.16

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                                                                                February 2, 1981

NATION

Learning Lessons from an Obsession


Lessons drawn from unique circumstances are usually wrong, but
in the case of Iran the impulse to understand what has happened
to the U.S. in the past 14 1/2 months may offer the only way out
of a blind rage. Blindness has been a metaphor throughout. The
U.S. was blind not to see the extent and temper of the Iranian
revolution against the Shah; blind fanatics seized the U.S.
embassy in Tehran; the Ayatullah Khomeini's blind sense of
vengeance sanctioned the seizure; and the hostages suffered
their own blindness, held in solitary and the dark. All year
long, photographs of American heads in blindfolds became icons
of the crime. Now the U.S. itself is like those blindfolded
prisoners as they unwrap their bindings and get used to the
light: Where are we? Where have we been?

Hell is the place we have been, though the Iranian version was
pure Sartre; no air and no exit. Yet the fact is that the U.S.
lost a great deal because of the hostage crisis. It lost eight
men, and that was the worst. It also showed itself and the rest
of the world that its defense and foreign policies could be
confounded by a street gang. It demonstrated that it was willing
to work a deal with kidnapers; that its military and covert
forces were faulty and impotent; that its political intelligence
was porous. Beyond these, it lost clarity in its foreign policy
when clarity was needed most.

The hostage crisis was American's obsession. Jimmy Carter
called it his particular obsession more than once, and the
country whole heartedly adopted it. Television and newspapers
helped mightily, Walter Cronkite's nightly countdown becoming
a show of its own. The country could not let go. For most of
the 14 1/2 months everyone held to the hostages and were held
by them simultaneously, like a disease of the blood. There was
little energy for anything but the disease. Perhaps the greatest
loss the U.S. endured was a loss of bearings--a fever dream
filled with shattered helicopters and the faces of strangers,
red with hate, straining to pop into the living room.

Could it have been handled better tactically?  Perhaps. The
French, for example, have felt all along that the U.S. made an
irrevocable mistake in doing business with the Iranians, rather
than treating them as one would any band of terrorists. "They
[the U.S.] should have drawn an X on the 52 hostages and given
them up for dead," argues Pierre Lellouche, a political
strategist at France's Institute for International Relations.
It makes for good theory, but Americans would never have
accepted it.

The British, on the other hand, seemed to think that Carter
played the matter just about right. Britain's Foreign
Secretary, Lord Carrington, observed recently that "when you
have got 52 of your fellow countrymen locked up over a period
of time and there doesn't seem any way of getting them out, and
when you can get them out at the expense of releasing assets
which belong to Iran anyway, I think that's a right move. I
would not agree that the Americans have given in to blackmail."
The West German response has been similar. What dismayed
Europeans most about the hostage crisis was the same thing that
most dismayed and shocked the American public--the terrible
failure of the helicopter rescue mission. On the whole,
however, U.S. restraint has been regarded as admirable by its
allies and in purely humane terms, the wisdom of that restraint
resides in the fact that, despite the ordeal, the 52 hostages
are indeed home free.

What makes Iran's particular act of terrorism so difficult to
second guess, of course, is that it was one of a kind. The
Pueblo affair is often cited as an analogous example. In
January 1968 a U.S. intelligence ship and 82 members of its crew
were captured by the North Koreans in the Sea of Japan. The
Johnson Administration made the proper noises initially, but
then settled down to very quiet, private negotiations. About
eleven months later the crew of the Pueblo was released. There
are coincidental similarities to the Iranian situation as well;
the Pueblo affair also occurred in an election year, and it was
resolved only after Johnson's successor. Richard Nixon, had been
elected. The North Koreans probably felt that they would fare
better dealing with Johnson, much as the Iranians feared dealing
with Reagan.

But the differences between the two incidents are more to the
point. The U.S. could threaten force against North Korea because
it had no fear of driving the North Koreans into the arms of the
Soviet Union. With Iran that fear was, and is, a fundamental
consideration, as was the even larger danger of igniting the
entire Persian Gulf and throttling the West's essential oil
supply. Also, the Pueblo crew was in fact spying, and they were
doing so against a country with which the U.S. had no diplomatic
relations. Beyond that, Kim II Sung's regime, while hardly a
dream government, was a lot easier to deal with than Khomeini's.
The North Koreans know how to practice discretion and secrecy,
while in revolutionary Iran it was hard to find any government
to deal with, and every move was a public riot.

A different precedent was offered by the Mayaguez incident. On
May 12, 1975, Cambodian forces seized the American merchant ship
Mayaguez and its 39 crewmen in the Gulf of Siam. On May 14 the
ship was freed, after U.S. fighter jets had sunk three Cambodian
gunboats, the Marines had landed on Cambodia's jungle islet of
Koh Tang, and the U.S. had bombed a Cambodian air base at Ream.
As soon as the ship was seized, President Ford simply declared
the matter "an act of piracy," then threatened military action.
On May 14 he dutifully appealed to the United Nations for help
in obtaining the ship's release. And on the same day he sent
in the troops, at least 14 of whom died in the action.

Sending in the troops was not a realistic option for Carter.
Had he threatened substantial military action against Iran, he
would have risked confrontation with the Soviets. At the very
least, he would have risked driving the Iranians to seek Soviet
protection. He could not easily negotiate in secret, and for
a long time it was impossible to negotiate at all. The Iranians
had what they wanted. They did not seek the moral approval of
the world; they wanted only to see the U.S. the Shah's great
friend, tied to the ground like Gulliver. The result was a
standoff between rage and outrage, and both persist, the U.S.
outrage now informed by tales of harassment of the hostages and
by the uniformity of their bitterness.

So now begin the contingency plans. If a similar situation were
to present itself in the future, the U.S. should or would
respond thus and so. The exercise is emotionally necessary, but
problematical. Undoubtedly the U.S. could learn to pay closer
attention to the character of the governments it supports, and
undoubtedly it will. But in terms of particulars, the hostage
crisis was a fluke, a historical aberration. The commonplace
wisdom it offers is that anything can happen.

Yet there are three fairly concrete lessons that may be learned
from this experience, and they all have to do with the proper
interpretation of events. The first is simply that the U.S. did
not pay enough attention to what was happening in Iran once the
Shah was deposed, or perhaps that it was paying attention to the
wrong Iran, the middle class. The Iranian revolution was
revolution in the streets. Iran was in the streets--and that
is where U.S. intelligence ought to have been looking. Had it
done so, it would have seen itself as the new country's declared
enemy, the only enemy in sight since the Shah had fled. No one
in the mobs was keeping that secret. It would also have seen
Khomeini for the demagogue he is, and not as some obscurantist
mullah waiting benignly in the background. "We do not have the
range or the flexibility to deal with revolution of this
character," observes Richard Bulliet, acting director of the
Middle East Institute at Columbia University. Range and
flexibility would have been nice to have, but in the meantime
it would have helped to notice that the wolf was inside the
door.

The second lesson, related to the first, is that the U.S. seems
to have dangerously little historical or cultural perspective
when it comes to making diplomatic decisions or entering into
diplomatic relationships. It was one thing to see how
immediately valuable the friendship of the Shah was to American
military and why the Shah's modernizing reforms, his agrarian
reform culture. Not for nothing did those millions of Iranians
demonstrate and strike in the schools, factories and oilfields.
The U.S. refused to recognize the depths of the Iranian culture
as a whole. That made it not only blind to the coming of the
revolution but also wholly dumbfounded in dealing with Iran once
the hostages were seized.

Third, the U.S. made much too much of the hostage incident.
Foreign service officers are like soldiers out of uniform. They
understand and accept this, especially in posts like
revolutionary Iran, where the U.S. plays stand-in for the devil.
When the embassy in Tehran was taken, therefore, Carter ought
to have immediately regarded and declared the hostages prisoners
of war and acted accordingly. He should have seen to it that
a third-party country was appointed mediator; he should have
sought out the International Red Cross to oversee the
humanitarian concerns; and then he should have sat back and
waited. He should have asked the press and TV networks to play
down the matter as well, though that is admittedly a perilous
undertaking. One of the odd axioms of terrorism is that if
hostages are not killed within the first few days, they will
probably never be killed, and thereafter become a burden to
their captors. Their value for the Iranians would have been
squeezed dry much sooner, and the U.S. would not have been
mummified for over a year.

There are subsidiary lessons as well:  1) in the future the U.S.
must make a clear announcement of how it will react to a
terrorist attack and serve notice to its potential enemies; 2)
the country must create a real military presence in the Middle
East, a credible force to back up a retaliatory threat, and a
capacity to intervene; 3) the media must show self-discipline
when it comes to terrorists. Had the Iranian militants not been
able to manipulate the television networks so thoroughly, had
they not been a prime-time program, their own frenzy and that
of the American viewers would have been considerably diminished.
In short, the U.S. paid too little attention to events before
the hostage crisis, and too much attention once the crime had
been committed.

This said, there was one advantage to the excess of attention.
From the perspective of pure practicality, the U.S. erred in
making the hostage crisis its national obsession. But from the
perspective of normal human emotions, what other obsession could
a nation feel?  If it was an obsession that made U.S. foreign
policy look shaky and feeble in the eyes of the world, it was
that same obsession that caused American eyes to fill up at the
sight of countrymen striding off that plane in Algiers. The
faces of the newly freed prisoners bore the lessons of their own
resilience and of the country's as a whole. Everyone was glad
to be home.

Khomeini has had his day; he promised to set his country back
hundreds of years, and by the kidnaping of the Americans he has
accomplished his purpose. Now, with the hostages out of the
way, he may survey his country and take in the sights: a
war-torn and bedraggled citizenry; an unemployment figure of
about 40% out of a working population of 11.5 million; an
inflation rate of over 50% and rising; the total revenues of the
government, an estimated $15 billion last year, not even
sufficient to meet the government payroll. The unfrozen assets
will come in handy, but they will hardly put the country in the
black. Of course, there is always the Soviet Union to turn to,
but the Iranians may find that the Soviet version of Russian
roulette is a bit less chancy than that of hostage guards.

For its part, the U.S. should keeps hands off. Between the two
countries there has been more than enough vengeance to go
around, and the time is right for some steady thinking. Perhaps
the Iranians will wish to do some thinking too. Anyone who
holds a hostage becomes a hostage to what he holds, and Iran,
like all civilizations, will have to learn to live with its
national crimes. But that is hardly enough for a nation to live
on. It might be instructive for iranian television to replay
that airport scene in Algiers from time to time, simply to offer
the sight of 52 free people heading home to a place they
cherish, and that cherishes them.

--By Roger Rosenblatt