"You Don't Do That"

In China, the U.S. State Department had chosen to wait "till the dust settles." In Iran, as one State Department official put it last week, State is waiting "for the air to clear." From Teheran, TIME Correspondent James Bell cabled:

"There must have been a moment in China when it became fully apparent that the West had had it. One day last week such a moment came in Teheran. Suddenly the consequences of Britain's policy of icy commercial hauteur and America's righteous paralysis were starkly obvious.

"It was nearly 7 p.m. on May Day in Majlis Square. As night crept around the blue minarets of Sepah Salar Mosque, Communist speakers droned on & on, whipping a huge crowd into a frenzy with such battle cries as: 'Long live the great people of China, the freedom-loving people of Korea . . . American tanks and British cruisers can't put us down . . .' Then the May Day chairman, a strike leader from the southern oilfields, stepped to the microphone and shouted: 'We greet the heroic nations of the U.S.S.R. who are at the helm of the democratic front!' "

The Enemy's Voice. "Thirty-five thousand Persians in the square went mad. A tremendous wave of sound rolled across the darkening square and crashed against its walls. The mass of humanity became a writhing thing, twisting and turning in ecstasy. Thirty-five thousand fists reached into the sky. Red, green and white Persian flags waved frantically to & fro.

"Standing on the platform before a light-blue backdrop on which was painted one-half of the world (minus the Western Hemisphere), the speaker shouted the same words again, and once more the crowd broke into a high frenzy. Three times more he shouted the same words, greetings to the 'heroic nations of the U.S.S.R.,' and each time the crowd nearly blasted him from the platform.

"In that roaring crowd, I could hear the voice of the enemy singing one more victory song. Iran is not yet behind the Soviet Curtain, but the Soviets have dangerously softened her up for conquest."

Power Vacuum. In Washington, the State Department was remarkably calm about Iran's nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (TIME, May 7) and the wave of anti-Western feeling. State chose to find cheer last week in these facts:

1) Iran promised that it would sell oil from the nationalized fields to Iran's old customers, none to Russia; 2) Iran's new Premier Mohamed Mossadeq, anti-British and anti-U.S., is also antiCommunist; 3) the British were making vague conciliatory noises--although it clearly seemed too late for conciliation. Said a State Department spokesman: "The only thing that has been lost in this situation as yet is profit to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co."

It was a dangerously shortsighted view.

In fact, the West has all but lost a key strategic position in Iran. Until a few months ago, Iran would have been willing to become part of a Middle Eastern defense system--if the U.S. had sponsored it; last week the Iranian Parliament fumed at mere suggestion of U.S. aid.

The U.S. State Department's failure to prevent or control the Iran mess is part of its larger failure to devise a policy for the entire Middle East, which today is a power vacuum as dangerous to Western security as the Far East, and even more inviting to Russian aggression.

What happened in Iran may happen tomorrow in Iraq, Syria or Egypt; the U.S. State Department has no plan, no ready means to prevent it. When a reporter suggested to a State Department official last week that the U.S. should take decisive action in the Middle East, including pressure on the British to behave less clumsily, the State Department man summed up the disastrous weakness of U.S. policy in his reply: "You don't do that kind of thing, as it was done in the 19th Century."

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