Self-Paralyzing Policy

History students for years to come may well read about the U.S.-Iranian relationship of the '60s and '70s as the case study of a policy that paralyzed itself. "The Iran dilemma" may even creep into the lexicon of political scientists who, with the benefit of hindsight, conduct post-mortems on the agony that the Carter Administration is now experiencing.

The dilemma is this: on the one hand, U.S. policy of all-out support for the Shah has discouraged both contact with and knowledge of the Shah's opposition. On the other hand, the nature of his opposition--which is deep rooted, wide spread and home grown--has precluded U.S. intervention on his behalf.

There are other, exacerbating dimensions to the problem. Indeed, there are exquisite ironies. The Shah is very much a creation of the U.S. He regained the Peacock Throne 25 years ago as a result of the bold but covert exercise of American power (a CIA-engineered countercoup against leftist Premier Mohammed Mossadegh). But two things make such intervention impossible now that he is threatened again.

First, the Shah is no longer a boy-king. He is a proud and imperious monarch of 59 who expects to be both addressed and treated as His Imperial Majesty. He takes orders from no one: not the U.S. ambassador, not the U.S. President. That rules out Washington's ability to tell him what he must do to survive, even if the U.S. had known what to tell him early enough.

Second, the American taste for intervention in foreign lands has been dulled by the experience of Viet Nam. More specifically, the CIA's dagger has been blunted, its cloak ripped away by the scandals and investigations, the reorganizations and the firings of the '70s. The agency has felt it had to lie low, especially on its old Persian stomping ground, since "Iran" and CIA "dirty tricks" are almost synonymous to many ears.

Still the questions linger. Why does there appear to have been so little thought given even to contingency planning? One well-informed U.S. Government source says that as far as he knows there has been no paper that went through normal Government clearance procedures addressing the question of what to do if the Shah should fall. How can this be?

Part of the answer is that only in recent weeks has Washington taken seriously the possibility of the Shah's falling. It has long been a basic tenet of American policy that the Shah must be strong; the wishful thinking of policymakers contaminated the judgment of those who collected and analyzed intelligence. American officials tended to rely on Iranian intelligence, which in turn tended to tell His Imperial Majesty what he wanted to hear.

Once it became clear to all the world that the Shah was in deep trouble, why did the foreign policy and national security bureaucracies not then start grinding out options for what to do if he should fall?

The answer, once again, is that the rigid imperatives of policy got in the way of bold, forward-looking thinking. "There was a fear around here of self-fulfilling prophecies," says one official privy to the discussions. "There was also a sense that the people upstairs didn't want to be told what to do 'if.' They wanted to be told 'if' wasn't going to happen, and they wanted us to concentrate on making sure it didn't happen." Or as another official puts it, "The support-the-Shah-to-the-hilt policy limited discussion of other options."

Limited though the discussion may have been, the option of sending in U.S. troops has been considered in the Government--but not favorably. There are contingency planners on both sides of the Potomac River who would have dearly loved to design an American military intervention to prop up the Shah or seize the Iranian oilfields, but they lacked the pretext that they would be protecting Iran from outside interference. "Hell," says one military official, "we would have been the outside interference."

Could not the U.S. send in troops with the explicitly limited, and therefore non-provocative, mission of protecting the Strait of Hormuz from any Soviet or radical Arab attempt to exploit the chaos?

When faced with that question, a U.S. official replies, "Think about it for a minute. Those troops would be stationed on Iranian soil. They might very well find themselves confronted with Iranian mobs shouting 'Yankee, go home.' Either they would have to go home or they would be embroiled in a civil war--probably on the losing side."

No one doubts that outside forces, inimical to the Shah and the U.S. alike, have been stirring the broth in Iran. But they neither cooked the broth nor lit the fire under it. True, the KGB has a big station in Tehran. True, some Iranian leftists have been trained by the Palestinians. But the inescapable fact is that Communist and Arab agitation do not begin to explain the extent of opposition to the Shah, and there fore do not begin to justify a superpower confrontation.

The dilemma in Iran has been illustrated in numerous conversations with supporters of the Shah, both in the Government and out. A theme in such conversations goes like this: "There is no alternative to the Shah." All right, fine. But what if, even though there is no alternative to the Shah, there should be no Shah tomorrow? Or next week? Then what? Such questions usually elicit a stubborn repetition of the statement: "There is no alternative to the Shah." That argument, which is beginning to sound like a slogan, really means: There is no acceptable alternative to the Shah. To say that there is no alternative at all is illogical, and unworthy of the men who reiterate it so dogmatically. But it is that dogma--"There is no alter native to the Shah"--that has dictated policy and discouraged options for many, many years.--Strobe Talbott

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