Sticks and Carrots

Establishing rapport with Tehran remains a problem

Relations between Washington and Tehran, which have been cool since the exile of the former Shah of Iran, reached a new low last week. On two successive days, tens of thousands of Iranians marched past the U.S. embassy in Tehran, shouting insults and condemning American "intervention" in Iranian affairs. In a speech to 50,000 of the demonstrators, Ali Akbar Hashimi Rafsanjani, a close associate of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, charged that U.S. policymakers were responsible for the death of every Iranian killed during the revolution. "Who gave the deposed Shah his weapons?" asked Rafsanjani. "Who supported him as long as he could kill?" At week's end Rafsanjani was himself shot and wounded in an assassination attempt by Forghan, a terrorist group that earlier killed a former army chief of staff and Ayatullah Morteza Motahari, one of Iran's leading theologians.

The demonstrations were in response to a U.S. Senate resolution deploring Iran's "summary executions" and the pronouncement by an Iranian religious judge that the Shah should be assassinated "in any country where found." The crowds in Tehran were particularly vociferous in attacking New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits, who introduced the resolution, and his wife Marion, who helped obtain the Iran Air account for a New York public relations firm.

The Ayatullah Khomeini denounced the U.S. as a "defeated and wounded snake" and termed Washington's relations with Tehran as those of a "tyrant with an innocent, a savaged victim with a plunderer. We don't need America. It is they who need us. They want our oil."

After a meeting of the Cabinet, Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi requested that the new U.S. Ambassador to Iran, Walter L. Cutler, delay his arrival hi Tehran until relations could be "clarified." Next day Yazdi rioted that the Senate resolution was not binding on the Carter Administration. He characterized it as a "response to Zionist interests."

There is evidence that a growing number of Iranians are becoming annoyed by Khomeini's brand of Islamic extremism.

But that does not mean any lack of support for sentences that have been pronounced by the revolutionary courts against officials who used torture and murder as instruments of policy. In one hourlong televised interview last week, a former interrogator for SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, broke down as he delivered a chilling account of the atrocities that had been committed during the Shah's reign. At the end, the announcer asked:

"Now what does the U.S. Senate want us to do with people like this?"

After Yazdi's "softening and courageous statement," as one specialist termed it, officials in Washington were confident that good relations were still possible with the government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. They also took heart from the fact that many of the anti-American demonstrators in Tehran last week carried placards that denounced the Soviet Union with a vitriol almost equal to that aimed at the U.S.

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