Questions About a Crisis

How will the Iranian situation affect the Saudis and the Soviets?

After the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian radicals, some of Washington's Middle East experts predicted that this outrageous violation of international custom would brand Ayatullah Khomeini as a pariah in the Islamic world. The experts were wrong. Certainly the majority of Khomeini's neighboring rulers disapprove of the embassy invasion and the holding of diplomatic hostages. But the denunciations of the Ayatullah have not been as loud or as specific as the U.S. would like. That is partly because Khomeini's skill at rousing Iranian mobs to a pitch of zealotry has caused other leaders to fear that his kind of revolution could take root in their nations.

Last week, as the war of nerves between Tehran and Washington continued, U.S. policymakers were pondering three questions: 1) What was the impact of the crisis on other key states in the Middle East, notably Saudi Arabia? 2) What role was being played by the Soviet Union? 3) How would other nations respond in the event of retaliatory action against Iran by the U.S.?

From the U.S. viewpoint, the linchpin of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, which currently supplies the West with about 22% of its oil imports. U.S. security depends, quite literally, on continued oil production by Saudi Arabia--and thus on the staying power of a royal family that faces many of the problems of religious and tribal instability that afflicted the deposed Shah. The Saudis, whose semifeudal society is trying to cope with both Western technology and hordes of unassimilated foreigners, are exceedingly vulnerable to both external and internal threats. That was proved by the recent seizure of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca by a band of religious fundamentalists who were well trained in guerrilla warfare.

The last of the invaders were finally routed from the mosque's catacomb-like basement last week, but not before the incident had shaken the House of Saud to its sandy foundations. Most authorities are now convinced that the group, which numbered between 200 and 300, was trained and armed in Marxist South Yemen, and that the tab for the venture was picked up by Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi. The Saudis also claimed that the young leader of the group, Mohammed al-Quraishi, a theology student who called himself the Muslim Mahdi (Messiah), had been killed in the fighting. A Saudi official declared last week that the objective of the gunmen had been to "terrorize the Muslims, incite sedition and rebel against the leader of the country," King Khalid. This was the first admission by the Saudi government that the motives of the terrorists had been political as well as religious.

In the lengthy struggle with the guerillas, the Saudi forces were at a disadvantage because they were trying to protect the lives of several thousand hostages and to avoid unnecessary damage to Islam's holiest shrine. Nonetheless, the protracted battle clearly demonstrated that the Saudi national guardsmen, supposedly the elite of the country's 56,000-man armed forces, were not as well trained as the guerillas. Western military experts believe that Saudi Arabia's ambitious plan to become a respectable military power will not be realized until the mid-1980s. That may not be soon enough to combat other forces of change already at work in the Middle East.

There was unrest last week in Saudi Arabia's eastern province, center of the oilfields and site of the huge refinery and port of Ras Tanura. The province contains sizable communities of Palestinians (75,000) and Shi'ite Muslims (75,000), and thus is susceptible to outside influence; both Marxist leaflets and cassettes of inflammatory speeches by Khomeini have circulated there in recent weeks. The Saudis are alarmed. As one official told TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis: "I fear that Saudi Arabia is now the target of a massive conspiracy to topple the ruling families of the gulf and place the oilfields within the grasp of new forces that will never see America as a friend."

The Saudis are particularly worried about the stability of the offshore island state of Bahrain, where a Shi'ite majority is ruled uneasily by a Sunni family. To protect their interests on Bahrain, the Saudis are pressing ahead with a plan to build a 19-mile causeway across the Arabian Gulf to the island kingdom. The Saudis, as well as the Bahraini rulers, are alarmed that Iran has reinvoked an old claim to sovereignty over the island.

With the fall of the Shah and the deterioration of his imposing military machine, Iran collapsed as a strategic power capable of protecting the oil routes through the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. Suddenly the Soviets find themselves confronted with targets of opportunity, which could conceivably offset some of their defeats of the past decade in the Middle East. These include their ignominious expulsion from Egypt by Anwar Sadat and their flight from Somalia. But now, with Iran on the verge of falling apart and the whole region trembling, the Soviets have another chance to fulfill their longstanding goal of gaining access to the Persian Gulf for their newly enlarged navy. Says a ranking Egyptian official: "If American power in the Middle East is immobilized, or even if it merely appears to be immobilized, then it can be only a matter of time before revolutionary change engulfs the oilfields, and all the present kings will either be dead or living in exile somewhere in the U.S."

During the embassy siege in Tehran, the Soviets have played an ambiguous role. On the one hand, their Ambassador at the United Nations, Oleg Troyanovsky, both by oratory and vote supported the Security Council resolution demanding the immediate release of the American hostages. On the other hand, Soviet propaganda has done what it could to make mischief. At first the Soviet Farsi-language broadcasts, beamed from Baku into northern Iran, harshly criticized the U.S. These were toned down after Washington protested. But last week, in its harshest volley to date, Pravda accused the U.S. of trying to "blackmail Iran by massing forces on its frontiers" and said that Washington was turning the crisis into "one of the serious international conflicts of the postwar era." The U.S. protested that the Pravda editorial was "deplorable," and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance complained to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin during one of their two meetings last week.

Most U.S. analysts believe the Soviets simply had not settled on a coherent policy to cover the radically changed situation. The Kremlin leaders may delight in the rise of anti-American sentiments in Iran and elsewhere, but they must realize that they do not necessarily reap benefits when the U.S. loses. Moscow's experience has been that even some of its most faithful clients rebel in exasperation. As one top Administration expert puts it: "When the Soviets go into a country in the Middle East, they tend to muck around and not really achieve much improvement in the local way of life."

Beyond that, Khomeini's Islamic revolution over the long term probably poses as great a threat to the Soviet Union, with its huge Muslim population (some 50 million) as it does to U.S. interests. Moscow's best hope lies in the fact that as long as the current state of near anarchy prevails in Iran, there is the chance of a new revolution that would bring the Marxist left to the fore.

The Soviets also need a stable regime in Tehran if Iran is to become a secure source of energy for them in the future. They are rapidly running out of oil of their own and will need to import large amounts of foreign oil beginning in the early 1980s. Under the Shah, the Soviets profited from cheap natural gas pumped from the Iranian fields through the Caucasus. To Moscow's chagrin, the Khomeini regime quickly canceled the deal after it came to power.

Soviet ambivalence does not extend, however, to the possible use of American military power in the area. This is one question on which the Soviets as well as America's closest allies in Europe and the Middle East are agreed: that it would be a devastating mistake for the U.S., whatever the provocation, to punish Khomeini by using American power to destroy Iran's airfields or immobilize its oil production. Even the Saudis, though they are fond of saying that the U.S. should throw its weight around and act more like a superpower, are terrified at the notion that this might happen in their own backyard.

The British view is that a U.S. military strike would set off an anti-American chain reaction of such intensity as to do almost limitless damage to U.S. interests in the Middle East and split the Western alliance more deeply than anything that has happened since the Anglo-French assault on Suez in 1956. Such an action, the British believe, could provoke a savage response throughout the Muslim world, sweeping aside the monarchies that until now have been aligned with the U.S. In addition, of course, the European allies are worried about the possibility of being deprived of the oil on which they and the Japanese largely depend. Says a Whitehall expert: "America, with some belt-tightening, could survive an Arab oil boycott. For Europe, it would be an event of apocalyptic proportions."

Washington's allies appreciate that U.S. prestige has suffered during the Iranian crisis--though less, they believe, than would have been the case if the U.S. had been dealing with a more conventional, and indeed more rational, adversary. The British government has been impressed by Jimmy Carter's handling of the crisis thus far and believes that as the frenzied holy month of Muharram comes to an end, ways will eventually be found to arrange a release of the American hostages.

Short of military action, the U.S. has several other "options we have not exercised," as Carter put it last week, that America's allies might find more tolerable. One such option would be an economic embargo on goods sold to Iran. Another would be a naval blockade of Iran, though this would cut off Iranian oil deliveries to Europe and Japan. Besides economic action, the U.S.--in the view of some strategists--could try to foment more unrest among Iran's angry minorities, including the Kurds and the Baluchis, who seek greater autonomy. The rebellion that broke out last week in Azerbaijan province, home of 5 million ethnic Turks, is an explosive example of what could happen elsewhere in Iran.

In short, these are possibilities for diplomatically acceptable pressures that might prove as effective as military action. The big question is whether, under any circumstances, U.S. interests would be served by the disintegration of Iran. Presumably that depends, in turn, on whether an Islamic Iran, a Marxist Iran or an anarchic Iran rendered impotent by ethnic warfare would, in the long run, turn out to be the greatest threat to the stability of the region.

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