Learning Lessons from an Obsession

By Roger Rosenblatt

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 America's obsession. Jimmy Carter called it his particular obsession more than once, and the country wholeheartedly 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 15 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 a 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 economic interests. But it was quite another not to see how and why the Shah's modernizing reforms, his agrarian reform in particular, were alien and menacing to an ancient religious 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 the 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

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