The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (18 page)

Carter’s secretary of state Cyrus Vance was the first in the administration to visit Iran. Vance was in the country for a meeting of CENTO, the Central Treaty Organization, to discuss security in the region. While traveling with Vance, an “unidentified spokesperson” for the State Department leaked the information that the United States was pleased with the shah’s human rights efforts and was therefore willing to sell him AWACS aircraft.
⁶
In July, President Carter informed Congress that it was his objective to sell seven AWACS planes to Iran. After months of congressional wrangling and intense debate, the sale was approved. The final package included an additional $1.1 billion in spare parts and instruction.

While the shah’s internal changes were making an impression on Carter, young men and women in Iran were swarming to radical Islam. Iran had never seen anything like this before in its history. University students gathered at Islamic study centers to debate the imams of Shia Islam. Young women clothed themselves in the
chadors
(long black veils) that had been outlawed by the shah. This new, radical Islam exploded on the campus of the University of Tehran in October 1977. A group of students calling for the isolation of women on campus rioted, leaving behind a trial of burned-out buses and broken windows.

While the ultimate aims of different groups opposing the shah varied greatly—some wanted a return to constitutional monarchy, others a socialist/communist government, and the imams and clerics an Islamic republic—Khomeini artfully united these groups against the shah by avoiding the specifics of what would happen beyond toppling the Peacock Throne. As a result, opposition groups that would normally have been contending with one another instead grew more unified—a remarkable feat by Khomeini that accelerated the revolution in Iran and later proved to be a deadly mistake for all but the Islamists.

C
ARTER,
P
AHLAVI, AND
K
HOMEINI

On November 15, 1977, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and Empress Farah flew to the United States for a visit to President Carter and the First Lady in Washington. As the two couples stood on the south lawn of the White House, they were met by hundreds—some say thousands—of Iranian students who had congregated in Lafayette Square. (At that time, the United States boasted an Iranian student population of over sixty thousand.) In a move to control the crowd, Washington police lobbed tear gas canisters into their midst. Unfortunately, the tear gas blew across the White House lawn and into the eyes of the Carters and their visiting dignitaries. With faces streaming with tears, the Carters were forced to cut their greetings short and retreat into the White House.

The two men were to meet again about six weeks later in Tehran. President Carter had been in the Middle East to promote a peace plan between Israel and her neighbors. He and Rosalynn planned a brief visit to Tehran to spend New Year’s Eve with the shah and his wife. Before leaving the States, Carter was presented with a declaration signed by a number of well-known Iranian activists. Rather than present the declaration to Pahlavi, Carter rose to the occasion and toasted the shah with:

With these words, Jimmy Carter reinforced the pro-shah stance that had long been American policy. However, in just months, Iran would be gripped by bloody riots as the shah struggled to quell the radical Islamists and other groups bent on deposing him.

During Ramadan in August 1978, large demonstrations erupted all across Iran. Curfews were imposed in some cities following days of mass rioting. The city of Abadan was the site of a mass murder said to have been staged by Islamic radicals. The doors of a theater hosting an Iranian film were barred while the building was torched; 477 people died in the conflagration. The shah’s attempts to suppress the rioting were rejected by his enemies and supporters alike. His enemies saw it as a weak attempt at appeasement, and his supporters just saw it as weakness, period.

All the while the shah was desperately trying to regain control in Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini had been in Iraq fomenting revolution. In his book
The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution
, Amir Taheri wrote of the charges that Khomeini’s underground network leveled at the shah. He was randomly charged with being a womanizer, a homosexual, a Jewish convert, a drug addict, and a Catholic. He was also labeled the “American shah” and “Israel’s shah.” Even the Empress Farah did not escape Khomeini’s twisted defamation. She was maligned as an adulteress and linked to none other than Jimmy Carter.
⁸

Khomeini’s rhetoric was designed to incite fear in the lower classes in Iran—the have-nots who were forced to do without while witnessing the overindulgence of the upper classes. It trumpeted what was seen as the shah’s collusion with Israel and the United States. The intellectuals, the political vanguard in Iran, initially took a wait-and-see attitude, but it was not long before they joined forces with the oppressed and poverty-stricken who took to the streets in protest of the shah’s policies. With the help of PLO-supplied weapons, trained terrorists, and the murders of Iranian-demonstrators as a means to incite the mobs in the streets, the mayhem spread. No wonder Yasser Arafat was hailed as a friend by Khomeini after he seized control of Iran. (Arafat’s reward was the Israeli embassy in Tehran with a PLO flag flying overhead.)

In an attempt to repress Khomeini’s influence, the shah appealed to the newly elevated president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, to clamp down on the ayatollah’s activities. In an aborted attempt to flee Iraq, Khomeini and his entourage became stranded at the Kuwait border when that country would not grant him entry, and he was refused reentry into Iraq. Finally, the ayatollah was granted permission to return to Baghdad where, on October 6, he was deported to France. Far from halting his interference in Iran, his exile only fired the passions of the Islamic radicals in that country.

Things were only beginning their downward spiral.

What is Islamofascism? Islamofascism is radical Islam combined with undemocratic institutions in such a fashion that it creates a threat to the neighborhood, and in concentric circle fashion. A threat to the extent to which Iran develops a missile envelope that goes outward, and all of a sudden it begins to encapsulate the American-European allies [in the Middle East] and eventually [sets its aims on] the United States itself.
¹

—P
ROFESSOR
R
AYMOND
T
ANTER

We have a phenomenon we are witnessing now that is the emergence of a kind of transnational, global, totalitarian, political Islam—and again I want to make it clear that I’m not, in any way, being critical of Islam as a religion—on the contrary, I think this is a usurpation and highjacking of Islam…whereby one seeks a form of world domination. That is why the phrase “Islamofascism” has been used to characterize the totalitarian and political character of this transnational, radical Islam, which is operating now in the mosques, in the media, in the schools, and training camps.
²

—D
R.
I
RWIN
C
OTLER,
Canadian MP and former minister of justice
and attorney general of Canada

I
n November 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed George Ball, an undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, to study the situation in Iran and make policy recommendations. Ball’s eighteen-page communiqué was strongly critical of Nixon’s Iranian policies. He inferred that the rule of the shah was at an end and encouraged Carter to begin dialogue with Khomeini.

It was also in November that Ambassador William Sullivan telegraphed the White House to report that the shah’s support was rapidly eroding, including that from the military. Sullivan encouraged the administration to adopt a transition policy that would support a takeover by the military and the mullahs. In his report, Sullivan called Khomeini a “Gandhi-like” personage, a moderate, and a centrist who would not personally involve himself in the politics of Iran.
³
James Bill, a leading expert on Iran, proclaimed in a
Newsweek
interview on February 12, 1979, that “Khomeini is not a mad
mujtahid
[high-ranking clergyman]…but a man of impeccable integrity and honesty.”
⁴
Somehow, these learned men totally missed the fact that Khomeini and his fellow militants viewed the revolution as a struggle between an oppressed Iran and the “Great Satan” superpower of the United States.

Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised the president to reject George Ball’s report, although Ball likened the shah’s regime to that of Humpty Dumpty in the sense that it was irreparable. Brzezinski’s counsel was that Carter should send a high-level military liaison to Iran in support of Iran’s armed forces. Carter chose Gen. Robert “Dutch” Huyser, deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command under Alexander Haig. Huyser’s personal interaction with Iranian military leaders for over a decade made him the obvious choice. It was Huyser to whom the shah expressed his concerns that he would alienate President Carter by not moving quickly enough to institute sweeping human rights changes to appease the administration.

In Huyser’s own words, he was charged by President Carter:

In my book
Showdown With Nuclear Iran
, I wrote of a meeting I had with Robert Huyser:

In Huyser’s assessment of the situation in Iran, he opined that the United States should have learned the importance of the “need to stand by one’s friends.”
⁷
He felt that by abandoning the shah, a long-time partner in the region, the United States had “lost a close and sturdy ally which could have provided stability for Western interests in the Persian Gulf.”
⁸
General Huyser said of the Carter administration:

Unfortunately for the United States, these were not all of the ills suffered as a result of electing the Georgian peanut farmer to the presidency. History will ultimately define Carter’s White House years by

• the Soviets invading Afghanistan (Carter’s response was to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow) and the birth of Osama bin Laden’s terror organization;
  
• recession, high inflation, high interest rates (21.5 percent), gas lines, and rationing;
  
• the fall of the shah of Iran, the inception of the Islamic revolution, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism;
  
• the loss of U.S. stature worldwide;
  
• the American hostage crisis that ultimately cost him reelection;
  
• extreme micromanagement;
  
• the alienation of Congress;
  
• the stripping of U.S. missiles in South Korea and Carter’s offer to remove all troops;
  
• reduction of the defense budget by $6 billion;
  
• emasculation of the CIA by cutting 820 intelligence jobs;
  ¹⁰
  
• praise of such heinous dictators as Tito, Ceausescu, Ortega, and, following his presidency, Kim il-Sung of North Korea;
  
• the rise of Marxism in Nicaragua;
  
• the relinquishing of control of the Panama Canal to a dictator. (Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., a front for the Chinese military, now controls entrance and egress points at either end of the canal.)
  

A
N
A
MERICAN
A
LLY
D
EPOSED
T
HROUGH
N
EGLECT

As the defiance against the shah’s regime grew, Iran’s prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar persuaded the monarch and his wife to leave the country. Ostensibly, Bakhtiar’s plan was to try to pour oil on Iran’s troubled waters. He disbanded SAVAK, freed all political prisoners, and allowed the shah’s nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to return to Iran.

In February 1979, Khomeini boarded an Air France flight to return to Tehran. Barely off of the plane in his return, he voiced his opposition to Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar’s government, pledging, “I will kick their teeth in.” He appointed his own competing interim prime minister and defied any to oppose him, stating that such an act would be a “revolt against God.”
¹¹
On March 30 and 31, a popular vote nationwide endorsed the establishment of an Islamic Republic. With the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Khomeini became Supreme Leader (
Vali-e Faqeeh
). On April 1, 1979, the greatest April Fools’ joke of all time was played on the people of Iran: Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed the “first day of God’s government” and established himself as the Grand Ayatollah. He awarded himself the title of “Imam” (the highest religious rank in Shia). The events following that proclamation have had a lasting effect not only on Iran, but on the entire Middle East and the world.

The newly crowned Grand Ayatollah had showed the rest of his Arab brethren how to unify secular, social, and religious groups in their hatred for the shah and the United States, and used it as a political and military tool to overthrow the government. Then, once he was back in Iran, he rewarded those who had supported his revolution with a swiftness and brutality that even SAVAK couldn’t have mustered.

A killing spree followed, targeting former officials of the shah’s government as well as those who had been looking for something other than an Islamic republic with Khomeini as its supreme leader for life. Even fleeing Iran wasn’t enough. In the decade following the Islamic revolution of Iran, at least sixty-three Iranians abroad were killed or wounded, including the man who had allowed Khomeini to return, former prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar. In the months following the coup, dozens of newspapers and magazines opposing Khomeini’s government were shut down, and a cultural revolution began as universities were closed for two years to cleanse them of Western influence. Thousands in the government and military lost their positions because they were seen as too Western-leaning. Groups such as MEK found themselves outsiders and targets of the very government that they had helped to put into power.

C
ARTER
T
RIES TO
M
AKE
F
RIENDS
W
ITH A
V
IPER

The Carter administration scrambled to assure the new regime that the United States would maintain diplomatic ties with Iran. Even as that message was being relayed to the ambassador in Tehran on February 14, the embassy was besieged by a mob of Islamic militants, many wearing the headpieces that identified them as Palestinian fedayeen (those ready to sacrifice their lives). This was further proof of Khomeini’s reach in the Islamic world. Rather than return fire on the intruders, Ambasssador Sullivan surrendered the embassy after a scramble to destroy sensitive electronic devices and classified documents. In the midst of the chaos that followed, Khomeini’s personal representative, Ibrahim Yazdi, arrived in the embassy. Yazdi and another mullah were able to turn the crowd back, thus ensuring the safety of the occupants of the embassy.

At this juncture, Ambassador Sullivan attempted to reassure Khomeini that the United States had accepted the inevitability of the uprising and would not intervene in Iranian affairs. However, another seed sown through Operation Ajax was that the United States embassy was seen as a den of spies gathered to overthrow Iran as it had done in 1953. As a result, extremists saw it as a target that needed clearing out in order to protect the fledgling Islamic republic rather than as a voice to be trusted.

Khomeini could not have defeated the shah of Iran on issues that interested the mullahs alone. Either the Iranian or U.S. armed forces could easily have taken out the rebel forces, but Carter knew little of the effective use of military power—regardless of the fact that he had no will to use it—and viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Thus the United States failed to act on behalf of its longtime ally, the shah. At the same time the Iranian national armed forces chose a stance of neutrality “in order to prevent further disorder and bloodshed,”
¹²
so it did not act, either. With the declaration that the military would remain impartial in the struggle, Khomeini realized his dream: Iran was his, and the process of total Islamization could begin.

The shah of Iran left his country a broken and ailing man, his body wracked by cancer. His first stop was a visit to his good friend Anwar el-Sadat in Egypt. From there he moved briefly to Morocco, then to the Bahamas, and then Mexico. Despite his long association as a key United States ally, the shah was initially denied entry into our country. However, as his cancer—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—grew worse and needed more sophisticated medical treatment, the door finally opened for him to enter the United States on October 22, 1979.

Before departing Mexico City for New York, the shah wrote in his personal journal:

A
N
E
MBASSY
U
NDER
S
IEGE

It was not necessarily the shah’s arrival in New York that sparked what was to later become known as the “Second Revolution.” It was, rather, a string of innocent contacts from well-wishers that would incite the hostile takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran mere weeks later. A videotape of the shah receiving such visitors as Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, several former Iranian officials, and other dignitaries was shown in Iran.

For those in Iran who were paranoid that the shah might attempt to return, this was proof of the duplicity shared by both the shah and Washington. Coupled with reports of counter-revolutionary forces taking up residence in Iraq and in Iran, little else was needed to fuel the fires of another anti-American backlash. They soon began to suspect the United States of plotting to deprive them of the fruits of their victory and the desire to restore American influence in Iran in a new form.
¹⁴

On November 4, 1979, a group of student dissidents who had adopted the moniker “Imam’s Disciples” entered the U.S. embassy in Tehran for the second time, again with little resistance. Although Khomeini denied any knowledge of the impending takeover of the U.S. embassy, it was likely his vitriolic anti-American oratory that gave the mob of some three to five hundred young Iranians the impetus to seize the compound. Khomeini had denounced the U.S. government as the “Great Satan” and “Enemies of Islam.”
¹⁵
Khomeini’s ploy was to cast the United States as evil and himself as the defender of righteousness.