Nation: Who Will Get Blamed for What?

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The future controversy on past policy toward Tehran

Even as President Carter struggled to resolve the Iranian crisis, his defenders and critics last week began what almost surely will become a protracted controversy over the events that led to the takeover of the embassy in Tehran—and what the U.S. might have done, if anything, to prevent it. Some experts on Iran in the academic world believe the first mistake of the Carter Administration was failing to understand the basic nature of the movement that swept the Ayatullah Khomeini into power. Following the policies of preceding administrations, Carter originally supported the Shah, seeing him as a stabilizing ally in the Persian Gulf region, and not realizing how widely he was hated by his subjects. Carter first thought the Shah could suppress the mounting demonstrations, then, when events got totally out of hand, abandoned him to his fate. The Shah has told friends, bitterly, that right to the end he expected more assistance from the U.S. Says Richard Falk, professor of international law and practice at Princeton University: "We really didn't appreciate what was happening in Iran, and we didn't appreciate the degree to which Iranians regarded the Shah as our contribution to their suffering."

Once the Ayatullah had come into power, the Carter Administration adopted what it felt was a moderate and cooperative course of action toward the new regime, maintaining food sales and supplying spare parts for military equipment. There are those who fault this policy not only with the traditionalist argument that we were kowtowing to rebels, but also on the ground that we were again misunderstanding Iranian society. Says Sepehr Zabith, a research associate at the Institutes of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley: "Each of the measures of accommodation that the U.S. took was viewed in Iran as a sign of weakness and of desperation. They served to embolden Khomeini, and the net result was that Khomeini was reinforced in his belief that he could impose his terms on the U.S."

That seems too stern a view, however. After years of more or less ignoring the oppressions of the Shah, the U.S. had good reasons—including the familiar strategic and economic ones—to develop friendly relations with the new Iranian regime.

Perhaps the trickiest question about U.S. policy is whether or not the Administration should have allowed the Shah to come to New York, the act that brought about the seizure of the American embassy. This was a serious Carter mistake, believes Richard Bulliet, a member of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, who thinks the decision reinforced Iranians' fears that the U.S. planned to restore the Shah to power, as it did in 1953. Says he: "Those currently running Iran could only interpret the decision as hostile. The admission of the Shah to this country sort of confirms the notion that somehow, in the backs of the minds of people in influential places, there is the idea that the revolution is temporary, that nonreligious types are going to emerge, and that the Shah is an old friend and we should treat him well. This is very offensive to the revolutionary government because it looks as if we were conspiring to put the Shah back on the throne."