US Foreign Policy and the Iranian Revolution

The Cold War Dynamics of Engagement and Strategic Alliance

C. Emery

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137329875
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a fresh perspective on the origins of the confrontation between the US and Iran. It demonstrates that, contrary to the claims of Iran's leaders, there was no instinctive American hostility towards the Revolution, and explains why many assumptions guiding US policy were inappropriate for dealing with the new reality in Iran.

Part I

The Origins of Engagement

1

The Collapse of US Policy 1977–1979

For the first 2 years of the Carter administration, a series of complex diplomatic initiatives with allies and adversaries relegated Iran policy to the periphery of the foreign policy agenda. The SALT II talks and Arab–Israeli peace process were the most complex and time consuming of these negotiations, but talks over the repatriation of the Panama Canal, restoring diplomatic relations with China, and the deployment of a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were all considered more pressing than re-evaluating Iran policy. No specific policy analysis on Iran was commissioned in the first few months of the Carter presidency.¹

This did not mean, however, that the new government in Washington lacked voices calling for a re-appraisal of Iran’s role in American strategic planning. In fact, concerns over US policy in Iran had been raised soon after Carter entered the White House. On 17 February 1977, newly incumbent President Jimmy Carter signed Presidential Review Memorandum 10 (PRM-10), initiating a comprehensive inter-agency review of America’s military force posture and US–Soviet competition in the world. As part of this policy review, Brzezinski told Samuel Huntington, a Harvard political scientist who had recently come into the National Security Council (NSC), ‘Go out and tell us how we are doing in the world vis-à-vis the Soviet Union’. Huntington, assisted by Brzezinski’s military assistant, William Odom, started drafting a report entitled ‘Crisis Confrontations’, which proceeded from a simple question: ‘Where is the most likely point for a US–Soviet confrontation?’² The pair developed a set of criteria that eventually eliminated all countries except one, Iran. In their analysis, the US lacked any credible deterrent to Soviet penetration in the Persian Gulf and had become dangerously reliant on the Shah for containing the Soviet threat.

Their warnings were driven by new assessments about the military balance of power and the realisation that the force structure that had been built to contain or deter the Soviets in the 1950s and 1960s was heavily dependent on nuclear weapons. By the late 1970s, the Soviets had achieved parity in strategic nuclear capabilities, collapsing these early Cold War deterrence strategies. At the same time, global economic power was more diffusely distributed, with key allies increasingly dependent on access to Persian Gulf oil. Britain’s withdrawal ‘East of Suez’ further increased America’s security commitments in the Gulf at the very point that Moscow’s ability to project power into the region appeared to be growing. Finally, after consultations with NSC staff members (in particular, William Quandt, Robert Hunter, Paul Henze, and Gary Sick), Huntington noted the potential for the Soviet Union to exploit domestic problems in Iran.³

These factors led Huntington and Odom to conclude that ‘in the regional areas of East–West competition, the largest strategic stakes and the most fragile situation was in Iran and the Persian Gulf area’.⁴ Brzezinski concurred, and at a Policy Review Committee on 8 July 1977 recommended that the US substantially increase its capability to intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf region on a large scale and at fairly short notice. These conclusions were enshrined in Presidential Directive (PD) 18, signed by Carter on 24 August 1977. As part of this, the Pentagon was ordered to create a Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) for the Gulf region. PD-18 stipulated that the quick projection of US forces in the Gulf must be considered as high a priority as either the European or Asian theatre.

It has since been argued that PRM-10 thus laid the foundations for a new US-led security framework for the Persian Gulf region that would ultimately transcend the Cold War and culminate in the two US-led interventions in Iraq of 1991 and 2003.⁵ In August 1977, however, the impetus for implementing PD-18 stopped outside the NSC. The Pentagon lacked the resources for creating any RDF for the Gulf, having experienced a 38 percent decline in its budget since 1968. It thus essentially ignored the PD-18 instruction to set up an RDF. The State Department also had its own reasons for being resistant to implementing PD-18. It was concerned by the radicalising effect of an increased military presence in the region, and made little effort to prepare US allies for its enactment. Furthermore, many of the senior officials in the State Department doubted that the balance of forces in the region had significantly shifted, or that Soviet behaviour indicated threatening intentions in the Persian Gulf. Odom subsequently claimed that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance ‘did not believe the Soviets had any genuine strategic concept of projecting power into that region’.⁶

PRM-10 had also highlighted a politically sensitive reality; the Western alliance might be unable to hold back Soviets in Europe in the event of a conventional conflict. Given European reluctance to increase defence spending, and tight budget restrictions in the US, Carter’s main advisors considered building a credible defence posture in Europe at the same time as an RDF capability in other regions to be an insurmountable challenge.⁷ Increased Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa added greater validity to some of PRM-10’s analysis regarding superpower competition in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf. For the moment, however, Vance’s argument that tensions in the Third World should not be linked to ongoing negotiations regarding strategic arms limitations prevailed.⁸ Only after the Iranian Revolution would the US begin to seriously start the process of pivoting towards the Gulf, a move accelerated by the hostage crisis and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

As well as forlornly pushing PD-18, Odom and Huntington had spent much of 1977 and 1978 attempting, in Odom’s words, ‘to get people to do some real hardnosed analysis about the internal situation in Iran’.⁹ They were concerned by reports that that Shah was losing confidence in America’s air–land force projection capability and questioned Washington’s political will to deter Soviet ambitions in the Gulf. They broadly sympathised with the Shah’s concerns that two of Carter’s major policy initiatives in 1977, a reduction in global arms transfers and the promotion of human rights, implied a downgrading of US–Iranian relations. The two NSC analysts warned that the Shah was having a dangerous crisis of confidence that could encourage instability in Iran or push Iran towards the Soviet Union.

As a presidential candidate, Carter had presented himself as a political outsider untarnished by the foreign and domestic scandals that had blighted the Nixon–Ford era. He had explicitly distanced his foreign policy approach from Nixon’s realist/globalist version of world order and talked loftily of a new moralistic course in America’s foreign relations and a movement away from outdated Cold War ideologies.¹⁰

Rolling back the central tenets of the Nixon Doctrine was generally understood to mean curbing the supply of sophisticated weaponry to pro-American dictators with dubious human rights records. Unsurprisingly, the Shah, an authoritarian leader who even the US embassy in Tehran admitted ruled his country with an iron fist, watched Carter’s election with a high degree of trepidation.

The related issues of arms sales and human rights had become the defining political issues for US policy in Iran. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party had long assailed the Nixon–Ford administrations for excusing the Shah’s increasingly repressive tendencies. Such criticism had been countered by the Shah’s status as the darling of the Republican establishment, the very model of a loyal and stable ally. By 1975, however, this reputation was in jeopardy.¹¹ The cause was his abrupt decision to pull out of a joint US–Israeli–Iranian covert operation to support Kurdish separatists in Iraq. The aim of the mission had been to hurt the most radical Arab regime in the region, damage Soviet prestige in the region, and protect Israel by tying down Iraq’s Soviet-armed military on its eastern border. For all three reasons it was hugely popular amongst the small but vocal neoconservative movement that was burgeoning around Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson. When in March 1975 the Shah unilaterally abandoned the Kurdish operation, closing the border and standing by as the trapped Kurds were massacred by Iraqi forces, Jackson and allies launched scathing attacks on his reliability as an ally.

There were in fact very sensible reasons for the Shah to end the Kurdish operation. In early 1975, Iraq had offered a favourable settlement to a long-running border dispute if Iran agreed to end its support for the Kurds. According to Andrew Warne, the Shah had already come to the conclusion that escalating a conflict with Iraq or provoking its benefactor, the Soviet Union, was contrary to Iranian interest. The Kurds had simply outlived their usefulness.¹² For having the temerity of pursuing a foreign policy focussed exclusively on Iran’s national interest, Republicans now criticised the Shah’s support for high oil prices and issued demands for the White House to curb arms sales and revisit plans to sell nuclear reactors to Iran. Fewer Republicans were now willing to defend the Shah’s human rights record.

Increased Congressional criticism on the substance of US–Iranian relations dovetailed with a wider struggle in executive–legislative relations over the control of US foreign policy. Since the late 1960s, lawmakers, academics, and pressure groups had argued that the US presidency had exceeded constitutional limits on executive power and was dangerously out of control.¹³ Congress was able to tap into public disillusionment with American foreign policy and a public perception that excessive executive power was at the root of America’s failure in Vietnam. In the mid-1970s, a series of scandals emanating from the White House, ranging from Watergate to illegal CIA covert operations at home and abroad, further discredited the presidency. Congress began reasserting its influence on America’s foreign relations, striking a major victory in 1976 by establishing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Congress could now effectively scrutinise CIA activities, although the White House would find creative ways to circumvent this oversight. In the same year, Congress took aim at another tool of executive power lacking legislative scrutiny. In 1976, Congress radically overhauled the statutory framework governing arms exports with the passage of the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act. From this point, arms contracts exceeding $25 million became subject to a stringent Congressional review process.

Many Congressmen saw the ‘blank cheque’ policy in Iran as summing up everything that was bad about the indiscriminate use of arms sales as a foreign policy tool. In July 1976, Senator Hubert Humphrey’s Foreign Affairs Assistance Subcommittee characterised the foreign military sales programme in Iran as ‘out of control’. By the start of the Carter administration, a chorus of public, media, and Congressional disapproval surrounded arms sales to Iran. Harold Brown explicitly acknowledged by commissioning a report on the state of the programme in April 1977. It generally noted improvements in how the programme was administered, but cautioned that ‘Congress has interjected itself into the arms sales policy framework and does not appear likely to lose interest in the subject’.¹⁴

President Carter would thus have to expend significantly more political capital on the Hill than his predecessors if he wanted to force through large and controversial arms sales to Iran. His willingness to do so would represent the first major test of his commitment to rolling back the Nixon Doctrine.

Business as usual: The arms sales programme to Iran

Whilst there had been little or no high-level discussion of Iran policy in the hectic few months of the Carter presidency, PRM-10 and PD-18 had in theory acknowledged concerns regarding America’s ability to project power into the Persian Gulf. The ‘realist’ analysis Odom and Huntington were developing in Washington was driven by changing assessments of the Soviet threat and concerns that regional allies may lose faith in America’s ability to protect them. US diplomats at the embassy in Tehran were also concerned by America’s ailing security guarantee. The difference was that they used this concern to push back against any attempt to downgrade bilateral relations or pressure the Shah on human rights. The ambitious strategic pivot advocated by the NSC would require a major bureaucratic battle and a huge relocation of financial and logistic resources. In contrast, the US embassy in Tehran used the same analysis to argue against any major shift on Iran policy.

The embassy’s first major report on the state of the US–Iranian relations, delivered 2 months after Carter’s inauguration, was a classic example of such reporting. It offered policy suggestions based on the assessment that the Shah believed the America’s security guarantee was no longer commensurate to the rising Soviet threat. Whether the Shah’s perception was correct was largely irrelevant to their presentation of an indispensable ally unsure whether Washington was committed to defending him. The report’s author, Jack Miklos, had served as Iran country director at the State Department from 1969 to 1974 before moving to Tehran to serve as chargé d’affaires. Miklos moved amongst Iran’s political elite and, like most non-Persian-speaking Americans in Iran, remained largely insulated from the lives of ordinary Iranians. He maintained an unshakable belief in the strength of Pahlavi regime matched only by his conviction that Iran’s political system should not be held to Western standards of human rights. His report began by summing up a basic Cold War objective in Iran unchanged since the Truman administration. US policy was ‘to maintain a stable, independent, non-communist and cooperative Iran which has the strength and will to resist Soviet aggressiveness, whether direct and indirect, and to continue its role for stability in the Persian Gulf, Middle East, and South Asia’.¹⁵

Miklos applauded the Shah’s responsiveness to Washington’s request for Iran to play a more prominent role in both regional and international arenas. He cited Iran’s participation in the four-power commission in Vietnam and the aid and military equipment it had provided to South Vietnam. More recently, he noted, Iran had sent a military contingent to supervise peace on the Golan Heights and provided financial assistance to Egypt and other needy countries allied to the US. Miklos then praised the Shah for using his growing military power to assist Oman in putting down a communist insurgency, fulfilling the more muscular role of regional policeman assigned to him by Nixon. No mention was made of his abandonment of the Kurds 2 years earlier.

If the Shah held his side of the US–Iranian strategic bargain, Miklos warned that the credibility of America’s security guarantee was a serious concern for Iran’s leaders. The Shah was said to believe America’s ageing security commitment ‘no longer credible’, and had decided he faced little alternative other than to embark upon a large-scale and expensive military modernisation programme aimed at attaining military self-sufficiency. It was thus eroding American power that now brought him into conflict with Carter’s apparent desire to roll back on arms sales as a tool of foreign policy.

Miklos’ view proceeded from an orthodox realist analysis. Iran’s military policies were measured ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Origins of Engagement
• Part II: The Dynamics of Engagement
• Part III: Engagement Held Hostage
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Interviews
• List of Documents
• Bibliography
• Index