Dominic Sandbrook: 30 years on from the Islamic revolution, can diplomacy win out?
[Dominic Sandbrook is the author, most recently, of "White Heat: a History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties".]
On the first day of February 1979, an Air France plane landed at Tehran Airport. It was carrying an elderly Islamic cleric from Iran’s rural hinterland who had not been in his native land for 15 years. As he stepped down from the plane, dressed entirely in black, supported by a French flight officer, a thousand waiting admirers began to chant his name: Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.
As a Mercedes van carried him towards the city centre, the streets were lined with people peering from windows and from rooftops, people packed on to building sites and into flats, people who had been up since dawn to claim a space by the roadside, people hanging off cranes and on to ledges, people screaming and shouting with ecstasy. Journalists estimated that there were perhaps five million people on the streets, the biggest crowd in human history.
Thirty years on, the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the ensuing Iranian Revolution looms as perhaps the central event of the late-twentieth-century world. The 76-year-old preacher was not an obvious candidate to become a historical icon: born to a family of clerics in the obscure, dusty town of Khomein, he had spent much of his life as a teacher and scholar, before being sent into exile in 1964 after denouncing the Shah's regime and his fealty to foreign interests. Yet he became the face of a revolution that toppled a corrupt, repressive monarchy, unleashed a devastating oil shock and global economic crisis, inspired a new brand of religious fundamentalism, and bequeathed an autocratic regime that, for all its manifest corruption, stagnation and brutality, still endures today. It was a turning point in the history of relations between the west and the Middle East, and between the United States and the Islamic world.
Yet there was nothing preordained about the way things worked out; indeed, the largely untold story of the revolution is that if a handful of people had made different choices, then the history of American-Iranian relations might have been much less tortured. And while nobody can expunge the record of three decades of hostility, the advent of a new administration in Washington does offer grounds for hope. Like every other American politician of his generation, Barack Obama has rattled his sabre in the direction of Tehran, but he has also talked of meeting Iranian leaders and even holding direct talks with President Ahmadinejad. Three decades on, it is time to bury the bitter legacy of the revolution and the hostage crisis. Nixon went to Beijing, Reagan to Moscow; is it too fanciful to picture Obama in Tehran?
The last American president to visit the Iranian capital was the ill-fated Jimmy Carter, who toasted the Shah on New Year's Eve 1977 as the world leader with whom he felt most "personal friendship". Iran, Carter said, was "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world". Even then the sentiment seemed dubious; now, it is quoted as a classic example of an American looking at the Middle East and seeing only what he wanted to see, not what was really happening. For it was only ten days after Carter's departure that a state newspaper published an inflammatory attack on the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, provoking the first in a series of demonstrations and clashes that drove the Shah from his country and made Khomeini one of the most familiar and controversial figures on the planet.
Nothing in history is inevitable, but Iran was heading for crisis at the end of the 1970s. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was a corrupt, indecisive man, more weak than wicked, a lover of fine wines and foreign women who dreamed of using his gigantic oil revenues to rebuild the Persian Empire. Elevated to the throne at the age of just 21 after the British ousted his father, he had become increasingly dependent on American aid, especially after he acquiesced, in a CIA-backed coup in 1953, to topple the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. In the aftermath of the 1973 oil shock, he spent more than $12bn on American arms and equipment. He wanted new factories and universities, grand boulevards and gleaming power plants, but the more money he spent, the more prices in the shops of Tehran soared beyond imagining. By the late Seventies, cities were buckling under the weight of thousands of rural peasants in search of his economic miracle. In Tehran's concrete nightmare, the streets were permanently blocked with traffic, overstuffed tower blocks groaned beneath the weight of hundreds of families and the electricity grid regularly broke down for four hours at a time. Amid the squalid shanty towns and the stinking sewers, frustration was inexorably turning to fury.
Looking back, the extraordinary thing is not that Iran slipped towards the last great ideological revolution of modern history, but that the Shah's American sponsors - who had installed one of the biggest CIA projects anywhere in the world, largely to monitor movements across the Soviet border - failed to realise what was happening. The intelligence failure in Iran was no less staggering than those in Vietnam and Iraq; indeed, given Iran's enormous strategic importance, it was perhaps even more unfathomable. At the American embassy - later the centre of the extraordinary hostage drama - only a handful of officials spoke Farsi, and most of their Iranian employees were not Shia Muslims but Armenian Christians. When a new ambassador, William Sullivan, arrived in the summer of 1977, he was struck by their total introversion. Sullivan had served in Laos and the Philippines; but in Iran, he said, "more than in any other country where I had lived and served, I felt myself insulated from and alien to my environment".
To anyone familiar with the histories of Vietnam and Iraq, the parallels are uncanny.And while a French diplomat predicted the Shah's downfall as early as 1976, and the Israelis began advising Jewish citizens to leave Iran in April 1978, the American embassy doggedly insisted that there was plenty of life left in the regime. In August, with Tehran's streets gridlocked with protesters, the CIA reported that Iran was "not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation", while the Agency's ineffectual director, Stansfield Turner, personally assured Jimmy Carter that the Shah was more than capable of suppressing dissent. As late as 28 September, with the regime having passed the point of no return, the Defence InIntelligence Agency reported that "the Shah is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years".
One man who did not agree, however, was the American ambassador, William Sullivan. In retrospect, Sullivan is one of the few characters to emerge from the whole sorry story with any credit. He could be wilful and arrogant, but, in stark contrast to the American officials who have been through Baghdad in recent years, he was no administration yes-man. The little-known story of Sullivan's efforts to change American policy in the crucial first days of the Iranian revolution - the point when things might have turned out differently - should be remembered as one of the great missed opportunities in modern American history.
At the beginning of November 1978, Sullivan sent a long cable to Washington under the ominous title "Thinking the Unthinkable". Jimmy Carter's friend, the Shah, was effectively finished, he said, and it was time for the administration to move on. Sullivan did not question the premise that the Americans should play a key role in the new Iran; its strategic location, vast oil reserves and long history of co-operation with the west made that inevitable. But he urged Carter to reach out to dissident elements in the military and moderate Islamic clerics, including, if need be, the mysterious Imam Khomeini, the most celebrated of the Shah's exiled opponents, then based in Paris. None of Carter's advisers knew anything about Khomeini, but there seemed no reason why the Americans should not befriend him. He might even, Sullivan thought, play the role of a Gandhi, a spiritual leader and voice for unity, in a new Iranian regime.
Whether Sullivan’s idea could have worked is one of the most compelling what-ifs of modern history...
Read entire article at Newstatesman
On the first day of February 1979, an Air France plane landed at Tehran Airport. It was carrying an elderly Islamic cleric from Iran’s rural hinterland who had not been in his native land for 15 years. As he stepped down from the plane, dressed entirely in black, supported by a French flight officer, a thousand waiting admirers began to chant his name: Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.
As a Mercedes van carried him towards the city centre, the streets were lined with people peering from windows and from rooftops, people packed on to building sites and into flats, people who had been up since dawn to claim a space by the roadside, people hanging off cranes and on to ledges, people screaming and shouting with ecstasy. Journalists estimated that there were perhaps five million people on the streets, the biggest crowd in human history.
Thirty years on, the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the ensuing Iranian Revolution looms as perhaps the central event of the late-twentieth-century world. The 76-year-old preacher was not an obvious candidate to become a historical icon: born to a family of clerics in the obscure, dusty town of Khomein, he had spent much of his life as a teacher and scholar, before being sent into exile in 1964 after denouncing the Shah's regime and his fealty to foreign interests. Yet he became the face of a revolution that toppled a corrupt, repressive monarchy, unleashed a devastating oil shock and global economic crisis, inspired a new brand of religious fundamentalism, and bequeathed an autocratic regime that, for all its manifest corruption, stagnation and brutality, still endures today. It was a turning point in the history of relations between the west and the Middle East, and between the United States and the Islamic world.
Yet there was nothing preordained about the way things worked out; indeed, the largely untold story of the revolution is that if a handful of people had made different choices, then the history of American-Iranian relations might have been much less tortured. And while nobody can expunge the record of three decades of hostility, the advent of a new administration in Washington does offer grounds for hope. Like every other American politician of his generation, Barack Obama has rattled his sabre in the direction of Tehran, but he has also talked of meeting Iranian leaders and even holding direct talks with President Ahmadinejad. Three decades on, it is time to bury the bitter legacy of the revolution and the hostage crisis. Nixon went to Beijing, Reagan to Moscow; is it too fanciful to picture Obama in Tehran?
The last American president to visit the Iranian capital was the ill-fated Jimmy Carter, who toasted the Shah on New Year's Eve 1977 as the world leader with whom he felt most "personal friendship". Iran, Carter said, was "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world". Even then the sentiment seemed dubious; now, it is quoted as a classic example of an American looking at the Middle East and seeing only what he wanted to see, not what was really happening. For it was only ten days after Carter's departure that a state newspaper published an inflammatory attack on the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, provoking the first in a series of demonstrations and clashes that drove the Shah from his country and made Khomeini one of the most familiar and controversial figures on the planet.
Nothing in history is inevitable, but Iran was heading for crisis at the end of the 1970s. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was a corrupt, indecisive man, more weak than wicked, a lover of fine wines and foreign women who dreamed of using his gigantic oil revenues to rebuild the Persian Empire. Elevated to the throne at the age of just 21 after the British ousted his father, he had become increasingly dependent on American aid, especially after he acquiesced, in a CIA-backed coup in 1953, to topple the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. In the aftermath of the 1973 oil shock, he spent more than $12bn on American arms and equipment. He wanted new factories and universities, grand boulevards and gleaming power plants, but the more money he spent, the more prices in the shops of Tehran soared beyond imagining. By the late Seventies, cities were buckling under the weight of thousands of rural peasants in search of his economic miracle. In Tehran's concrete nightmare, the streets were permanently blocked with traffic, overstuffed tower blocks groaned beneath the weight of hundreds of families and the electricity grid regularly broke down for four hours at a time. Amid the squalid shanty towns and the stinking sewers, frustration was inexorably turning to fury.
Looking back, the extraordinary thing is not that Iran slipped towards the last great ideological revolution of modern history, but that the Shah's American sponsors - who had installed one of the biggest CIA projects anywhere in the world, largely to monitor movements across the Soviet border - failed to realise what was happening. The intelligence failure in Iran was no less staggering than those in Vietnam and Iraq; indeed, given Iran's enormous strategic importance, it was perhaps even more unfathomable. At the American embassy - later the centre of the extraordinary hostage drama - only a handful of officials spoke Farsi, and most of their Iranian employees were not Shia Muslims but Armenian Christians. When a new ambassador, William Sullivan, arrived in the summer of 1977, he was struck by their total introversion. Sullivan had served in Laos and the Philippines; but in Iran, he said, "more than in any other country where I had lived and served, I felt myself insulated from and alien to my environment".
To anyone familiar with the histories of Vietnam and Iraq, the parallels are uncanny.And while a French diplomat predicted the Shah's downfall as early as 1976, and the Israelis began advising Jewish citizens to leave Iran in April 1978, the American embassy doggedly insisted that there was plenty of life left in the regime. In August, with Tehran's streets gridlocked with protesters, the CIA reported that Iran was "not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation", while the Agency's ineffectual director, Stansfield Turner, personally assured Jimmy Carter that the Shah was more than capable of suppressing dissent. As late as 28 September, with the regime having passed the point of no return, the Defence InIntelligence Agency reported that "the Shah is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years".
One man who did not agree, however, was the American ambassador, William Sullivan. In retrospect, Sullivan is one of the few characters to emerge from the whole sorry story with any credit. He could be wilful and arrogant, but, in stark contrast to the American officials who have been through Baghdad in recent years, he was no administration yes-man. The little-known story of Sullivan's efforts to change American policy in the crucial first days of the Iranian revolution - the point when things might have turned out differently - should be remembered as one of the great missed opportunities in modern American history.
At the beginning of November 1978, Sullivan sent a long cable to Washington under the ominous title "Thinking the Unthinkable". Jimmy Carter's friend, the Shah, was effectively finished, he said, and it was time for the administration to move on. Sullivan did not question the premise that the Americans should play a key role in the new Iran; its strategic location, vast oil reserves and long history of co-operation with the west made that inevitable. But he urged Carter to reach out to dissident elements in the military and moderate Islamic clerics, including, if need be, the mysterious Imam Khomeini, the most celebrated of the Shah's exiled opponents, then based in Paris. None of Carter's advisers knew anything about Khomeini, but there seemed no reason why the Americans should not befriend him. He might even, Sullivan thought, play the role of a Gandhi, a spiritual leader and voice for unity, in a new Iranian regime.
Whether Sullivan’s idea could have worked is one of the most compelling what-ifs of modern history...