Robert Wright Two-Book Bundle: Three Nights in Havana and Our Man in Tehran by Robert A. Wright

Author:Robert A. Wright [Wright, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9781443438773
Google: ZbGKBAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 23016028
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

The biggest riddle of the Iran hostage crisis is why U.S. president Jimmy Carter—the man credited with putting human rights on the U.S. foreign-policy agenda—adopted his predecessors’ policy of massive support for the shah and, in so doing, made himself an object of loathing for the Iranian people.

The answer to this riddle lay in Carter’s inheritance from Richard Nixon. In the wake of Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger decreed a new strategic orientation for the United States, the Nixon Doctrine. The United States could no longer afford to pursue a policy of global anti-communism, they asserted, if this meant confronting insurgency in every corner of the world. Henceforth, the United States would pick its fights. It would disengage from the zero-sum game of containment unless its national interests were directly threatened. This new, downsized Cold War strategy was perfectly suited to the shah, whose aspirations to establish Iran as a regional superpower were limitless.37 But it was a disaster for the U.S. in Iran. “The Nixon years crystallized the U.S. government’s relationship with the shah at the expense of the Iranian nation as a whole,” William Daugherty has explained. “From then until the end of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule, U.S. national security policies in the Middle East were predicated on him and his retention of power.”38

In May 1972, President Nixon visited the shah and agreed to an arms deal that would give Iran almost unlimited access to America’s non-nuclear arsenal. Over the protestations of the Pentagon, Nixon even promised the shah F-15 fighter jets—planes so new that they were not yet in use by the U.S. Air Force. As Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state Cyrus Vance later observed, nobody knew when this deal was inked that within a year the OPEC oil crisis would give the shah the money to commence “a military build-up of abnormal proportions.”39 By 1977, the shah’s generals had placed orders for an astounding $30 billion in new armaments from the United States, making Iran the Americans’ largest weapons export market by far. Ken Taylor’s friend Michael Shenstone visited Iran in February 1978 and could hardly believe what he saw. “I remember going out with Ken to Isfahan,” said Shenstone. “We landed at Isfahan airport, and on the other side of the airport was a huge field—it looked like a square mile—of military helicopters that the shah had bought from the U.S. Helicopters as far as the eye could see. For what? You could see there the conspicuous waste. What was he defending himself against?”40

Many American policy-makers who later tried to figure out what went wrong in Iran highlighted the divergent views of Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, as though President Carter was incapable of reconciling their competing conceptions of America’s strategic interests. Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner, for example, believed that the “Brzezinski–Vance schism…badly hurt the President’s foreign policy.”41 Yet even at the worst moments of the hostage crisis the president never concurred in this view. “Zbig is a little too competitive and incisive,” Carter confided to his diary in February 1979.

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