State vs. Defense by Stephen Glain

Author:Stephen Glain [Glain, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88898-3
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2011-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

On November 4, 1979, eight months after the popular overthrow of Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, hundreds of students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage. Inspired by radical clerics, they demanded the return for trial of the shah, who was in America undergoing medical treatment; the release of Iran’s overseas assets frozen by Washington since the revolution; and a U.S. apology for its past meddling in Iranian affairs, beginning with the CIA’s 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s freely elected prime minister.* An April 1980 attempt to rescue the sixty hostages failed with the deaths of eight servicemen when two of the mission’s aircraft, evacuating a rendezvous site in a remote strip of Iranian desert, collided in a sandstorm. The 444-day crisis ended only after Carter stepped down.

Just sixteen days after the embassy siege, unrest among religious radicals in Saudi Arabia angry at reforms promoted by King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud climaxed with an assault on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine in Islam. Royal troops cleared the site two weeks later and the surviving insurgents were publicly beheaded, but the incident broke Fahd’s nerve. To pacify conservatives, the king pledged a “Fundamental Law” that enshrined much of the extremists’ agenda. Hairdressing salons were closed, female broadcasters were removed from television broadcasts, and girls were banned from attending schools outside the kingdom. Though largely overlooked in the United States, the Grand Mosque crisis led to Saudi Arabia’s self-imposed exile from modernity, the implications of which would reveal themselves with staggering effect two decades later.

On December 27, having already dispatched two airborne battalions to Afghanistan to repel an Islamist rebellion waged against its erstwhile ally in Kabul, the Soviet Union unleashed a massive invasion of the country. It was widely perceived as a show of contempt in Moscow for détente, which was already under attack in Washington as a one-way street, and as the debut of a new, more provocative USSR with obvious designs on the Persian Gulf. Deciphering the attack as a consequence of American weakness, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s hawkish national security adviser, wrote in his journal: “Had we been tougher sooner, had we drawn the line more clearly … maybe the Soviets would not have engaged in this kind of miscalculation.”

The Soviets indeed miscalculated, though not for want of U.S. resolve. According to declassified Russian documents, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was a purely defensive response to an Islamic insurgency and an imagined CIA plot against its most vulnerable flank.† For Moscow, a stable, nonhostile Afghanistan was a vital cushion against the tremors of a radical Islam radiating from the Middle East. The Soviet empire, after all, numbered among its subjects some 40 million Muslims in the central Asian republics, many of whom had separatist inclinations. The declassified archive makes clear that Moscow had no designs on the Persian Gulf, a misperception that motivated Carter’s militarist claim on the region, which unlike the Nixon Doctrine not only survived but has been greatly embellished upon.

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