Who Lost Iran?

As oil was beginning to flow at a near normal rate from Iranian wells and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi seemed to be holding fast, Washington policymakers and analysts were heatedly examining why the Carter Administration had been caught by surprise when violent riots swept Iran. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott reports:

All Washington seemed to be playing a thoroughly unedifying game of "Who lost Iran?" For a while last week Foggy Bottom was a morass of recriminations and alibis. Almost everybody agreed that the U.S. should have anticipated the Shah's troubles much sooner--but that somebody else was responsible for the failure to do so. Some State Department officials complained that in Tehran, U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan had suppressed pessimistic, and prophetic, cables from underlings. Others blamed Presidential National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose theory it is that the U.S. must bolster "regional influentials" like Iran. That theory, said the critics, was based on the false assumption that military might plus oil wealth equals political stability and failed to take account of the corruption, mismanagement and religious opposition that undercut the Shah's influence over his own people.

Human rights advocates in the Administration blamed "militarists" and "cold warriors" for turning a blind eye to the Shah's repressive policies. The corridors of the Pentagon reverberated with bitter denunciations of the "softheaded liberals" who had blinded President Carter to what self-avowed hardheads call "the realities of power." But most of the grumbling was aimed at the CIA. White House staffers and congressional aides accused the agency of cranking out sanguine "estimates" of the situation in Iran. Administration sources revealed that Carter had circulated a handwritten memo to his top foreign policy advisers complaining about the poor performance of Iran watchers.

By midweek there was a welcome shift away from finger pointing to genuine selfcriticism. The National Security Council called in some academic experts on Iran, including University of Chicago Professor Marvin Zonis, for a closed-door seminar on the lessons of the past few months. At the CIA there were a number of informal post-mortems on what one participant acknowledged had been a "massive intelligence failure."

The consensus of those meetings was more constructive than the assignment of blame to any one agency or even to any one Administration: ever since the 1960s, when Britain was withdrawing from east of the Suez and the Shah proclaimed himself the guardian of the Persian Gulf, the U.S.Iranian connection has been a textbook case of what diplomats call "clientitis"--the fallacy of mistaking an ally's interests for one's own. The U.S. failed to see that the Shah was weak simply because it had long been a principle of policy, and therefore an article of faith, that the Shah must be strong. Said one Cabinet member last week: "For years our intelligence was dominated by our policy, and our policy was dominated by wishful thinking." In other words, analysts tend to tell policymakers what they want to hear, and policymakers want to hear confirmation of their policies.

U.S. intelligence has suffered from another, even more ironic disadvantage: U.S. officials enjoy such close ties with Iranians in power that they have been reluctant to develop contacts with Iranians in the opposition. Bemoaned one intelligence expert: "I think we probably knew more about Muslim dissidents on the Soviet side of the border than we did about those in Iran." The Shah drastically underestimated the strength of his opposition, and the U.S. followed suit.

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