Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  listening to your explaining so brilliantly to His Majesty the King the difficulties for the U.S. and the particular difficulties that would not be understood by those who do not know the U.S.

  And I would assure Your Excellency that I for one will be instrumental among those who will help you on the path you have marked out. . . .

  While we feel at ease hearing you outline the steps you have embarked upon, I feel inevitably the results will be good. And we appreciate the fact that things cannot be done overnight and have to be done step-by-step, but expeditiously.

  This was a royal imprimatur to our step-by-step approach, a precious vote of confidence. Fahd then pledged to do his utmost to remove obstacles to US–Saudi relations, including the oil embargo. He would visit the United States soon to demonstrate Saudi friendship.

  When I bade him goodbye at the door of the guest house, Omar Saqqaf — also a participant at the royal audience — was already waiting, equally unannounced. He, too, clearly came at the King’s bidding to speak more openly than had been possible at the formal audience. Saqqaf was concerned that I might be discouraged because the King’s subtleties had eluded me. He came straight to the point: “You both were difficult, as far as I can see. But this was among friends. You will see results.” He said that the Saudis appreciated my efforts; the alternative to Sadat was the Soviet protégé Ali Sabri. “If Arab radicals win with Soviet arms,” I said, “you yourself will be threatened.” Saqqaf, having studied Mideast trends all of his life, agreed. He stated in moderate terms the essence of the problem between the Arabs and Israel: “Both sides need to learn that the other doesn’t want to kill them. Now it’s a vicious circle.” Saqqaf, like Fahd, conveyed Saudi eagerness that I continue my mission. This in turn gave the Kingdom a stake in its success. It would place no obstacles in my path; it would almost surely be helpful.

  As the King had already done, Saqqaf told me that Syria was eager to establish contact with me at the highest level; this meant President Hafez Asad. I told him I would contact Asad upon my return to Washington. This I knew would give Saqqaf a chance to communicate with Damascus before I did, enabling him both to smooth my way and to garner some credit for the Kingdom.

  My November trip marked the real end of the Middle East war. It stabilized the cease-fire; it settled the immediate postwar lines. By November 14, Egypt and Israel had worked out a detailed accord at Kilometer 101 for implementing the six-point plan. We had been instrumental in all these negotiations. We were gradually getting into a position where our support was essential for progress while the Soviet capacity for mischief was being systematically reduced. We could now focus on the next step — to assemble the Geneva Conference and to chart the road toward peace. But first we had to move some other pieces on the chessboard of diplomacy.

  * * *

  I. Formal diplomatic relations were restored three months later, on February 28, 1974, shortly after the first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement.

  XIV

  Persian Gulf Interlude

  I LEFT Riyadh for countries that would contribute relatively little to the solution of the immediate crisis in the Middle East but that were important to our conception of a secure and more peaceful world: Iran was key to the balance in the Persian Gulf; Pakistan was a longstanding friend whose independence we had sought to protect; China was essential to the global equilibrium; Japan was a mainstay of our system of alliances. (The Peking and Tokyo visits will be discussed in later chapters.)

  Our first stop was Tehran on November 9, 1973, to meet with America’s ally of thirty-seven years, the Shah of Iran. Time and his people have not treated the Shah of Iran kindly. America and its allies shamed themselves by their later behavior toward him, abandoning a friend not only politically — which can result from the brutal dictates of national interest — but also humanly, when he was adrift without a refuge and required succor. History is written by the victors; in this case they have been cruel.

  There have been many falsehoods about America’s relationship with the Shah. The impression has been created that personal friendships or a predilection for authoritarian rulers shaped American support for the Iranian leader. Reality was more complex; a relationship that thrived under eight American Presidents of both political parties must have resulted from deeper causes than personal idiosyncrasy. America’s friendship with Iran reflected not individual proclivities but geopolitical realities. Iran’s intrinsic importance transcended the personalities of both countries’ leaders. Iran, the state with the longest history of self-rule between Egypt and China, can be the landbridge between the Soviet Union and the Arab Middle East; under the Shah it was a barrier shielding vulnerable Pakistan and Afghanistan from the pressures of both Soviet expansionism and Middle Eastern turbulence. Iran is by far the strongest nation along the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes over 40 percent of the industrial democracies’ imported oil. It is itself capable of producing well over six million barrels of oil a day (its production has been as high as eight million) — an important contribution to world oil supply, the reduction in which after the Shah’s overthrow in 1979 caused a global economic crisis. It requires no complicated theories of a preference for authoritarians or personal seduction to explain why American Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter affirmed the parallelism of interests between the United States and a friendly Iran.

  Nor were the benefits one-sided — as indeed they could not be in a relationship extending over such a long period. Whatever the Shah’s fanatical and misguided successors proclaimed, historically the gravest threat to the independence of Iran has come not from America, eight thousand miles away, but along the traditional invasion routes: from the north, where stood a covetous Soviet Union; from the west, where Iraq sought to undo the borders imposed half a century earlier. A prudent Iranian ruler would consider it safer to rely on a country separated by two continents than on a neighbor that had not accepted true independence anywhere along its frontiers. And the United States considered itself fortunate that the most populous and potentially the strongest nation in the Persian Gulf did not follow the fashionable trend of a non-alignment that grew less and less distinguishable from anti-Americanism.

  The Shah, a shrewd analyst of foreign policy, based Iran’s security not on maneuvering ambiguously among the superpowers but on alliance with America. At the same time, having seen Britain abandon its presence in the Gulf and America become mired in Southeast Asia, he foresaw that Iran would have to rely as well on its own strength. He therefore sought modernization and economic development partly to anchor his own rule in popular support, partly to enable Iran to carry its own share of the defense burden. He realized that outside assistance was more likely in a gross emergency if Iran could by itself resist threats from within the area and could force even the Soviets, if they chose to menace Iran, into a scale of adventure that would leave no doubt about their design.

  Later, when our interests were beyond salvage, it grew fashionable in America to exorcise guilt feelings by blaming Iran’s fate on Nixon’s decision in 1972 to sell advanced weapons to our ally. This critique seems to have united two disparate groups otherwise severely at loggerheads. On the one hand, there were neoconservatives, some recently converted from having opposed all American military commitments abroad, who argued that the “Nixon doctrine” was fundamentally flawed. Since Iran and other threatened countries would never be able to defend themselves, we should have known all along that only the stationing of American forces in the Persian Gulf could establish the requisite security umbrella.1 Others adopted an opposite, more fashionable, rationale, that appealed to liberal clichés about the evil of weapons sales as well as the Shah’s alleged repressiveness. Neither made historical or geographical sense.

  For what Nixon faced in 1972 was not a theory but a reality. Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf at the end of 1971 had been followed in April 1972 by a Friendship Treaty between Iraq and the Soviet Union, which led to the heavy supply
of modern military equipment to that then most radical of Arab states. To keep Iraq from achieving hegemony in the Persian Gulf, we had either to build up American power or to strengthen local forces. America’s eagerness to forget Vietnam, and the later conservative resurgence, have obliterated the mood of that period. That America had to reduce its foreign involvements was the universal wisdom — unchallenged, indeed supported, even by conservatives. Every military budget was slashed by the Congress. The one military base we sought to build in the Indian Ocean, at Diego Garcia, was under constant Congressional attack. Funds for it could be obtained only by calling it a support facility and explicitly forgoing building an airport capable of handling heavy bombers. The stationing of troops there was specifically proscribed — and Diego Garcia is 2,000 miles from the coast of Iran. Creating a credible military capability for the defense of the Persian Gulf by America alone is a task of enormous, perhaps insuperable, practical and logistical difficulty in the best of circumstances — as we are discovering at this writing. Our choice in 1972 was to help Iran arm itself or to permit a perilous vacuum. Nor did the Nixon doctrine ever look to any country to defend itself alone against a superpower; it explicitly offered assistance if a nuclear power — a euphemism for the USSR — attacked an ally willing to defend itself.2 For decades, Iran under the Shah contributed importantly to the stability of the region and to international security. And he — or groups holding his views — might have continued to do so with a wiser policy by our successors.

  A variation of the critique of our policy is that the error was not the decision to arm the Shah but to give him a “blank check” to purchase arms without limit. This is disingenuous; there was no blank check. Nixon’s decision was triggered by the Shah’s request to buy new advanced aircraft, the F-14 or F-15. For a variety of reasons the Pentagon dragged its feet, partly because it preferred to sell some of its obsolescent equipment, partly because of preference for stocking our own inventories — though it did not frontally challenge Nixon’s decision. When Nixon visited Tehran in May 1972, the Shah raised the issue, pointing out that he had the alternative of buying comparable if slightly inferior French planes. Nixon approved in principle the sale of either F-14S or F-15S. A directive to that effect was issued upon his return. The Defense Department replied with a counterproposal: that the Shah delay any decision on the purchase of either aircraft until operational experience was acquired with both aircraft. Whereas the F-14 would be ready in 1973, the F-15 would not be ready until 1976 or 1977 — delaying the decision by four years. In order to put an end to the procrastination, Nixon ordered that the decision on these aircraft purchases and their timing should be left to the government of Iran. In the context, that is the meaning of the oft-quoted directive, which ended with a general obiter dictum that the Pentagon not try to second-guess Iranian decisions on what equipment to select.

  In any event, only one ignorant of our governmental processes or eager to score debating points could argue that this single directive by Nixon survived Watergate and his resignation and drove all the decisions of two subsequent administrations — during which 90 percent of the major arms sales were in fact made. I doubt that Presidents Ford and Carter were even aware of the directive — as I had forgotten it — when they approved later arms purchases that were incomparably larger than those approved under Nixon. Presidents Ford and Carter encouraged the Shah’s military strength for the same reason that Nixon approved the first increment: It was considered in the overwhelming strategic interest of the United States, of Iran, and of the stability of the region. (Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger maintained his own representative in Iran to handle Iranian arms requests.) That the strategic judgment had merit is shown by the fact that after the Shah’s death, revolutionary Iran was attacked by Soviet-armed Iraq (an event inconceivable while the alliance with the United States was still intact) and was saved from catastrophe by the much-vilified American arms; and that the Iranian government holding American hostages would at various times ask for American spare parts as a condition of the hostages’ release.

  In the perspective of a decade, the Shah’s overthrow had little to do with his purchases of military equipment. Indeed, had America played its hand differently when that upheaval started, Iran’s military establishment might have provided a political counterweight to radicalism during the period of the monarchy’s disintegration. The single most important factor in the Shah’s collapse was the policy he learned from the West: the modernization of a feudal, Islamic society, the rapid economic development that absorbed far more of Iran’s revenues than did arms purchases. The Shah took literally the Western academic doctrines according to which the source of political instability was the gap between economic expectation and achievement. And as the “revolution of rising expectations” was met, so the argument went, political stability would follow almost automatically. Western liberal maxims caused the Shah to build a secular, modern state in the reformist mold of Kemal Ataturk and to force-feed industrialization to a population that had barely left the feudal age. For nearly two decades he seemed to be succeeding. Iran’s gross national product rose at the rate of nearly 10 percent a year. Land reform was instituted, public education and women’s rights fostered, workers’ profit-sharing and public health spurred.

  But the result was hardly the political stability foreseen by academic theory. Industrialization uprooted rural populations and drew them into the congested cities where they found themselves morally and psychologically adrift. The increase in the GNP spawned a new social class that, just as in comparable periods of European history, sought a larger role in government. Education produced intellectual ferment and the temptations of radicalism; it was surely hostile to absolute monarchy in the Shah’s style. The modernizing cultural influences from the West, flooding over the broken dam of Iran’s cultural isolation, overwhelmed Iran’s religious and social traditions. The rootless, the newly powerful, the orthodox, and the spiritually dispossessed came together with disparate, often conflicting, motives and swept away the Shah’s rule in an orgy of retribution and vengefulness.

  But retribution for what? To be sure, there was corruption at the Shah’s court, though not unusually so by the standards of the region or even by the standards of the regime that followed. The excesses of the secret police, the dreaded SAVAK, were inexcusable, even allowing for the mass of exaggerations.I Undoubtedly, the Shah lived in an isolation that prevented him from understanding that his economic successes were creating new political realities which could not be dealt with by repression. However, his accumulated failures were almost certainly less severe than the practices of other nations in the Persian Gulf or among the nonaligned that have not been exposed to opprobrium. And nothing that happened can compare with the witch trials, executions, terrorism, and lunacy that followed, reminiscent in bloodiness and judicial hypocrisy of the worst excesses of Robespierre.

  What overthrew the Shah was a coalition of legitimate grievances and an inchoate accumulation of resentments aimed at the very concept of modernity and at the Shah’s role as a moderate world leader. The Shah was despised less for what he did wrong than for what he did right. He was brought down by those who hated reform and the West; who were against absolute rule only if it was based on secular principles. The immediate victors were not enlightened dissidents of liberal democratic persuasion but the most regressive group in Iranian society: the religious ayatollahs who identified human dignity not with freedom and progress but with an ancient moral and religious code. It was, in fact, a declaration of independence directed against all the homogenizing cultural influences of global progress, against the alien doctrines of Communism as well as of the West, a groping for identity and faith in a world perceived as representing rootless corrupting uniformity.

  The valid criticism of our policy in the Seventies is our failure to perceive this almost metaphysical rebellion against modernization. We were blinded not only by the loyalty to the Shah for which we are criticized — and
there are worse indictments to be made of a nation than steadfastness in support of an ally — but also by the Western notions of economic and social progress that are the patent medicine of the very critics who gloated at the Shah’s downfall. I remember saying once to the traveling newsmen as we were leaving Tehran that, on historical precedent, a rate of economic advance like Iran’s was bound to lead to revolution. But it was idle musing, for I added immediately that apparently the momentum of a very rapid rate of growth could overcome the political perils of industrialization. I was wrong. In fact, the rate of modernization accelerated the onset of political upheaval. The surface stability of 1976 was deceptive. Two years after I left office the cauldron exploded; the clumsy response in both Tehran and Washington compounded the tragedy and destroyed the domestic achievements of two decades — as well as the international ties that had served the cause of peace in the Persian Gulf.

  But the problem is deeper than a simple mea culpa. Assuming we had understood the peril, what should the United States have advised? Do we possess a political theory for the transformation of developing countries? Do we know where to strike the balance between authority and freedom, between liberty and anarchy in feudal, religious societies? It is easy to argue that a more rapid liberalization would have saved the Shah; that moves toward parliamentary democracy to broaden political participation would have defused the pressures. Leaving aside the question of whether we had the power to bring this about, it is likely that these “enlightened” nostrums would have speeded up the catastrophe. The challenge to the Shah’s rule came in the main from groups who had no interest in such Western ideas. His truly implacable enemies were the conservative, feudal group deprived of their social privileges; or radical leftists. Neither was remotely interested in parliamentary democracy. Indeed, after the Shah’s overthrow, they crushed the few advocates of democratic institutions before turning to settling their own quarrels by mutual extermination.