Real War (41 page)

The counsel of trusted allies can be particularly helpful in dealing with those parts of the world they know better than we do. Discussions with Japanese leaders like Nobusuke Kishi, Eisaku Sato, and Masayoshi Ohira gave me insights into Asian issues I could not have gained from Europeans or Americans.
And the French know more about black Africa than we do, or probably ever will; so do the British, the Belgians, and others. The British, as a result of their imperial days, have a vast store of knowledge and understanding about South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and many remote but strategically important places around the world. Some leaders of small nations are intimately familiar with their parts of the world and wise about the whole world. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew is in my view one of the world's premier statesmen, even though his own stage is too small for the full exercise of his talents.

The difference between meeting with friends and meeting with adversaries can best be summarized this way. When you talk to your adversaries you learn
about
them. When you talk to your friends you learn
from
them.

We often tend to overlook the vital importance of maintaining and strengthening our ties with countries that are not major powers, some of which, like Australia and Brazil, because of their vast resources, are destined to be great powers in the future. If I were to advise a young man where to go to seek his fortune in the twenty-first century, I would recommend Brazil or Australia. Brazilians fought courageously side by side with U.S. troops in Italy in World War II, and I witnessed first-hand the bravery and dedication of Australian and New Zealand troops in the South Pacific. They were magnificent allies in war and we should seek their advice and assistance in maintaining the peace.

Canada, our staunch ally to the north, should not be taken for granted simply because we share the longest unguarded border in the world. The Canadians are our best customer, buying 20 percent of our exports. But living next to an industrial giant like the United States can be difficult. Their understandable desire to lessen American control of their business enterprises should be respected and encouraged.

The United States is fortunate to have genuine allies and not satellites. We should treat all of them as such—recognizing that they are as important to us as we are to them and that their judgment on great issues may at times be better than ours.

As long as alliances are needed, maintaining the strength of those alliances will remain one of the President's chief responsibilities. Success or failure will often depend on the President's
personal skills in dealing with allied leaders, and their personal assessment of the caliber of his leadership.

Presidents, particularly in this century, have often used the Oval Office, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, as a “bully pulpit.” The power of the President as moral leader of the free world is immense, but to be effective, a President must use this power with great skill. Most importantly, he must use it only when the stakes are high and worthy of his commitment. The area of human rights is one in which that power, properly used, can be immensely effective. But it must be used selectively, with a discriminating awareness of the many distinctions that exist in the real world.

The tragedy of Iran is a case history of what happens when the United States fails to distinguish between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, between those that provide some human rights and those that deny all, between those who are our staunch allies and friends and those who are our potential enemies.

I first met the Shah in Tehran twenty-seven years ago when I was forty years old and he was only thirty-four. He had just been restored to his throne. He was only reigning, however, not ruling. Power was being ably exercised by General Zahedi, the father of the Shah's last ambassador to the United States. I found the Shah to be intelligent, dignified, quiet, and not too sure of himself. However, he was a good listener, and he demonstrated a profound understanding not only of the problems in his own country but of the world around him as well. Iran's deposed, left-leaning anti-Western Prime Minister Mossadegh had left the Iranian economy in a shambles. Eighty-five percent of the people were illiterate. Women had no political rights whatever. Iran was still in the nineteenth century.

Since then, I have met with the Shah on a number of occasions. We became friends. I saw him grow in power and in wisdom. While I was out of office, during the 1960s, I made four trips to Tehran to see him. By then he had matured into a
world leader of the first rank. What was even more important and exciting, he had made a revolution in Iran. In less than twenty years he had brought Iran into the twentieth century. Before he came to power, well over half of Iran's lands had been held by less than 1 percent of its people. He initiated a massive land-reform program, which included a wholesale divestiture of Crown lands as well as forcing the wealthy landowners and Moslem clergy to give up much of theirs; for Iran's peasants, this meant their first chance ever at owning their own land. He launched an imaginative plan to give Iran's workers a share in the economy, first through profit-sharing, and then by encouraging workers to buy stock in the enterprises they worked for; he even had the government lend them the necessary capital to buy it. To help the rural poor, long one of the most poverty-stricken and disease-ridden populations in the world, he organized young Iranians into a Literacy Corps, a Health Corps, and a Reconstruction and Development Corps—as alternatives to military service—and sent them into the countryside. The number of schools and colleges skyrocketed; the level of illiteracy plummeted; eventually, with the Shah's help and encouragement, more than 40,000 young Iranians were also studying abroad. Enormous strides were made in health care. In what amounted to a revolutionary change in Moslem Iran, women were given full political rights over the bitter opposition of traditional Islamic leaders.

Even before the oil boom that began in 1973, Iran's economy was growing at an impressive rate of 9 percent a year. Unemployment and underemployment nearly vanished. The Shah told me that Britain's Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson once commented that under the Shah's leadership Iran had done more in achieving the goal of socialism—more prosperity equally shared—than had Great Britain. The Shah also developed substantial military strength and was filling the vacuum left by the British when they withdrew from the Persian Gulf area.

He did not provide as much progress in political rights as most Americans would have wished. Iran had no tradition of democracy, and his government still used what by Western standards were harsh measures to keep its political opposition in check. But the people of Iran had made far more progress in
political and human rights than any of their neighbors except Israel. Under the Shah, Iran was advancing internally and was secure externally. In one of the last comprehensive studies of Iran done before the upheavals of 1979, under the auspices of Stanford University's
Hoover Institution, the Shah's rule was rightfully judged to have been one that oversaw “Iran's transition from weakness to strength, from backwardness to progress, from poverty to wealth.”

When I saw him in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in July 1979 I found that the Shah had lost none of the dignity, character, or courage that were his trademarks when he was in power. But he was deeply depressed. Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke of the savage slaughter of his friends and supporters by the new regime. But he was not sorry for himself. He was sorry for his country. The clock had been turned back a hundred years for the Iranian people. Women had lost their rights. The economy was in shambles. Four million people were unemployed. Inflation was running at 40 percent. Iran was no longer the staunch friend of the West holding back the forces, internal and external, that threatened to cut our oil lifeline.

The Shah was hard on himself, admitting that he made his share of mistakes. But he had tried desperately to do his best. He still has great affection and respect for the United States. He finds it difficult, however, to understand the policy of the U.S. government toward him during his ordeal. Despite the economic progress that had been made during his reign and the slow but sure movement toward more democracy, the United States, both privately and publicly, pushed him to do more. He tried to comply. But, as he reflected, he feels now that he may have tried to do too much too soon—both economically and politically. The more the people got, the more they wanted. He had antagonized the Moslem leaders by forcing them to give their lands to the peasants, as he had done with his own lands, and by emancipating women. He had enormously increased the availability of higher education; but then thousands of educated young Iranians—particularly those who had gone to school in the United States—joined his opponents and insisted that he abdicate so that democracy and human rights, American style, could come immediately to Iran.

Instead of rights, they got an Islamic dictatorship.

He found it difficult to understand the attitude of the French. Iran had been a friend to France, and even had contracts to purchase at least $10 billion worth of goods from the French. Yet the French government allowed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to set up what was in effect a government-in-exile outside Paris and to use it as a forum to attack him from abroad and to direct and incite the mobs in the streets at home.

As he sees it now, the crucial mistake the United States made was not in giving him support or failing to give him support, but in being indecisive. One day, he would receive public and private assurances of all-out support. The next day, a story would be leaked to the effect that second-level U.S. emissaries were in contact with his opposition. The day after that, a statement from the White House would indicate that the United States, in the event that the Shah was overthrown, would accept any government the people wanted. A vacillating United States government could not seem to decide whether to support the Shah unequivocally, force him to compromise with his enemies, or leave him free to maneuver without its support.

The Soviets did not vacillate. They beamed inflammatory radio broadcasts to Tehran and other major cities. They supported the small but well-organized Communist Party and other dissident groups. They did not expect to bring Iran into the Soviet camp immediately. But they knew that chaos in Iran was their ally, and if they could generate enough of it, over a long enough period of time, Tehran would cut its Western ties, become neutral at the very least, and perhaps move toward the Soviets. Their strategy worked.

The Shah became a man without a country, hounded from one refuge to another. American diplomatic personnel were taken hostage, and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini thumbed his nose at the U.N. and the rest of the civilized world. While demands that the Shah be forcibly returned to Iran have been refused, the way he was treated by many of his erstwhile friends once he fell from power contrasted shabbily with the way he had stood by them in their own times of need.

The United States and the West have lost a staunch friend in an explosive area of the world where we desperately need friends who will act as a stabilizing force. Countries in the area, such as Saudi Arabia, that have the will to assume that stabilizing
role lack the military power. Those, such as Iraq, that have the power may not seek the same kind of stability. The Soviet threat looms larger. Now the United States and our Western allies must fill the vacuum, or have it filled in a way detrimental to us.

Iran has lost an effective leader. The world has lost one of those leaders who, far from being parochial, have a better understanding of the great forces that move the world than leaders of most major countries. When I saw him in Mexico the Shah gave me, at my request, an hour-long appraisal of developments in the Soviet Union, in China, in India, in the Mideast, in Africa, and in Latin America. His knowledge was encyclopedic and his wisdom was incisive.

There are lessons for the future in this tragic development.

Especially when a key country like Iran is involved, we must never forget that our choice is usually not between the man in power who is our friend and somebody better, but rather between him and someone far worse.

We must not set higher standards of conduct for our friends than for our enemies.

We must not insist on forcing American-style democracy on nations with different backgrounds and different problems. They must move in their own way at their own pace toward the goals that we in the West have taken hundreds of years to achieve.

Above all, in the future we must stand by our friends or we will soon find that we have none. After seeing what happened to the Shah in Iran and how he was treated by the United States after he left Iran, other rulers in countries that are very important to us—such as Saudi Arabia—now wonder if the same thing will happen to them if they come under attack from foreign-supported internal revolutionaries.

As the
Wall Street Journal
observed:

The United States needs friends. And more often than most allies the shah was willing to help, for example in fueling U.S. warships in the midst of the Arab oil embargo. If his reward for this is infamy even in the U.S., how many future rulers will take risks for the U.S. side? We can be sure that the fate of the shah is carefully watched by Prince Fahd controlling the oil taps, King Hussein sitting next to the West Bank and King Hassan holding one side of the straits of Gibraltar.
To the extent the shah is ill-treated by the U.S., it is one more incentive for them to cut the best deal they can with the anti-Americans.

We must grasp the distinction between “totalitarian” regimes, which deny all freedoms, and “authoritarian” regimes, which may severely limit political rights but allow personal liberties—for example, the right to free choice in education, religion, employment, marriage, friends, workplace, and family life, and in some cases the protection of a system of jurisprudence, which while not as advanced as ours, is nevertheless far more meaningful than the purely paper legality of the U.S.S.R. or the Koran's protection in present-day Iran.