Jimmy Carter Sold out Iran

As if a light were switched off, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, portrayed for 20 years as a progressive modern ruler by Islamic standards, was suddenly, in 1977-1978, turned into this foaming at the mouth monster by the international left media. Soon after becoming President in 1977, Jimmy Carter launched a deliberate campaign to undermine the Shah. The Soviets and their left-wing apparatchiks would coordinate with Carter by smearing the Shah in a campaign of lies meant to topple his throne. The result would be the establishment of a Marxist/Islamic state in Iran headed by the tyrannical Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Iranian revolution, besides enthroning one of the world's most oppressive regimes, would greatly contribute to the creation of the Marxist/Islamic terror network challenging the free world today.

At the time, a senior Iranian diplomat in Washington observed, "President Carter betrayed the Shah and helped create the vacuum that will soon be filled by Soviet-trained agents and religious fanatics who hate America." Under the guise of promoting" human rights," Carter made demands on the Shah while blackmailing him with the threat that if the demands weren't fulfilled, vital military aid and training would be withheld. This strange policy, carried out against a staunch, 20 year Middle East ally, was a repeat of similar policies applied in the past by US governments to other allies such as pre Mao China and pre Castro Cuba.

Carter started by pressuring the Shah to release "political prisoners" including known terrorists and to put an end to military tribunals. The newly released terrorists would be tried under civil jurisdiction with the Marxist/Islamists using these trials as a platform for agitation and propaganda. This is a standard tactic of the left then and now. The free world operates at a distinct dis-advantage to Marxist and Islamic nations in this regard as in those countries, trials are staged to "show" the political faith of the ruling elite. Fair trials, an independent judiciary, and a search for justice is considered to be a western bourgeois prejudice.

Carter pressured Iran to allow for "free assembly" which meant that groups would be able to meet and agitate for the overthrow of the government. It goes without saying that such rights didn't exist in any Marxist or Islamic nation. The planned and predictable result of these policies was an escalation of opposition to the Shah, which would be viewed by his enemies as a weakness. A well-situated internal apparatus in Iran receiving its marching orders from the Kremlin egged on this growing opposition.

By the fall of 1977, university students, working in tandem with a Shi'ite clergy that had long opposed the Shah's modernizing policies, began a well coordinated and financed series of street demonstrations supported by a media campaign reminiscent of the 1947-1948 campaign against China's Chiang Ki Shek in favor of the "agrarian reformer" Mao tse Tung. At this point the Shah was unable to check the demonstrators, who were instigating violence as a means of inflaming the situation and providing their media stooges with atrocity propaganda. Rumors were circulating amongst Iranians that the CIA under the orders of President Carter organized these demonstrations.

In November 1977, the Shah and his Empress, Farah Diba, visited the White House where they were met with hostility. They were greeted by nearly 4,000 Marxist-led Iranian students, many wearing masks, waving clubs, and carrying banners festooned with the names of Iranian terrorist organizations. The rioters were allowed within 100 feet of the White House where they attacked other Iranians and Americans gathered to welcome the Shah. Only 15 were arrested and quickly released. Inside the White House, Carter pressured the Shah to implement even more radical changes. Meanwhile, the Soviets were mobilizing a campaign of propaganda, espionage, sabotage, and terror in Iran. The Shah was being squeezed on two sides.

In April 1978, Moscow would instigate a bloody coup in Afghanistan and install the communist puppet Nur Mohammad Taraki. Taraki would proceed to call for a "jihad" against the "Ikhwanu Shayateen" which translates into "brothers of devils," a label applied to opponents of the new red regime in Kabul and to the Iranian government. Subversives and Soviet-trained agents swarmed across the long Afghanistan/Iran border to infiltrate Shi'ite mosques and other Iranian institutions. By November 1978, there was an estimated 500,000 Soviet backed Afghanis in Iran where, among other activities, they set up training camps for terrorists.

Khomeini, a 78-year-old Shi'ite cleric whose brother had been imprisoned as a result of activities relating to his Iranian Communist party affiliations, and who had spent 15 years in exile in Ba'th Socialist Iraq, was poised to return. In exile, Khomeini spoke of the creation of a revolutionary Islamic republic, which would be anti-Western, socialist, and with total power in the hands of an ayatollah. In his efforts to violently overthrow the government of Iran, Khomeini received the full support of the Soviets.

Nureddin Klanuri, head of the Iranian Communist Tudeh Party, in exile in East Berlin, stated, "The Tudeh Party approves Ayatollah Khomeini's initiative in creating the Islamic Revolutionary Council. The ayatollah's program coincides with that of the Tudeh Party." Khomeini's closest advisor, Sadegh Ghothzadeh, was well known as a revolutionary with close links to communist intelligence. In January 1998, Pravda, the official Soviet organ, officially endorsed the Khomeini revolution.

American leaders were also supporting Khomeini. After the Pravda endorsement, Ramsey Clark, who served as Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, held a press conference where he reported on a trip to Iran and a Paris visit with Khomeini. He urged the US government to take no action to help the Shah so that Iran "could determine it's own fate." Clark played a behind the scenes role influencing members of Congress to not get involved in the crisis. Perhaps UN Ambassador Andrew Young best expressed the thinking of the left at the time when he stated that, if successful, Khomeini would "eventually be hailed as a saint."

Khomeini was allowed to seize power in Iran and, as a result, we are now reaping the harvest of anti-American fanaticism and extremism. Khomeini unleashed the hybrid of Islam and Marxism that has spawned suicide bombers and hijackers. President Jimmy Carter, and the extremists in his administration are to blame and should be held accountable.

nation's morale goes up and down. today, Iran's morale is very much on the up. The downs after the turmoil of the 1950's and early 1960's seem to be many more years in the past than they in fact are. The self-assurance of the place shows in many small ways. "The last man on earth is more important than the first man on the moon," Iran's prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, told the Washington National Press club when asked what he thought of Frank Borman and company flying round the moon. To such a house-proud audience it was the kind of risque remark which no Iranian would have thought of venturing a few years ago. The Shah himself does not hide his satisfaction ; he likes to point out, for instance, that doubts expressed in The Economist four years ago about the dangers to Iran's balance of payments have not materialised. "In the short space of six years," wrote the American journalist Alfred Friendly, formerly a vigorous critic of the Shah, in the Washington Post last year, "the Shah has made his promises good, his opposition disappear and his detractors look silly. Iran has its problems, to be sure, deep, difficult and dangerous. But they are problems which develop from success." Most Iranians positively relish the discomfort of a western observer eating humble pie. Like the resurgent Japanese, though in a more humorous way, Iran's intelligentsia feels vindicated at last by its success. In the Middle East only Israel and Lebanon have an educated class to match Iran's. In Iran this class has for generations either been idle or up to its ears in action fighting. Or in many cases its nembers have disappeared abroad in forced or voluntary exile. There was no wider or more vocal network of disgruntled emigres than the "exile" Iranians. Four or five years ago some of these began to trickle back. They more than rickle back today, and, talent being scarce in the developing world, they are run off their feet when they arrive. Ministers and several people immediately below ministerial rank have formerly been the inside of Persian jails, a number of them as members of the banned Tudeh (communist) party. Other ex-members of this party are now captains of Iran's burgeoning private industries. In a recent paper Mr. Shaul Bakhash, a most thoughtful Iranian critic, points out that this conversion has taken place partly because the price of opposition (was made) increasingly steep." However, says Bakhash: "an extensive programme of government sponsored reform --at the heart of which lies land reform -- made the government far more acceptable than previously to the younger generation. Men who in the 1950's absolutely refused to be identified with the administration, suffer no pangs of conscience in being part of it today. . . The process of change has infused the whole government machinery with an energy and elan, a self confidence in problem-solving that it has not witnessed in years." Using modern men in government began to work only under the late Hassan Ali Mansur, member of an old family whose brief as prime minister in 1963 seems to have been to form a party from the young and the bright. One man Mansur took into government from the national oil company was Amir Abbas Hoveyda, seen at left. When Mansur was assassinated in December, 1965, Hoveyda became caretaker prime minister. Five years later he is still prime minister. Success and more particularly, a desire for calm after so many years of upheaval have contributed to his unprecedented survival. Hoveyda has turned out to be good at the flim-flam of politics, good at diatribes in the Majlis, good at kissing babies. He exhibits almost always a pugnacious bonhomie. But when his political number comes up, as it will, his real achievement will be the train of brainy young men whom he has introduced to the Shah and who are now part of the administration. Several of the youngest Hoveyda men have gone to bigger things outside the central govrnment -- rnayor of Teheran, governor of the ports, big private enterprise jobs. The ablest being perhaps, Hushang Ansary, Hoveyda found making expatriate millions in Japan. In quick succession Ansary became ambassador to Pakistan, minister of Information, anibassador to Washington, and now minister of the Economy. Many of the brightest younger members of government have come back from abroad simply because they have heard what is going on in Iran, and will stay there, regardless of politics, so long as they can find the right people to work for. Both the World Bank and the IMF have been stripped of their cadre of Persians in order to people the economic branches of Iran's government. One of these young men advises Ansary. Another recently returned to be deputy Governor of Iran's Central Bank. The three men in direct line of command under the chief of the important Plan Organisation are all on extended leave of absence from the IMF and World Bank, and so is the dean of the new faculty of economics at the University of Teheran. The problem in an economy doubling inside a decade is that there are not enough men of talent to go round. Moreover, the government has to cornpete on unequal terms with the private sector. For every young technocrat in government several now join business. Some of them have already become millionaires. More substantial in a new class of urban rich, and haute bourgeoisie of mounting size, are such traders turned industrialists as the Khayyamis and the Akhavans (motor cars), brothers like the Reza'is (steel and copper), old yet entirely professional families like the Kouros's rnd the numerous Farmanfarmaians. The foreign ministry's recruiting problems, once the easiest, are now enormous. In the economic ministries and in the prime minister's office a host of young people will go when their booses go, not out of political pique, but because most of them, having done their stint in government, now understandably covet the rewards of the private sector. So the government has doubled its effort, originally undertaken for political reasons, to persuade Iran's 4o,ooo or more students working abroad to return as soon as their degrees are won. Many of these are almost permanent students, Trofimovs from the Cherry Orchard, and the pick of this crop has been taken already. Left behind is a hard core of opposition at which the government can only nibble, notably the well organised and well sustained but steadily decreasing group in west Germany which dogs the Shah when he travels through northern Europe, peppering him with absurdly rnis- informed propaganda. Missions led by Ministers and other luminaries constantly seek out Persian students in Europe and America. When abroad the Shah gives speeches and audiences urging them to return. Pardons and jobs are shelled out to,those who need them. Prodigals who return spread the word to the friends they have left abroad.

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