The United States and Iran through the Ages
An Interview with Gary Sick
Conducted by Maggie Goodlander
Professor Gary Sick served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sick is the author of All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran and October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. He currently serves as a researcher and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Did advisors and key players in the Ford Administration imagine how dramatically U.S.- Iranian relations would change? In 1974 or 1975 could anyone have predicted that such a large-scale Iranian revolution would occur?
The simple answer is no. No one in the government—even leaders in Iran—were astonished by how it evolved and how the Shah’s who security apparatus collapsed. There is a book called The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran that actually examines all the conflicting theories of revolution that have been applied to Iran and examines them on the basis of a thorough review of what information was available at the time. It demonstrates well that the Iranian revolution was a surprise to everybody; that it didn’t actually become inevitable until very late in the day. There was a tipping point in the fall of 1978, and up until that point it was very possible that the shah would survive the challenge. Once that tipping point passed, it was all downhill for the shah. I think everyone who witnessed it was shocked by how quickly it went and how totally the shah and his very impressive security apparatus were incapable of responding to the challenge.
How does the Iranian Revolution play into the Iranian national narrative? How do moderate Iranians who oppose the current regime view the events of 1979?
In answering that, you have to realize that people’s views change dramatically over time. I think most of the people in Iran did not really expect the Shah to be overthrown or a new revolutionary regime—much less an Islamic-oriented regime—until September 1978. Most people were just going about their business and didn’t anticipate how big this was going to be. As the revolution grew, a great many people from all walks of life—in Iran and outside of Iran—combined to support the idea of the revolution.
People who we might call moderates or centrists saw this as a move towards greater democracy and human rights, and away from the rule of the monarchy. Those people took to the streets and in some cases even risked their lives for the sake of the revolution.
There were some very strange cases. For example, when I was on the National Security Council during that time, a lot of people who had been in Iran came to see me. One afternoon, a member of the Jewish Agency, an organization responsible for protecting Jews who are threatened in parts of the world and helping them escape to Israel—came to see me and said that he had just come from Iran. This was in the fall of 1978. He sat on the sofa in my office and I remember vividly his recounting that he had spoken with the leaders of the Jewish community in Tehran—this was a very large Jewish community comprised of about fifty or sixty thousand Jews—and how the children of Jewish leaders were out marching in the streets for Khomeini. He couldn’t believe it. The rest of the Jewish community outside Iran was very concerned about what this might mean to support fundamentalist Islamic rule. But many young Jewish people in Iran were caught up in the enthusiasm for the revolution.
People’s views about the revolution at that time were remarkable supportive, even in places that you would least expect it. That was certainly not universal. As the revolution over, people who had been proponents of greater democracy, human rights, women’s rights were thrown out of that system and marginalized; people like Yazar Kamanzi, who had promoted the idea of the revolution as a democratic movement, were marginalized. With this, a lot of people’s opinions began to change, and many centrist opinions began to shift against the revolution. There were a lot of committed monarchists who opposed the revolution from the start. A lot of people who were in favor of the revolution had a change of heart and decided that was not what they had in mind at all. Inside Iran, it’s far more complicated. People who lived through the revolution suffered a huge, chaotic breakdown of the government and its operations. They fought a war for eight years, and they have been subjected to far more control of their personal lives. It’s not that there is a revolutionary movement again or a burgeoning counter-revolution movement, but there is huge disillusionment with what the revolution has produced.
The revolution has done some really good things. They brought pipe gas to rural areas that never had it before, there are schools in villages that had never seen schools, there are roads to towns that weren’t there. There is television throughout the country. Going to college is much more feasible for people of all walks of life and all areas of the country. Their healthcare system has actually improved dramatically.
So there are a number of things that the Islamic revolution has achieved, but it’s been at a cost.
There are a lot of people inside Iran—although they’ve seen what revolution looks like and don’t want to go through it again—who are just disillusioned about where they are. A lot of people I think just want to get on with their lives at this stage. That’s the place where the present regime has a real problem. On one hand, it’s not producing great economic benefits for the country, but at the same time it’s cracking down more and more because they see this opposition and apathy growing amidst the Iranian people. The two together have undercut their legitimacy. This is a very complicated situation, but I think the key here is that this is dynamic—attitudes don’t stay fixed in one place.
Even people who were part of the group of students who took over the American embassy—people who were committed to the revolution and to clerical rule—have in many cases changed their views and become outspoken opponents of the regime to the extent of actually getting thrown in jail. So it’s a moving target and the revolution is not something that is black or white or good or bad—it’s something that is evolving and changing over time.
Similarly, how does the Iran Hostage Crisis play into the modern Iranian narrative? Do Iranians remember the hostage-taking with pride, as a moment when Iran brought the most powerful nation in the world to its knees, or it is viewed differently?
At the time, it was a point of pride in Iran. People marched in the streets in favor of it. Though some of it was engineered by the government—people were brought in for demonstrations and the like, but much of it was sincere. Khomeini, who was of course the leader at the time, called it the second Iranian Revolution. In that sense, what he felt was being accomplished and his underlying reason for keeping the crisis going as long he did was that he really wanted to break any kind of relationship with the United States. He saw the U.S.-Iran relationship as one of dependency and he felt that Iran needed to break away from it totally. The hostage crisis provided a political opportunity for him to get his own domestic agenda passed, which he did against growing odds at the time; and secondly, to break off any contacts or sense of dependency on the United States. I think those were shared by a lot of Iranians. Again, lots of Iranians had very different views—there were a lot of Iranians who were appalled and ashamed that a country which called itself civilized would invade a foreign embassy and hold hostages in that way over such a long period of time.
For many Iranians, this was truly unacceptable. Basically today, most Iranians have simply forgotten about it—it’s not a big deal in Iran. It’s not something that people talk about. Though they go through the ritual of remembering the taking of the embassy each year, it is not a significant memory in the Iranian consciousness. I would say the average Iranian hardly ever thinks about it. Though Iran has forgotten about it and put it nearly completely out of their minds, it has never been forgotten in the United States at all and continues to be at the very heart of U.S. policy with regard to Iran. It has posed many problems domestically as America forms its policy toward Iran. It has shaped U.S. attitudes towards Iran so dramatically that if anyone who says a good word about Iran or talks about engaging with Iran is immediately risking the label of being ‘Soft on Terrorism’ or ‘Soft on Iran’ or ‘An Appeaser.’ It has prevented the United States from progressing in a political sense.
If you think about it, the Vietnam War was unfolding at the same time as the Iranian Revolution. More than 50,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam—it was a terrible war with disastrous consequences that affected American politics from one end to another. But today we have full diplomatic relations with Vietnam, even though it is a communist government. We do business with them and American prisoners of war go over there and revisit where they were held captive. In Iran, we have no diplomatic relations at all and there is still deep division over whether we should even talk to the government.
I think this goes back to the hostage crisis; it has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on America’s psyche. It has been and remains slow to heal.
What are the most pressing challenges to a healthy U.S.-Iranian relationship?
There are many, many challenges; first, there are several facts that simply have to be acknowledged. Iran is the largest, most populous, and one of the most economically important countries in terms of its oil and gas reserves in the Persian Gulf. It dominates one entire side of the Persian Gulf and one side of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 60 percent of the world’s exported oil and gas go. It is enormously important.
The United States and Iran disagree with one another about many issues. It’s not just that the United States has been scarred by the hostage crisis, the Iranians have a domestic political problem also because their revolution was oriented around opposition to the United States. This idea of chanting ‘death to America’ at every major public event that Iran holds has soured Iranian domestic politics. Someday, those feelings and emotions will have to be resolved. That doesn’t mean that they are just going to vanish one day, but I think we’re actually seeing a time when both the United States and Iran know they cannot function without one another. The United States cannot have a coherent policy in the Persian Gulf without having contacts with Iran and dealing with Iran on a number of regional issues. Iran cannot have a coherent policy in the region without having some contact or relationship with the United States, which is in fact the most powerful country in the Persian Gulf. We have the largest footprint in the Gulf of any country. Iran can’t ignore that, and we can’t ignore them. We are going to find a way to begin to deal with one another.
How has the Bush Administration fared in its policy toward Iran?
In the last year, the Bush administration has begun making some significant changes in U.S. policy. We were very involved in this latest proposal to Iran that offered a package of benefits that was presented to them by three members of the Security Council and three European powers recently.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed that letter to Iran and the number three diplomat at the State Department was said to continue to participate in the meeting that was held subsequently. That was a major step. The United States will have diplomatic relations with Iran someday. We will begin to deal with some of the issues that separate us and bring us together. We do share a number of fundamental interests in the region – you can either focus entirely on the negative side or you can look at the positive side of things and build on it. It’s going to have to be a mixture of both of those; we can’t forget the negative things that happened with the Iranians, but we can’t ignore the positive side of things. At this stage, I think we are beginning to experiment on both sides with this idea of strengthening relations. This will, no doubt, be a poignant challenge for the next administration.
What do Iranians hope to achieve from nuclearization? Do they seek national security or regional sovereignty? What are their underlying intentions?
Looking back, Iran began seeking nuclear capability under the days of the shah. In fact, I was present in Tehran with President Carter in the last full year of the Shah’s reign when he agreed to sell the Shah seven nuclear reactors. This idea had been approved quite explicitly by the Ford administration years earlier. So, the idea of developing nuclear power capability existed long before the Iranian Revolution, and the United States actually cooperated with that process. Of course then, as now, developing nuclear capability offered you the capacity of building a nuclear weapon. Today, people joke that if Japan wanted to, they could have a nuclear weapon in a long weekend. Other countries like Brazil or Taiwan are much further away from it, but if they decided, they needed to have a nuclear weapon, they could, using what they’ve got, get one rather quickly.
Iran is on its way to being a member of that forty nation club that has the capacity to build a nuclear weapon. Iran’s interests are vast. First, Iran actually does need alternatives to oil and gas. In the long run, their energy and electricity consumption have gone up dramatically. Today, Iran produces about four million barrels of oil per day, and it uses one and a half million barrels a day for domestic uses. It also imports refined products because it doesn’t’ have enough refineries to keep up with the demand for gasoline and diesel.
Turning to nuclear power is not strange. Iran has some of the greatest hydroelectric capabilities. Nuclear is not the only alternative energy source. It is 1.5 billion barrels of oil—we’re talking billions of dollars over a long period of time. Finding alternatives to the fossil fuel consumption in Iran is a very sensible thing to do.
Ultimately, Iran wants to be taken seriously as a regional power. They see that countries who have nuclear capability are taken much more seriously by the rest of the world. Iran wants to be taken seriously in the region and have a voice.
By replacing eliminating the Taliban in Afghanistan and replacing Saddam Hussein with a group of Shia political leaders, the United States has in fact increased Iran’s power and influence in the region. Iran is a much more powerful and influential country than it was five years ago, largelybecause of our actions.
Our misguided policy has affected Iran’s relations with other Arab nations, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—Iran’s overall influence is felt much further away. They are able to play a political game in the Levant area, providing support to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Those elements have in fact increased Iran’s influence and ability to extend its influence. This has grown rapidly in the last five years. Having nuclear power and being able to produce a weapon means a great deal.
In August of 1990 you famously wrote an opinion article in the New York Times raising concerns about the timing of the freeing of hostages in Tehran and Ronald Regan’s presidential campaign. Has any new information come to light in the last two decades that has changed your views on what happened?
That, of course, was hugely controversial. There were a lot of people who were extraordinarily angry with me for making that argument. In terms of new information, I have found evidence that both supports and negates my argument. From my perspective, and I’ve said this in the book, there’s no smoking gun. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, and as far as I’m concerned, it remains an open question. I think that’s where it will remain until we reach a breakthrough of some sort.
A conversation with the Iranians will perhaps shed light on what really happened. Either way—whether it supports or negates, I’d like to know what happened.
http://thepolitic.org/content/view/134/
Labels: Gary Sick, US Iran relations
