A fortnight after the meeting, on Christmas Eve 1979, Soviet forces began to stream over the border as part of Operation Storm 333. This was not an invasion, Ustinov declared to army commanders leading troops across the border, in a line that was to be repeated again and again by Soviet diplomats and politicians over the course of the next decade; rather, it was an attempt to restore stability at a time when the ‘political and military situation in the Middle East’ was in turmoil, and after requests by the government in Kabul ‘to provide international help to the friendly Afghan people’.47
From Washington’s point of view, the timing could not have been worse. For all the Soviet fears about US expansion into Afghanistan, the full extent of American weakness across the region was becoming painfully clear. After flying out of Teheran at the start of 1979, the Shah had moved from one country to another in search of a permanent home. By the autumn, President Carter was being encouraged by senior members of his administration to allow a dying man who had been a staunch friend to the US into the country to receive medical treatment. As this was being discussed, Khomeini’s new Foreign Minister told the President’s advisers point-blank that ‘you are opening Pandora’s box with this’.48 White House records show that Carter was aware of how high the stakes were if he allowed the Shah entry to the US. ‘What are you guys going to advise me to do if [the Iranians] overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?’ the President asked. He did not receive a reply.49
On 4 November, two weeks after the Shah had checked into the Cornell Medical Center in New York, militant Iranian students overwhelmed the security guards at the US embassy in Teheran and seized control of the embassy compound, taking around sixty diplomatic staff hostage. Although the initial aim seems to have been to make a short, sharp protest about the decision to admit the Shah to the US, things escalated rapidly.50 On 5 November, Ayatollah Khomeini commented on the situation at the embassy. He did not mince his words, let alone appeal for calm. The embassies of Teheran, he declared, were breeding grounds for ‘underground plots [that] are being hatched’ to bring down the Islamic Republic of Iran. The chief orchestrator of these plots, he went on, was ‘the great Satan America’. With that, he called on the US to hand over ‘the traitor’ so that he could face justice.51
Initial US efforts to defuse the situation ranged from the inept to the shambolic. One envoy, carrying a personal appeal from the President to Khomeini, was flatly denied an audience with the ayatollah and was unable to deliver his letter; it emerged that another envoy had been authorised to open discussions with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), whose members had been behind terror attacks such as the massacre at the Munich Olympic Games and whose primary aim was the establishment of a Palestinian state at the expense of Israel. Even more embarrassing than the disclosure that the US was trying to use the PLO as a conduit to reach the Iranians was the news that the Iranians themselves refused to let the PLO play a mediating role in the crisis.52
President Carter then resolved to take more decisive action that would not only unlock the hostage situation but would also serve as a statement of intent that although the Shah had fallen, the US was a force to be reckoned with in the centre of Asia. On 12 November 1979, in an attempt to put Khomeini’s regime under financial pressure, he announced an embargo on Iranian oil. ‘No one’, he declared as he announced the ban on imports, ‘should underestimate the resolve of the American government and the American people.’53 Two days later, the President went further still, issuing an executive order to freeze $12 billion of Iran’s assets. This decisive action played well domestically, with Carter experiencing what was described as the largest increase in presidential popularity since the Gallup poll was invented.54
The sabre-rattling had little effect, however. The oil embargo was dismissed by Teheran as irrelevant. ‘The world needs oil,’ said Ayatollah Khomeini in a speech a week after Carter’s announcement. ‘The world does not need America. Other countries will turn to those of us who have oil, and not to you.’55 The embargo was anyway not easy to enforce from a logistical point of view given that Iranian oil often passed through third parties and could still reach the US. That the boycott put pressure on supply inevitably threatened to drive oil prices higher – which played into the hands of the Iranian regime by boosting its revenues.56
The seizure of assets spooked many in the Arab-speaking world, who were concerned about the precedent set by US action. The stand-off exacerbated political disagreements with countries such as Saudi Arabia, which did not see eye to eye with Washington over policy in the Middle East, particularly in relation to Israel.57 As a CIA report prepared a few weeks after the introduction of the embargo concluded, ‘our current economic pressures are unlikely to have any positive effect; [in fact] their impact may be negative’.58
Moreover, many western countries were reluctant to be drawn into the escalation of a crisis with Teheran. ‘It soon became apparent’, Carter wrote, ‘that even our closest allies in Europe were not going to expose themselves to potential oil boycotts or endanger their diplomatic arrangements for the sake of American hostages.’ The only way to concentrate minds was to make ‘the direct threat of further moves by the United States’.59 Carter’s Secretary of Defense, Cyrus Vance, was therefore sent on a tour of western Europe with the message that if sanctions were not imposed on Iran, the US would take unilateral action, including mining the Persian Gulf if necessary.60 This would naturally have an impact on oil prices – and therefore on developed economies. In order to put pressure on Teheran, Washington had to threaten its own supporters.
It was against this tense backdrop of desperate, counter-productive and badly thought through measures to force a settlement in Iran that news was received that Soviet columns were marching south into Afghanistan. US policymakers were taken completely by surprise. Four days before the invasion, President Carter and his advisers had been contemplating plans to seize Iran’s offshore islands, and to look at military and covert operations to overthrow Khomeini. An ominous situation had turned critical.61
Already facing a disastrous hostage situation, the US was now forced to contemplate a major extension of Soviet power in this region. Moreover, Washington’s views mirrored those of Moscow – namely that a move on Afghanistan was likely to be a prelude for the further expansion of one superpower at the expense of the other. Soviet sights were likely to be set next on Iran, where trouble was bound to be stirred up by agitators, as one intelligence report suggested in early 1980. The President should therefore start considering the circumstances under which ‘we [would] be prepared to put US forces into Iran’.62
Carter ramped up the rhetoric in his State of the Union address on 23 January 1980. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan meant that a region of ‘great strategic importance’ was now under threat, he said; Moscow’s move had eliminated a buffer, and brought it within striking distance not only of an area that ‘contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil’ but also of the crucial Straits of Hormuz ‘through which most of the world’s oil must flow’. He therefore articulated a carefully worded threat. ‘Let our position be absolutely clear,’ he said; ‘an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.’ This was a defiant statement that perfectly encapsulated attitudes to the oil of the Middle East and to the position first built up by the British and then inherited by the Unites States: any attempt to change the status quo would meet with a ferocious challenge. This was imperial policy in all but name.63
Carter’s bombastic words, however, contrasted with what was happening on the ground. Discussions with the Iranians about releasing the hostages had been continuing in the background, but were becoming ever more farcical. Not only were talks being held between representatives of Teheran and a presidential aide who wore a wig, false moustache and glas
ses to some meetings; but, as these discussions were going on, Ayatollah Khomeini kept giving speeches about the ‘world-devouring USA’ and about how the ‘great Satan’ should be taught a lesson.64
Eventually, in April 1980, President Carter resolved to bring matters to a conclusion and authorised Operation Eagle Claw, a covert mission to rescue the hostages from Teheran. The result was a fiasco to make schoolboys blush. Eight helicopters dispatched from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz were supposed to rendezvous with a ground team at a location near Tabas in central Iran, where they would be led by Colonel Charlie Beckwith and a new unit of crack troops, christened Delta Force. The operation proved to be stillborn: one helicopter turned back because of weather conditions; another developed a cracked rotor and was abandoned intact, while yet another was discovered to have a damaged hydraulics system. Beckwith concluded that the mission was no longer viable and obtained permission from the President to abort. As the helicopters returned to the Nimitz, one flew too close to a C-130 refuelling aircraft, resulting in an explosion that brought down both – and killed eight American servicemen.65
It was a propaganda disaster. Khomeini, not surprisingly, portrayed it as an act of divine intervention.66 Others looked on with bemusement at the ineptitude of the failed mission. The fact that the US had been unable to secure the release of the hostages through negotiation or by force spoke volumes about how the world was changing. Even before the failure of the rescue mission, some of the President’s advisers had felt there was a need to act decisively so as not to look impotent. ‘We need to do something,’ Zbigniew Brzezinski – the President’s National Security Advisor – said, ‘to reassure the Egyptians, the Saudis and others on the Arabian peninsula that the US is prepared to assert its power.’ And that meant establishing ‘a visible military presence in the area now’.67
The US was not alone, however, in trying to find a response to the tumultuous events that would enable it to protect its interests and reputation. On 22 September, Iraq began a surprise attack on Iran, bombing Iranian airfields and launching a three-pronged ground invasion that targeted the province of Khūzestān and the cities of Ābādān and Khurramshahr. There were no doubts in Iranian minds about who lay behind these attacks. ‘The hands of America’, thundered Khomeini, had ‘emerged from Saddam’s sleeve’.68 The attack, claimed President Bani-Sadr, was the result of an American–Iraqi–Israeli master plan whose aims were variously described as attempts to depose the Islamic government, to reinstate the Shah or to force the disintegration of Iran into five republics. Either way, he alleged, Washington had provided the Iraqis with the blueprint for the invasion.69
Although the idea that the US was behind the attack has been championed by some commentators and repeated by many others, there is little hard evidence to show that this was the case. On the contrary, the sources – which include millions of pages of documents, audio recordings and transcripts recovered from the presidential palace in Baghdad in 2003 – point firmly to the fact that Saddam had acted alone, choosing an opportune moment to strike at a volatile neighbour with whom he had a score to settle after coming out on the wrong side of territorial settlements five years earlier.70 These documents show an aggressive escalation in information-gathering by Iraqi intelligence in the months prior to the attack as thoughts in Baghdad turned to a surprise invasion.71
Saddam was also driven by a heavy dose of insecurity and a strong streak of megalomania. He was obsessed with Israel and with the powerlessness of the Arabs to defeat a country that was ‘an extension of the United States of America and the English’, while at the same time complaining that any aggressive action taken against Israel by the Arabs would result in the west deciding to retaliate against Iraq. If we attack Israel, he warned his senior officers, the Americans would ‘throw an atomic bomb at us’. The ‘first target’ of western action, he noted, ‘will be Baghdad, not Damascus or Amman’.72 Somehow, in Saddam’s mind, it seemed to make sense: attacking Israel would leave Iraq facing annihilation; therefore an attack on Iran should receive precedence.
The coupling of Israel and Iran could be found in the grandstanding rhetoric used by both Saddam and senior figures in the Iraqi leadership that referred excitedly to Iraq assuming the mantle of leadership for Arabs everywhere. The attack on Iran in 1980 was presented as an example of reclaiming land that had been ‘extorted’ during the territorial settlement of 1975. This would give encouragement to others, declared Saddam to his high-ranking officials, and galvanise ‘all the people’ whose lands have been taken from them to rise up and claim what was theirs by right too – a message intended above all for the Palestinians.73 Saddam convinced himself that invading Iran would help the cause of the Arabs elsewhere. Driven by such perverse logic, it was little wonder that the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, took to describing Iraq as ‘the most irresponsible of all Arab regimes, with the possible exception of Kaddafi’.74
Saddam had also been ruffled by the Revolution in Iran, muttering that the removal of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini was ‘completely an American decision’. The unrest was the start of a master plan, he declared, that would use Muslim clerics ‘to scare the Gulf people so that [the Americans] can have a presence and arrange the situation in the region’ however they saw fit.75 Such paranoia was blended with moments of genuine insight, such as when the Iraqi leader immediately grasped the significance of the Soviet move into Afghanistan – and what this meant for Iraq. Would the USSR do the same thing in the future to get its way in Baghdad, he asked; would puppet governments be set up in Iraq too, under the guise of providing help? ‘Is this’, he asked Moscow, how you will treat your other ‘friends in the future’?76
His misgivings only grew as the USSR worked to capitalise on anti-American sentiment in Iran and set about courting Khomeini and those close to him.77 Saddam realised that this too was potentially damaging and that Iraq might be jettisoned by Moscow in favour of its neighbour. ‘Soviet penetration of the region . . . should be checked,’ he told diplomats from Jordan in 1980.78 Feeling increasingly isolated, he was prepared to turn away from his Soviet backers, who had stood square behind his rise to power in the 1970s. His disillusion was one reason why the Soviets were not told of the forthcoming attack until the day before it was launched – which resulted in a frosty response from Moscow.79 By then, according to Iraqi intelligence reports, the fact that Iran was suffering from a ‘choking economic crisis’ and was in no fit state to ‘defend [itself] on a large scale’, represented too good an opportunity to miss.80
The fall of the Shah had set an extraordinary chain of events in motion. By the end of 1980, the whole of the centre of Asia was in a state of flux. The futures of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan lay in the balance, resting on choices made by their leaders and on the intervention of outside forces. Guessing which way things would go in each of these countries let alone in the region as a whole was nigh on impossible. For the US, the answer was to try to muddle through by playing all sides. The results were disastrous: while it was true that the seeds of anti-American sentiment had been planted earlier in the twentieth century, it was by no means inevitable that these would grow into full-blooded hatred. But US policy decisions over the last two decades of the century would serve to poison attitudes across the region lying between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas.
For sure, the United States had a hard hand to play at the start of the 1980s. To start with, the Iraqi assault seemed a blessing for US policymakers, who saw in Saddam Hussein’s aggression an opportunity to open discussions with Teheran. President Carter’s National Security Advisor Brzezinski ‘made no secret of the fact that the Iraqi attack was a potentially positive development that would put pressure on Iran to release the hostages’, according to a senior advisor involved in the crisis meetings that took place in this period.81 The pressure on Khomeini’s regime was amplified by the knowledge that, in order to respond to the attack, it desperately needed spare parts for military ha
rdware that had previously been purchased from the US. The Iranians were told that Washington might be minded to provide the relevant materials – whose value ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars – if the hostages were released. Teheran simply ignored the approach, which had the personal approval of the US President.82 Not for the first time, Iran was a step ahead: its agents had proved resourceful, buying much needed spares from elsewhere, including Vietnam, which had large stocks of US equipment captured during the war.83
Iran was also supplied in large volume by Israel, which took the view that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped at all costs. The willingness of the Iranians and the Israelis to do business with each other was in many ways surprising, especially given the derogatory way that Khomeini in particular regularly talked about Jews and about Israel. ‘Islam and the Islamic people met their first saboteur in the Jewish people who are at the source of all anti-Islamic libels and intrigues,’ he wrote in 1970.84 Iran and Israel were now cast as unlikely bedfellows thanks to Saddam Hussein’s intervention in the Gulf.
This was one reason why Khomeini’s rhetoric towards minorities and to other religions softened in the early 1980s, by which point he was referring to Judaism as ‘an honourable religion that had arisen among the common folk’ – although he distinguished this from Zionism, which in his eyes at least was a political (and exploitative) movement that was in its essence opposed to religion. This change in posture towards religions was so extensive that the Islamic Republic of Iran even issued postage stamps with a silhouette of Jesus Christ and a verse from the Qurān written in Armenian.85
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