Assuming that the Islamic Republic of Iran does not get blown off the nuclear map, my sense of recent events is that Tehran is the clear winner in the war on terrorism. Prior to September 11th, Iran had a revolutionary past, and an uncertain future. Students—presumably clamoring for blue jeans and mascara—were rioting against the Persian theocracy. On its borders it had enemies in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, not to mention oil competition from another traditional foe, Azerbaijan. As always the United States was hostile, invoking economic sanctions, and the Russian fear of Islam’s dry wind blowing sparks across its former Central Asian republics had Moscow lined up against the mullahs. But then the enemies of our enemies were reincarnated as the coalition of the willing, and Iran found itself happily being pulled to regional predominance in the wake of the Great Satan’s post-9/11 crusades.
Beginning in November 2001, America stepped up to do the mullahs’ bidding. It pushed the Sunni-rooted Taliban out of Afghanistan, leaving large portions of that country in the control of warlords, some of whom are in the pay of Tehran. Next the US turned on Iraq, overthrew Hussein (who had fought a grisly 8-year war against Iran) and, as it dismantled the Iraqi military, announced that the battlefield objective was to bring democracy to the Sunni triangle. Jefferson had no such illusions when he dealt with Barbary’s pirates. But the administration of George W. Bush hoped the idea of a democratic Middle East would play well on sound-bite storyboards. Instead, in Iraq, as the US removed the minority Sunnis and Baathists from power, it positioned Baghdad either for a Shiite-dominated government (which would be friendlier with Iran) or civil war (also an Iranian interest). As if those gifts were not enough to the heirs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the Bush administration went for an Iran trifecta when it used its swagger to evict the Syrian army from Lebanon—leaving that troubled country more at the mercy of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorists from whose ranks suicide bombers are routinely recruited. Thus in a few short years, Iran went from fearing a New Age or consumerist counterrevolution to its restoration as the regional great power in the Middle East—all thanks to the theocracy in Washington that, presumably, shares some of its fundamentalist values.
You would have thought that the ayatollahs might have shown some gratitude towards their American soldiers of fortune. After all, al-Qaida’s pretensions toward predominance in the Arab world had origins in the Sunni madrassas of Saudi Arabia, not the holy city of Qom. But rather than reward the Americans with some discounted crude oil or invite President Bush to spend New Year’s Eve in Persepolis, as the Shah would have done, the mullahs decided to follow up their victories by pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium and possibly construct nuclear weapons. Seen from Tehran, the choice of atomic energy or a bomb was a no-lose proposition. As follows: once Iran had a nuclear capability, it would no longer fear an invasion from American-occupied Iraq. At the same time it could rally the Arab faithful around the idea of finally having the capacity to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yes, the UN could issue sanctions, and the air forces of either the US or Israel might take out some cooling towers or research laboratories. But those would be minor setbacks and, perversely, might confirm Iran’s status as the pre-eminent Middle Eastern power—once again capable of holding the West hostage. Bomb technology might also serve notice on domestic opponents of the mullahs, who in 2005 had banned more than a thousand candidates in regional and national elections and then backed the presidential candidacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, to celebrate his victory, decided to win friends and influence allies by announcing the Holocaust a “myth.”
Obviously, like anyone who would rather not see Istafan turn into a nuclear Sarajevo, I would like to think the Bush administration is capable of “muddling through” this crisis (as was said of the incompetent Hapsburg government of Franz Joseph). But I am not optimistic. My sense is that the US government needs to the idea of a “Mad Fakir” in Tehran just as much the Iranian government needs to fill the streets with demonstrators rallying against the “Enemy of Islam.” Nor do I believe that this nuclear showdown will be easily halted before the brink. Each side has too much invested in its enemy.
* * *
Just a summary of American-Iran relations should not give anyone reason to hope that Washington has broken the da Vinci code to understanding Iran. Leaving aside 10,000 years of Persian history, let’s move the clock to 1953, when British and American intelligence agencies staged a coup against the possibly communist-influenced prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Returned to the throne in Iran was Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose father—a mid-ranking Iranian military officer—had seized power by a coup in 1925 and proclaimed himself “shah.” In the early 1950s, Iran was seen as a swing vote in the Cold War, and the Truman administration feared that Iran, and its oil, would become another satellite in orbit around the Soviet Union. But the memory of the coup has made the US an anathema to many Iranians.
Grateful to the Americans for his restoration from exile, the Shah recast the Persian Empire as a modern Western state. In exchange for serving the Americans security and petroleum interests in the region, he was given carte blanche to skim state profits and crack down on domestic opposition, which included those like the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted Iran to became an Islamic state. Neither all the Shah’s SAVAK agents nor all the Shah’s men, however, could keep a lid on this dissident movement. In January 1979—a year after President and Mrs. Carter had spent New Year’s Eve in Tehran and called the Shah “an island of stability”—Pahlavi fled his country. Fearful of reprisal, Carter refused to grant his friend asylum, and the exiled leader wandered the world, as Henry Kissinger put it, like the Flying Dutchman, finding shelter in places like the Bahamas, Panama, and Egypt. When the Shah’s cancer worsened in October 1979, he was finally allowed into the United States for treatment. In response, militant students in Tehran stormed the American embassy—taking 66 hostages, 51 of whom they held from November 1979 to January 1981.
Carter froze Iran’s assets in the United States and cut off Iranian petroleum imports, but clearly those holding the American hostages were neither oil traders nor foreign investors. The nightly television news featured bound and gagged American diplomats, who became synonymous with Carter’s missing mojo. To recapture his mettle, the President then launched one of the oddest rescue missions in military history, in which a platoon of airborne forces, cruising the Iranian deserts in helicopters, were suppose to liberate the hostages, then held in various locations around a chaotic city of four million residents. Some of the helicopters crashed in a desert sandstorm, the mission was aborted, and the Iranians only released the hostages on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the next president—giving rise to the suspicion that Reagan’s campaign had found the hostages as convenient a campaign symbol as did Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the years that followed, the Reagan administration may have thought that it could “do business” with the Imam, who clearly understood the politics of television as well as the Reagan ‘imagineers'. But the Ayatollah proved a spiritual heir to another Persian sect, the assassins of the 12th and 13th centuries, rather than another Middle Eastern potentate eager to jet ski in Cannes. Iran sought to export its Shiite fundamentalism around the Middle East. For example, it backed Hezbollah in the anarchic Lebanese civil war, hoping to secure some missile launch pads near the Israeli border. It may well have plotted the 1983 suicide bombing of the American barracks in Beirut that killed 240 marines. But by that point Iran was involved in trench warfare with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which enjoyed support, including the ingredients of chemical weapons, from such western powers as Germany, the UK and the US. (Remember when Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld on bended knee to Saddam?) Essentially the American strategy in the Iran-Iraq war was to bleed two unpopular regimes, keep an eye out for Israel, and to maintain access to Persian Gulf oil. Iran, however, saw western trademarks on the incoming canisters of chemical weapons—one reason that today it continues to work so feverishly toward producing an atomic bomb.
Then in the mid-1980s the US decided to sell weaponry to the mullahs, touching off what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair, something that suggested that Ronald Regan had never outgrown his fondness for vaudeville. In this triangular trade, hatched in the mind Lt. Colonel Oliver North—but backed by everyone in the Reagan administration not later found to be “out of the loop”—the Americans would sell Iran advanced guided missiles. Israel would act as the middleman, and the proceeds from the arms deals would be sent to the “contras,” forces opposed to the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The reason money for Central American freedom fighters was laundered through Iran is because Congress had outlawed aid to the contras. (A number of Reagan administration officials were later sentenced to jail for lying to Congress over the affair. Bush Senior, however, pardoned them. Bush Junior now has some of them back working in places like the state and defense departments.)
The high-water mark of this deadly burlesque came when Reagan’s National Security advisor, Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane, flew to Tehran on an Israeli chartered plane. To confirm his diplomatic bona fides, he had with him a Bible and a chocolate cake. The reason that the US was doing business at all with Tehran is that the weapon sales were ransom payments for American hostages held in Beirut. For a while these strange dealings prolonged the slaughter in the trenches between Iran and Iraq, and topped up the contras bank accounts. But then Iran realized that hostages were a freely convertible currency, and grabbed a few every time they grew low on ammunition. On November 13, 1986 President Reagan said: “There’s been no evidence of Iranian government complicity in acts of terrorism against the United States.” Three days later, his Secretary of State, George Shultz, said: “Iran has and continues to pursue a policy of terrorism.”
About the time that McFarlane and his cake were in Tehran, a US guided-missile cruiser, on station in the Persian Gulf (but largely there to protect shipments of Iraqi crude oil), shot down an Iran Air commercial flight, killing some 290 passengers. The USS Vincennes had confused the civilian Airbus for an attacking Iranian fighter, and launched its missiles. For that engagement, the Navy decorated the ship’s captain. Although it was never proved, as the trail of money and Semtex wove through places like Syria and Libya, it was always suspected that the Iranian government sponsored the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in revenge for the loss of its flight to Bandar-Abbas.
Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. At his public funeral, as the body was being carried through Tehran, frenzied mourners rioted and nearly managed to destroy the casket and pitch the dead Imam into the street. Some ten thousand people were injured. Subsequently, during the 1990s, it appeared as though the hard-line relations between Iran and the US might thaw, especially when so-called reformers occupied more positions of authority within the Iranian government. In the world of Apple computers and Nike sneakers, the Islamic Republic of Iran looked increasingly like Albania or North Korea, countries clothed behind veils of unreality. During the attacks against the Taliban in November 2001, Iran let American forces use certain port facilities. Then, two months later, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush christened the “axis of evil,” and included Iran on the list, infuriating Tehran. A year later, not only were American armored forces patrolling the Iraq-Iran border, but also there was talk in the administration and in sympathetic think tanks about how “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.” So much for reconciliation.
Within the Bush administration, there are two schools of thought as regards the Islamic Republic of Iran: those who would open a dialogue with the mullahs (sometimes this is called “constructive engagement”) and those who would use the American presence in Iraq to launch either an invasion or a pre-emptive strike against the revolutionary council’s nuclear facilities. Recently, after an earthquake in Iran, President Bush sent aid to the victims, and spoke of the differences between the Iranian people and those running its government. According to an official quoted in the “New Yorker,” the goal of this kind of engagement is to “talk to them—but with the purpose of overthrowing them.” But more hard-liners, notably the circle around Vice-President Dick Cheney, see war with Iran over its nuclear capacity as inevitable. They imagine using lightening air strikes to “take out” Iran’s uranium enrichment program. As one strategist said: “it could all be done in a single night,” which sounds ominously like the refrain in August 1914, that the “troops would be home for Christmas.”
* * *
In recent weeks, while thinking about the coming Iranian-American confrontation over Iran’s nuclear capability, I searched the Internet for a clear statement from President Bush on how he views the Iranian situation. At the same time, I attended a speech in Geneva, Switzerland, given by the Iranian foreign minister on “Iran and the Nuclear Issue.” Having now listened to them both, I cling to my belief that this conflict will only end badly—in this sense: I fear that the Americans will first try to set the clock back to 1953 and attempt to overthrow the Iranian government, preferring, in the first stage, covert action to air strikes. But later, especially if the 2006 mid-term election looks to be going poorly for the Republicans, I could well imagine that Karl Rove might call the nation to general quarters over Iran’s looming nuclear arsenal.
From its side, I sense the Iranians feel their survival as an independent nation is linked to having nuclear weapons, which will give them the opportunity to menace Israel or to take hostages from a distance—and thus keep alive the dream of a theocratic Persian empire. Either way, the two countries seem incapable of rational dialogue.
Let’s hear about Iran, first and at length, from President Bush, who recently gave an Iraq set speech to Freedom House in Washington and then took questions from the audience. The point he is trying to make is that Iran needs to hear from many countries, not just the United States, that its pursuit of uranium enrichment, were it to lead toward a weapons capability, is viewed as dangerous and unacceptable. But from the transcript of the President’s response, what is most apparent is that his manner of thinking resembles that of some corrupted computer hard drive, broken into a series of partitions, none of which can connect and articulate a coherent position.
Here is what the President said, in answer to a question:
“THE PRESIDENT: The Iranian issue is more -- in dealing with Iran, we're dealing with more than just influence into the formation of [Iraq’s] national unity government. I happen to believe that ultimately the Iraqis will say, we want to have our own government. We want to be on our own feet. We've had a little problem with Iran in the past and, therefore, let us kind of manage our own affairs. No question right now we're concerned, however, about influencing the formation of the government, but also, obviously, we're deeply concerned about whether or not the Iranians have the wherewithal and/or the knowledge about building a nuclear weapon.
“My negotiation strategy on this issue is that I believe it is better for the Iranians to hear from more than one voice as to whether or not the world accepts them as a viable nation in the international affairs. And so we have asked Germany and France and Great Britain to take the lead, to send a clear message to the Iranian government.
“It's difficult to negotiate with non-transparent societies. It's easier for a non-transparent society to try to negotiate with countries in which there's a free press and a free political opposition and a place where people can express their opinions, because it sometimes causes people to play their cards publicly. In negotiating with non-transparent societies, it's important to keep your counsel.
“But I am pleased with the progress we have made on the diplomatic front. As you know, there are now talks of a presidential letter out of the United Nations, and my Secretary of State, working with Ambassador John Bolton, are constructing such a letter and trying to make sure that there is common consensus, particularly amongst the P5 plus Germany. As a matter of fact, Condi leaves I think today, if not tomorrow, for Europe to sit down with the P5 plus Germany to continue keeping people knitted up on our strategy. Obviously, there's some cross pressures to some members of the P5. There's a lot of politics in Europe -- which is a good thing, by the way, that people are questioning whether or not it's worth it to try to stop the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon. I just believe strongly it's worth it. Now is the time to deal with these problems before they become acute.
“I'm troubled by a non-transparent regime having a weapon which could be used to blackmail freedom-loving nations. I'm troubled by a president who has declared his intentions to destroy our ally Israel. And we need to take these admonitions and these threats very seriously in order to keep the peace.”
Not long after the President made these stream-of-unconscious remarks, Seymour Hersh reported in the “New Yorker” that US military planners had “not ruled out” using tactical nuclear weapons on various Iranian nuclear facilities. Under the administration’s Orwellian logic, this phrase does not mean the US had decided to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian reprocessing laboratories buried underground; only that it had not eliminated tactical nuclear weapons in the arsenal of any possible attack against Iran. But when it comes to confront Iran on the nuclear issue, the US will discover that it is more isolated than it thinks in the Middle East, and that the region’s system of alliances more resembles the anarchy of the Balkans in 1914 than the system of check and balances that lead to stability in Europe after the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Here’s a brief update on who is friends with whom in the Middle East:
--The US has Britain and Israel as firm friends, and allies of convenience in Afghanistan and Pakistan—so long as the money keeps rolling in. In the oil states of the Persian Gulf, the US has suppliers, or customers, but not really allies.
--Russia, wary of American encroachments in Central Asia, has looked to expand its relations with Turkey, and renew those with Syria. Plus it would like to be the “honest broker” in solving the Iranian standoff, and thus capture that rich market for itself. Both Russia and Iran oppose American efforts to siphon Caspian Sea oil west through Georgia and Turkey.
--Turkey, which would like to be closer to the European Union, failed to support the American invasion of Iraq, fearing it could lead to an independent Kurdistan, which would threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity. In recent years, its ties with Israel have waned, as it seeks Syrian support on the Kurdish question and thus it has developed more ties with Russia and, by extension, Iran.
--India, fretful about all the American aid pouring into Pakistan, demanded, and received, commercial nuclear technology from the Bush administration, despite the fact that India has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement (NPT), a treaty that even Iran has signed. Presumably, the Americans let India have more nuclear genies, thinking some help may be required in a face-off between war-headed Iran and (in a worst case) a more fundamentalist regime in Pakistan.
--If Iraq dissolves into civil war, neither the Americans nor its coalition allies will know whom to support. Support the Shiite majority, and you help Iran. Help the Kurds achieve independence, and you start a war with Turkey. Restore the Sunnis or the Baathists, and you will have fought a war both to topple Saddam Hussein and then another to restore his followers to power.
--In Iran, the confrontation with the Great Satan continues to solidify the power of the mullahs, at a time when they could have been marginalized. Meanwhile, Iran is well positioned in Lebanon to press the campaign against Israel, has some Russian support (at least for its commercial nuclear intentions), has less to fear from Afghanistan, is well-positioned in southern (Shiite) Iraq, and now is coming to the table with nuclear cards.
* * *
The foreign minister of Iran is Dr. Manouchehr Mottaki, who addressed, in good English, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. He appeared behind the lectern wearing a black suit and a high white collar, making me think I was listening to an Iranian Woodrow Wilson. To get to his position, he has risen through the ranks at the ministry of foreign affairs. I find his academic background odd, at least for someone hired by the revolutionary council to justify to the West Iran’s nuclear strategy. He received his undergraduate degree in Bangalore, India, and most of his academic writings have focused on Iran’s relations with Japan. Maybe he’s there to keep a big client happy? Often overlooked is the fact that Japan would have the most to lose if UN sanctions were voted against Iran. The Islamic Republic supplies 15 percent of Japan’s energy needs, and no one needs a reminder as to what happened the last time Japan’s oil trade was cut off.
In defending Iran’s nuclear option, Dr. Mottaki invited many atomic chickens, first hatched by the United States, to come home to roost. On the matter of national security, he invoked the specter of 9/11, to argue that all countries have the right of self-defense. He aligned Iran with “multi-lateralism” and the ideas of collective security, in contrast to the “unilateral” approach taken by the Bush administration in Iraq. He made the point that Iran has been a member of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) for 36 years but now asked: “Why can’t we enjoy the privileges of membership?” (It made the bomb sound like an American Express card.) He equated Iran with environmentalism: “Why can’t we have clean nuclear energy?” Of course, he attacked Israel: “the nuclear program of the Zionist regime and its nuclear weapons, which are outside the safeguard regime, are a threat against regional peace and security.” But the sophistry reached it height when Dr. Mottaki invoked the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, citing “…[Iran’s] inalienable right under international law to peaceful use of nuclear energy” and “a natural right of the Islamic Republic of Iran” for uranium enrichment. It reminded me of George Orwell’s observation that: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In that sense, I suppose the Declaration of Independence justifies going nuclear.
Of course, Dr. Mottaki is a professional diplomat, not unlike the Japanese foreign minister who in 1936 walked out of the League of Nations rather than answer questions about his country’s invasion of Manchuria. But he preferred to score rhetorical points—“How can we trust a country that has already used atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”—rather than explain how Iran has got as far with its nuclear program as it has. Several other countries, not unlike Iran in world politics—Brazil, South Korea, and Argentina—all undertook independent nuclear development, and each gave up before being able to process weapons grade plutonium or test-fire an accurate inter-continental ballistic missile. But no matter what it says in world forums, Iran is far down the road toward atomic independence, be it for clean energy or dirty bombs, although not for reasons that will ever appear in one of President Bush’s press conferences.
* * *
In order to understand how we are approaching the nuclear precipice with Iran, I would suggest reading a two-part series that appeared in “The Atlantic” in the last year. The author is William Langewiesche, and the first part is entitled “The Wrath of Khan.” It is a profile of a Pakistani atomic scientist, Dr. Abdu Quadeer Khan, who effectively stole nuclear technology from the West and coordinated Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. The second essay has the title “The Point of No Return,” and it describes how Dr. Kahn, undoubtedly with the knowledge and support of the Pakistani government, sold turnkey nuclear programs to a variety of rogue states, including North Korea, Libya, and Iran. In one of the series’ more damning sentences, Langewiesche writes: “Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now, the United States was aware not only of Khan’s peddling of nuclear wares to Iran but also of the likely involvement of the army and the government of Pakistan.” He also concludes: “Indeed, Iran was Pakistan’s longest-standing customer.”
How it was possible for Pakistan, the American linchpin in the war on terror, to have sold nuclear technology to Iran makes compelling reading. Initially, Langewiesche writes, Kahn assisted the effort to build a Pakistani bomb out of fear and loathing for India: “He believed, as many Pakistanis still do, that India had never accepted the Subcontinent’s partition, and (as he told his friends) that Hindus were tricksters with hegemonic designs.” In the 1970s, India tested nuclear weapons not far from the border with Pakistan. By 1982, thanks to Kahn, Pakistan had the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium. By 1984, “it was producing enough fissionable material to build several bombs a year.” But once Kahn had developed a domestic nuclear capacity he needed missile technology for its delivery system, and that led him into business with North Korea, which traded information about its NoDang missile in exchange for some of Pakistan’s enrichment components. Later, either for money or the glory of fathering a “Muslim bomb,” Kahn started doing business with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Libya. Pakistan became the Wal-Mart of the atomic bomb: a place to go for do-it-yourselfers.
Why the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s atomic warehouse is a mystery of criminal negligence. During the 1980s, the US needed the support of Islamabad to fight its Afghan proxy war against the Russians. In the 1990s, it may also have tolerated a Pakistani bomb as a way to establish a balance of power on the Subcontinent; India had proven maddeningly non-aligned. After 9/11 the Bush administration bet all on finding Osama bin Laden, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and launching its invasion of Iraq. For those enterprises, Pakistan was an indispensable, if shaky ally, and by all accounts the US chose to ignore the signs that Dr. Kahn was wholesaling the country’s atomic secrets.
Langewiesche is most scathing about the Bush administration’s delay in releasing, until October 2002 (by which time Congress had authorized the invasion of Iraq), the intelligence information that Pakistan had supplied nuclear technology to North Korea. He continues: “The blundering of that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan—which…was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America’s most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists.” When the news broke that Pakistan, via Khan, was running an atomic chop shop, the government in Islamabad quietly pensioned off the scientist, confined him to a form of house arrest, and continued to round of up the usual al-Qaida suspects. The US did not react. Clearly someone left the yellowcake out in the rain.
* * *
What will happen next in the nuclear showdown could well be the following: the US will push the European Union to take the lead in confronting Iran’s successful enrichment program, and there could be forms of so-called “smart sanctions” enforced against the Islamic Republic. In response, Iran will hole up in its nuclear bunkers, and then occasionally fire off some test ballistic missiles, to make the point that it has the capability to reach Tel Aviv or the West. More locally, it will increase the funding of subversion in southern Iraq, not to mention turning up the heat on Lebanese anarchy—both of which serve to undermine American interests in the Middle East.
From its side, the Bush administration will seize on the Iranian nuclear capability as the ideal midterm campaign issue, one both to justify the presence of American forces in Iraq and to make the electorate forget about Scooter Libby, the various deficits, and Jack Abramoff’s Indians. Rove is also a big believer in the permanent state of war. I doubt, however, the Bush-Cheney war lobby will mobilize against Iran before the election, for the simple reason that it is thought to be years, not months, away from having the bomb. But, facing ruinous budget figures brought on by the splendid little war in Baghdad, the administration will put its energies into covert operations against the mullahs. It will seem a cost-efficient front to open, and already the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near Eastern Affairs has vastly increased the budget to besiege Tehran with what might be called Radio Free Iran. That Secretary also happens to be Elizabeth Cheney, Dr. Evil’s daughter.
* * *
In thinking about the coming crisis with Iran, I can’t help but be reminded of the Cuban Missile Crisis, those 13 days in October 1962, when the world perched on the nuclear brink. At the time I was 8 years old and watched with my parents on a black-and-white television as President John F. Kennedy announced that he was placing Cuba (it always sounded like “Cuber”) under quarantine. Even in the third grade, I was obsessed with what the teacher called “current events,” and every day I brought clippings to class to indicate where the American Navy was stationed and how long it would take the Russian missile ships to reach the blockade. I had enormous admiration, as well, for President Kennedy. I had seen him during the 1960 campaign and knew intimately the story of PT 109, which had seen service among the same Pacific islands where my own father’s infantry battles had taken place. But during the Missile Crisis, school children spent a lot of time under their desk or in the halls, hands covering our heads, drilling for deliverance.
What I learned later was the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had acted from weakness, rather than strength, in sending Russian missiles to Cuba. He had seen the gap widening between American and Soviet atomic capabilities, and figured a few inter-continental ballistic missiles off the Florida Keys might narrow the divide. He withdrew his missiles in exchange for guarantees that the US would not invade Cuba and for dismantling NATO missiles in Turkey. Could Iran’s supreme council be arming for the same reasons of weakness, fearful of American troops on their border and nuclear weapons held by Pakistan and Israel, both in America’s pocket?
The differences between the Cuban Missile crisis and today’s Iranian nuclear standoff are many, but perhaps most striking is the incongruous background of the respective leadership in the US and Iran from those, in 1962, who were running America and the Soviet Union. Kennedy had seen war among the bloody waters of the Solomon Islands, in some stretches known then and now as Iron Bottom Sound, for all the ships sunk at a cost of thousands of lives. Khrushchev had served in World War II as the commissar with Russian forces holding the desperate line at Stalingrad, where more than a million lives were lost between the German and Russian armies in a campaign that unfolded as the Americans were clinging to the beachhead at Guadalcanal. I sense that by 1962 both leaders had seen enough war to last them a lifetime.
In their place today, in the US and Iran, are men comfortable with the chants of religious fundamentalism, for whom Armageddon is more a promised land of redemption than a mine field to be avoided. The current Bush administration places great faith in a military in which few of them served while the mullahs, not to mention the country’s new president, owe their tenuous political legitimacy to the halcyon days when Iran held America hostage. Sadly, President George W. Bush may be “no Jack Kennedy.” My fear is that he will confront Iran much the way, after 9/11, he reduced the complicated history of Iraq and the Middle East to the simplistic plots of a Clint Eastwood movie (“We’re taking that fucker out.”). But this time he will be confronting an enemy of religious zealots for whom martyrdom—yours and theirs—is one of the recommended paths to salvation.
