American embassy hostages stalemate

One of the two most influential American news magazines came out this week with a picture on its cover of the American bald eagle, the symbol of American power, with his feathers dropping off him like autumn leaves and printed boldly on one wing was the title of the cover story. It said, 'Has America lost its clout?'

Well, the definition of 'clout' that the Oxford dictionary has recently added says, 'Noun: colloquial, influence, power of effective action, especially in politics.' 

So Newsweek puts the resounding question, 'Has America lost its clout?' The feature piece is an historical survey which laments how, in recent years, the United States has suffered a series of blows to its power of effective action, how we've seen Soviet and Cuban forces marching unhindered across large parts of Africa and staunch, if unsavoury, friends falling from power in places like Nicaragua and Iran, have watched oil sheiks raising their prices recklessly to make us realise in pain that, for the first time in American history, the United States is dependent on foreigners for a vital resource. 

Americans, it goes on, have seen their dollar plummet in value and their standard of living drop below that of countries as diverse as Sweden and Kuwait and they have seen their armed forces, which once held a nuclear monopoly, struggle to maintain something called 'parity'. 

Now, such a piece could have been written at any time in the past year or two that the magazine's editors were short of a rousing editorial, but I don't think that it would have appeared now or the question put with quite such urgency if it had not been for the uniquely frustrating crisis in Iran – the seizure and holding by the Ayatollah Khomeini of the American embassy hostages in reprisal for letting the Shah come to New York for medical treatment. 

A recent comment by an American who was, for a long time, an expert in wielding the power of effective action, takes on a special poignancy as we look at the paradox of what somebody has called 'the power of the impotent Ayatollah' and the 'impotence' of the powerful United States. Mr Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA, has come out with a memoir that challenges its readers to find an effective substitute for presidential clout once you emasculate the CIA, the intelligence services, and their power of wielding secret power. 'Once a nation's intelligence service is denied the use of this power', says Mr Helms, 'there is nothing between landing the marines and diplomacy.' 

Well, it does seem as if the marines, for the rest of their foreseeable history, will have to content themselves with battle exercises on the home ground, short of a declared war. President Eisenhower's dispatch of them into Lebanon in 1958 to protect an elected government from overthrow by Syrians, that would appear to be the last of their emergency overseas exploits which started when they sailed off to protect American shipping from the Barbary pirates in Jefferson's time. 

I'm pretty sure that many Americans picking up this current issue of Newsweek at a news stand will instinctively translate the title, 'Has America lost its clout?' into a growl, which they know is ridiculous, 'Why don't we send in the marines?' Well, we know it can't be done any more and, in the knowledge, the presidential candidates, who are now out on the stump, didn't offer a whimper of criticism against President Carter. 

They might – they did – slam into him for something vague and stirring, a lack of leadership, but since they, too, couldn't think of anything drastic or heroic to do with the Iranians, they kept their traps shut. The best they could do was to show their deep understanding of the issues involved by nodding sagely and saying the president had done what, indeed, they, themselves, would have done so far, namely to stop the imports of Iranian oil, to freeze Iranian dollar assets both at home and abroad, and to echo the president’s ringing denunciation of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran as an act of terrorism totally outside the bounds of international law and diplomatic tradition. 

Of course he said nothing but the truth. However the lump that sticks in everybody's gullet is the unpleasant fact that international law and diplomatic tradition only work for people who respect them. International law and diplomatic tradition are rendered totally impotent by the most striking characteristic of terrorism in our time, by what I've called 'the success of violence'. We're really in the position, the noble but useless position of Calvin Coolidge when he was governor of Massachusetts and the police of Boston threatened a strike, something unheard of at the time – the time was 1919. Coolidge's words rang round the nation. 'How true, how wise,' people said when he declared, 'There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.' 

But all you have to do to defeat this wisdom is to go ahead and strike anyway, which is what the Boston police did. Coolidge, however, called out the state guard and the police bowed. Today they would probably stay out till the state government got tired of trying to police a big city with improvised soldiery. 

So, President Carter. Not only he, but the international court of justice might declare that the action of the Ayatollah Khomeini is totally outside the bounds of international law and diplomatic tradition. And the Ayatollah simply says, in no doubt holy language, 'So forget international law.' What has come out in the past week is some evidence from documents captured by the students in the American embassy and from the deep digging of a New York Times reporter which shows that the whole situation is by no means as simple as we'd thought. Let's very briefly say what that situation is as most of us had understood it till this week. 

In October, the United States allowed the exiled Shah to come from his temporary home in Mexico and enter a New York hospital after an American doctor, sent to Mexico, had gone into the Shah's history of lymph cancer and other afflictions and had decided that he needed an expert diagnostic opinion which he could get only in New York. 

So President Carter, having assured the Iranian government – meaning the official government – of Prime Minister Bazargan, said that the Shah was not being granted political asylum, he was coming in for emergency medical treatment and he would be requested to leave the United States as soon as he was convalescent. Then on 4 November, without warning, the Ayatollah, or his student guerrillas – by the way, apart from the Ayatollah and the handful of advisers, the entire population of Iran seems to be students – the students marched on the embassy and seized and bound its inmates. 

Well, it now comes out that the president and his secretary of state, Mr Vance, had spent eight months resisting the appeals of many powerful American friends of the Shah to let him come in as a permanent exile. And throughout those eight months, the White House and the State Department were in constant touch with a Mr Laingen, the acting American ambassador in Tehran. Some of that diplomatic correspondence was captured by the students and they were in no mood to split hairs, they probably cannot even honestly distinguish between the authority of President Carter and the influence, if any, of a Rockefeller who happens to be a banker. After all, it is standard Marxist and maybe by now Islamic doctrine that the United States is really run by the Rockefellers. 

Well, apparently Ambassador Laingen – let's call him ambassador – got the idea, through these months of private appeals to the president (and one of them was to Dr Kissinger), got the idea that, in time, when the Ayatollah and his regime cooled down and backed into the shafts that the Shah would come here without a fuss. There's pretty certain evidence that Mr Carter may have toyed with the idea but saw long ago that it wouldn't do, in spite of the protests and appeals of the Rockefellers and their friends and Dr Kissinger's disgusted complaint that the administration was treating the Shah like a Flying Dutchman. 

Well, by October, the American doctor had made his clinical findings and the president told Ambassador Laingen that the United States intended to fetch the Shah to New York for medical treatment only. Ambassador Laingen told the Bazargan government and they were appalled. They said the Iranian people would never accept the medical story. They warned, even, that the embassy might be occupied but they believed they could protect it. Mr Laingen reported back to Washington. Again, the White House said that the Shah would arrive quietly in New York. Again, the Bazargan government warned that it wouldn't work. And it didn't work for the Bazargan government. In fact, it fell, precisely because the Shah did arrive in the New York hospital. After them, the deluge. The embassy guard was caught napping or rather it was a light guard, having accepted the word of Mr Bazargan that there would be no heavy raid. 

In retrospect, it's now clear that the Carter administration hoped to let the Shah in some time in the future but at the same time it resisted the urgent appeals of the Rockefellers and the Kissingers and others to let him in now. The medical reason was not a pretext to rush the invitation. It was a genuine, compassionate cause and Mr Carter thought it would be seen and respected as such. 

Even so, Mr Carter was dubious all along. At one staff meeting, at least a month before we ever heard of the Shah's illness, the president said to one of his aides, 'And when the Iranians take our people in Tehran hostage, what will you advise me then?' The silence of the presidential candidates now on the stump is explained by the fact that, once a candidate, you are made privy to such presidential secrets. They knew about the pressure to fetch the Shah here. Some of them were all for it. Now they must wake up at night and shudder at Mr Carter's forlorn question and go back to sleep thanking the Lord they are not in the White House they so long to inhabit.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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