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Mission Impossible
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13422 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
2,223 Words |
| Author
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Augustus Richard Norton
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MISSION TO TEHRAN
Gen. Robert E. Huyser
New York: Harper & Row, 1986
308 pp., $20.95
When wishful thinking guides the foreign policy of the United States, one can be sure that failure lurks nearby. Certainly such was the case in Lebanon. The fervent wish to restore civility to a beleaguered country was undermined by the complexity of the situation and the unappreciated brevity of an opportune diplomatic moment. But the most profoundly telling episode of wishful thinking took place in Iran in 1978. Key policymakers were so disabled by their preconceptions that the fall from power of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was foreseen only very late in the day. In Washington, even as the end was approaching at breakneck speed, there was a tendency to cling to policy options that simply did not exist.
It was really only in late December 1978 that the futility of the shah's position came to be understood in President Jimmy Carter's White House - well after the attentive reader of a newspaper with good foreign coverage might have come to the same conclusion. A number of options that would permit the shah to continue to reign, if not rule, were contemplated throughout December, including a proposal by George Ball that a governing Council of Notables be established. All such ideas were disabled by the widespread opposition to the shah, whose very presence acted to undermine the legitimacy of any successor. So by the end of the month, the Carter administration was moving ineluctably, if unwillingly, toward the conclusion that the shah had to go.
Key Washington policymakers, and especially National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued that the Iranian military would play a leading role in the equation that would determine whether post-Pahlavi Iran would continue to be friendly to the United States. Hence, it was not surprising that the Defense Department recommended (with support from Brzezinski) that the president send a high-ranking military official to Iran to establish a working relationship with his Iranian counterparts.
Support for a military coup
The White House was hungry for ideas, as it often is during a crisis, and Carter accepted the recommendation. He agreed to direct Air Force Gen. Robert E. Huyser, deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command, to proceed on a mission to Tehran. Huyser's presence was to serve as a gesture of U.S. support for the Iranian military and to ensure the military's support for the government of newly appointed Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar. Mission to Tehran is Huyser's account of his important assignment, one in which he was to provide situational assessments that influenced the development of policy at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.
The Huyser mission was staunchly opposed by his direct boss, Supreme Allied Commander Alexander Haig, who viewed the mission as essentially political and more appropriately assigned to a different emissary. Haig's loud objections were overruled, as were those of Ambassador William Sullivan, the envoy of the United States in Tehran. Huyser arrived in the Iranian capital on January 4, 1979, only to be met with a cable from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance instructing him not to contact the
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