Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
weak and simply confirmed the state of affairs: limiting travel to Iran for all but journalists and officials, and restricting financial transfers. His ban on importing Iranian goods was meaningless, since war and revolution had ground Iran’s economy to a halt.
As the months progressed, there was one constant: Carter grasped at straws. Even though Bani Sadr had violated earlier promises, he raised White House hopes with a secret approach through a German law firm.49 Carter maintained an almost religious belief that diplomacy could work. His diplomats counseled against any nondiplomatic strategy for fear that it would undermine diplomacy’s prospects. They were more willing to condemn American actions for hindering diplomacy than to blame Iranian insincerity.50 When Carter agreed to attempt a rescue of the hostages, Vance resigned in protest.51
Ten months after the embassy seizure, German intermediaries reported that a senior Iranian official was ready to talk.52 The official was able to convince the White House that he truly represented Khomeini by foretelling demands that Khomeini would make in a speech. The speech consolidated and formalized the Iranian position: demanding noninterference by the United States in Iran’s internal affairs, release of frozen assets and a return of the shah’s assets, and cancellation of all U.S. claims against Iran.
The Carter administration agreed to bargain for the hostages. “It was in the national interest of the United States to negotiate with Iran for the release of the hostages, rather than to refuse to negotiate at all,” wrote the legal advisor to Edmund Muskie, the secretary of state.53 Politicians across the aisle uniformly held that there should be no negotiation with terrorists in principle, although there was no consensus when it came to the problem of rogue regimes. Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state, considered Carter’s willingness to talk a bad idea.54 Carter’s decision to negotiate with Khomeini was eased by moral equivalence; many of his advisors saw merit to Iranian accusations against the United States.55 Muskie’s legal advisor went so far as to equate U.S. freezing of Iranian assets with Iran’s taking of hostages.56
On September 13, 1980, Warren Christopher, deputy secretary of state, traveled to Bonn with his handpicked team to meet Sadegh Tabatabai, the Iranian intermediary who was also the brother of Khomeini’s daughter-in-law. The State Department believed the meetings productive—when the metric is merely sitting down to talk, it is easy to claim success—but the channel soon dried up. Tabatabai stopped traveling to Bonn, and the Iranian parliament started issuing new demands. The State Department was willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt and blamed the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War for Tabatabai’s abrupt withdrawal from talks.57 It should not have. The Iranians frequently switch negotiators. After accepting concessions, the Iranian leadership annuls the process, reiterates its demands, and begins negotiations anew with the adversaries’ concessions as the opening position.
Rather than see the war as an impediment, the State Department should have recognized it as an opportunity, for indeed that is what it was. “The blow that broke the logjam came from Saddam Hussein, not Jimmy Carter,” Rodman observed.58 Ronald Reagan’s election also helped. The Iranian leadership understood Carter and knew how to exploit his weakness, but Reagan was a different matter. Iran’s traditional game of increasing demands would no longer work. Events, rather than Carter’s outreach, reversed the dynamic. Khomeini finally decided that further delays might cost Iran and that it was time to make a deal.
The Iranian government then cast aside the agreement reached between Christopher and Tabatabai to let international courts determine the value of the shah’s assets, and instead demanded $24 billion.59 With the costs of war piled onto the turmoil of revolution, Tehran faced financial ruin. Khomeini wanted money. The Iranian demand was blackmail; but if Carter refused to pay, Khomeini might condemn the hostages to revolutionary courts in which justice was no concern and death sentences the norm. Although American leverage was at its weakest, Carter ordered negotiations to proceed.
The price of negotiating under fire was high. Carter agreed not only to the ransom, but also to an American pledge “not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” Even though this agreement was not a treaty and not technically binding, diplomats have cited it as reason not to pressure Iran.60 There were also peripheral costs as a result of relying on Algeria to play the middleman. This reactionary, pro-Soviet regime was locked in a fierce border dispute with Morocco, an important American ally, and Carter’s wooing of Algeria came at Morocco’s expense.61
When the Iranian government released the hostages just minutes after Ronald Reagan took his oath of office on January 20, 1981, Carter’s team trumpeted the success of their diplomacy.62 They bragged that they had persevered, avoiding the use of force except for the failed rescue mission, and rallying the international community against Iran. Most importantly, they won the release of the hostages. Diplomacy had triumphed, they concluded.
This is debatable, however. Diplomacy prolonged the crisis to 444 days and allowed radical factions to consolidate around Khomeini. Iranian officials toyed with their American counterparts and drove up the cost of the bargain before abruptly disengaging. Carter’s desperation empowered a series of anti-American intermediaries, ranging from the PLO and the Syrians, to Libyans, Cubans, and Algerians.63 The perception of powerlessness to free the hostages eroded America’s international standing and encouraged adversaries. While Carter might once have defined his brokering of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty as the central pillar of his legacy, his handling of the hostage crisis leads historians to remember his presidency as bumbling and ineffectual.64 It was events outside the negotiating room that won the hostages their freedom.
What should Carter have done differently? Iran’s negotiating behavior provides clues. Since the revolutionaries responded more to pressure than to nicety, Carter might have done more to build leverage. “Diplomacy divorced from power is futile,” as Rodman observed. When Iraq invaded Iran, “suddenly the stubborn lethargy of the Iranian political system, all the internal feuding and procrastinating and jockeying for position, jelled under the pressure of force majeure; suddenly the economic sanctions took on a new bite as the threat of protracted war impended.”65 Carter need not have invaded Iran, but had he quietly sent troops and battle groups to the Persian Gulf, Khomeini would have noticed. At the very least, Carter might then have negotiated from a position of strength.
Carter’s obsession with his own re-election also undercut diplomacy. While it was admirable that he wanted Reagan to begin with a clean slate, the more Carter’s team telegraphed desperation to conclude an agreement before they left office, the more they strengthened the Iranian hand.
In the annals of the twentieth century, Carter’s handling of Iran presents a paradox. Few if any U.S. presidents have been more committed to diplomacy in a crisis, and yet, by his single-minded pursuit of diplomacy, Carter froze U.S. relations with postrevolutionary Iran for nearly three decades. Hindsight is always 20/20, but had Brzezinski not pushed forward so enthusiastically in his handshake with Mehdi Bazargan, and had Carter’s decisions not extended a two- or three-day crisis into a fourteen-month event, the United States and Iran might enjoy normal relations today.
The Iran-Contra Affair
The hostages’ homecoming was the end of a chapter, but not the final story. The crisis left Carter’s legacy in tatters, but the damage it did to Iran’s image was worse. The Islamic Republic had, in world opinion, become a pariah state. Khomeini promised paradise, but he brought misery and isolation. Whereas Iranians had once seen themselves as being on track to acquire economic power and a European standard of life, it was clear by the early 1980s that Iran’s trajectory had reversed.
With the hostages home, President Ronald Reagan turned his attention to the economy and to rebuilding America’s military capability. Crises that define presidencies, however, are almost always unforeseen. In 1982, with terrorism resurgent, Israel invaded Lebanon to push out Palestinian guerillas. The U.S. special envoy Philip Habib brokered a deal in which Israeli forces would leave Beirut while the Palestine Liberation Organization would leave Lebanon altogether.
When Lebanon’s government faltered, chaos again