by Dore Gold
Iranian
President Hasan Rouhani's recent U.N. visit was not the first time a
top Iranian official succeeded in hoodwinking the West and especially
its leading newspapers and media outlets. Just before he arrived in
Tehran in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini succeeded at waging a
successful deception campaign from his place of exile at
Neauphle-le-Chateau, just outside of Paris. He completely hid his true
intentions of what he planned to do once he would become the ruler of
Iran.
A committee of
advisers recommended to him that he refrain from rhetorically attacking
the US or saying anything against women's rights. He sent his personal
representative, Ibrahim Yazdi, who had American citizenship and would
later become his foreign minister, to meet U.S. officials in Washington
as well as many influential academics. This was the first Iranian charm
offensive.
The results of
this Iranian effort were impressive. There was the embarrassing case of
Professor Richard Falk from Princeton University who wrote an op-ed in
The New York Times, entitled "Trusting Khomeini." He wrote that the
people around Khomeini were "moderate" and even "progressive." He even
added that they had "a notable concern for human rights." Years later it
should be noted, Falk adopted increasing extremist positions, even
accusing the U.S. government in 2004 of complicity in the 9/11 attacks.
Nonetheless, in 2008 the U.N. appointed him as a "special rapporteur" on
Palestinian human rights. In 1979, his article was typical of many
elite attitudes about Khomeini in academia and in the U.S. government.
In fact, among
American experts there was little knowledge about Khomeini's background,
except for information transmitted by his supporters. The one exception
to this trend was the case of Professor Bernard Lewis, who served in
the Intelligence Corps of the British Army in World War II and then
became one of the most influential Middle Eastern historians at British
and American universities. One of his assistants found a written book by
Khomeini in the Princeton University Library that contained the Arabic
lectures he had delivered in 1970, while he lived in exile in Najaf, the
Shiite holy city in Iraq. The book was entitled "Islamic Government."
The CIA, as well
as other parts of the American government, apparently did not even know
the book existed. But Lewis studied the text, revealing Khomeini's
extremist positions, which he shared with the Washington Post. These
included calls for "armed jihad" and the need to "take the lead over
other Muslims." The book was plainly anti-Semitic, suggesting that the
Jews were seeking "to rule over the entire planet."
There were
American academics who were cultivated by Khomeini's people and were
prepared to suggest that Lewis had quoted Khomeini "out of context."
Henry Precht, who was head of the Iran desk at the U.S. State
Department, went even further and rejected Lewis' conclusions. He even
said that the book that Lewis found was a forgery. He criticized the
Washington Post for publishing excerpts of the book. Precht, who had met
with Khomeini's envoy, argued in internal meetings in Washington that
after the fall of the Shah, Khomeini's government would leave Iran more
stable.
Years later,
Khomeini admitted that he employed traditional techniques of deception,
specifically referring to the tactic of khod'eh, which according to his
biographer, Amir Taheri, meant "tricking one's enemy into a misjudgment
of one's true position." Thus in 1978, Khomeini told the British daily,
The Guardian, that he was not interested in having "the power of
government in my hand." Many analysts thought he would retire to the
Shiite seminaries of Qom, after he returned to Iran. William Sullivan,
the U.S. ambassador to Tehran, wrote a cable in 1978, in which he
envisioned Khomeini taking up a "Gandhi-like role."
Among his
British counterparts, there were those who anticipated "enlightened
Islamic rule." The French intelligence services were somewhat better
since they carefully monitored the speeches that Khomeini recorded and
distributed on cassette tapes, but their recommendations were ignored by
the political eschelons in Paris under the leadership of French
President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. In short, Khomeini's deception
campaign worked.
What followed
after Khomeini reached Iran was the exact opposite of what Western
experts had predicted. Revolutionary courts were set up which
arbitrarily arrested and executed anyone suspected of opposing the new
government. A bloodbath followed as hundreds were sent before firing
squads. Khomeini's regime was brutal. Under international pressure, the
Shah had ordered a halt to the use of torture in Iranian prisons;
Khomeini reintroduced torture when he came to power. He did not retire
to Qom, but rather promulgated a religious doctrine, known as velayat-e
faqih (the rule of the head jurisprudent) that made him the supreme
source of authority in Iran.
In foreign
affairs, Khomeini's constitution called for "the continuation of the
Revolution at home and abroad." A month after declaring Iran as an
Islamic Republic in 1979 he established the Revolutionary Guards, which
not only protected the regime from internal threats but also took part
in the export of the Islamic Revolution, by undermining the internal
stability of Arab states. U.S. allies in the Arab world were quickly
targeted. For example, Shiite uprisings in the Eastern Province of Saudi
Arabia in 1979 and 1980 were backed by Tehran.
At this time,
the Iranians promoted popular Shiite revolts in Bahrain and Iraq as
well. They deployed an expeditionary unit of Revolutionary Guards in
eastern Lebanon which gave orders to Hizbullah after its foundation in
the early 1980s. This included the attacks in 1983 on the U.S. Marine
Barracks in Beirut and the headquarters of the French peacekeeping
forces there. Years later, Iraqi Shiite politicians disclosed that the
Revolutionary Guards also directed an organization known as al-Dawa to
undertake attacks in 1983 against the U.S. embassy in Kuwait.
While Iran was
invaded by Iraq in 1980, it recovered all its lost territories by 1982
and yet Khomeini continued his war against Saddam Hussein for another
six years. The Iranians even expanded their war with Iraq to the waters
of the Persian Gulf where it attacked the tankers used by Arab states to
export their oil. By the early 1990s, Revolutionary Guards were also
stationed in Sudan, where Iran sought facilities for a future naval
presence in the Red Sea. Today, using the Quds Force of the
Revolutionary Guards, which was specifically formed for these foreign
operations, its commander General Qassem Sulaimani is active in
advancing Iranian hegemony across the Middle East, by intervening in
local wars with weapons, advisers, and even military forces.
It now appears
that the community of Middle Eastern experts -- both inside and outside
of government -- had absolutely no idea back in 1979 what the rise of
Ayatollah Khomeini would mean for the future of the Middle East. They
were charmed into believing that Iran, after the fall of the Shah, would
adopt a moderate course. The consequences of their miscalculation were
disastrous for the Iranian people and the world.
The first
Iranian charm offensive required two parties to succeed: Iranians who
skillfully employed a campaign of deception and gullible commentators in
the West, who took at face value what the Iranians said. It can only be
hoped that this time, with Rouhani's charm offensive, this dangerous
combination will not reappear, leading the U.S. and its allies to repeat
the errors in interpreting Iranian intentions, that were committed in
the earliest days of Khomeini's rule.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5951
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment