The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2015 29 ask themselves: “What were those decades of enmity about? Why did we waste so much energy annoying each other?” Ghosts in the Way Our colleagues’ return, however, still faces an enormous obstacle: the presence of potent ghosts that haunt both sides in the American-Iranian relationship. See them or not, acknowledge them or not, the ghosts are there and will make their presence known. If we ignore them, they will still haunt us and work their spells. Perhaps Secretary of State Cyrus Vance did not see the ghosts in October 1979 when, despite the explicit advice of his chief of mission in Tehran, he urged President Jimmy Carter to admit the ailing, deposed Mohammad Reza Shah to the United States. Asked by Carter why he was ignoring the views of the embassy, Vance said that we would tell the Iranians that the shah was in the United States “only for medical treatment”—there was “no political pur- pose” behind the decision. Did Cyrus Vance and his colleagues think that anyone in Iran would accept this explanation? Did they believe that the ghosts of August 1953, when the CIA helped stage a coup that removed the nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, had been exorcised and had lost their power to work mischief? Were they even aware of those events and their place in the Iranian political canon? Combined with these simmering resentments of history was an explosive present. The revolutionary movement that tri- umphed in February 1979 had not brought Iranians the promised paradise. It had not even brought them peace. There was ongoing strife in universities, on the streets and in those provinces domi- nated by ethnic minorities. Nationalists and liberal intellectuals were complaining about the new authoritarianism; leftists were beating the anti-American drum and clamoring for more confiscations and executions; with backing from powerful clerics, right-wing thugs called hezbollahi (God’s partisans) were beating up journalists, women and anyone who questioned their slogan: “Rahbar, faqat Rouhollah; Hezb, faqat Hezbollah” (The only leader is Rouhollah [Khomeini]; the only party is the Hezbollah). With the revolution in such trouble, the hunt was on for scape- goats. Since the new rulers were not about to admit their own failings, the difficulties had to be the work of foreigners and their agents. Americans became the most obvious target, and assassi- nations, explosions and disturbances were described as the work of “American mercenaries.” Yet, in a case study of obliviousness, the administration ignored these realities of both past and present and decided in Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the State Department had trained no cadre of Iran experts to fill senior positions either in Washington or Tehran. An Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. oil well in Iran, 1909. Exploitation of Iranian oil began in earnest in 1901 with the D’Arcy oil concession, backed by Great Britain as a way to push back against Czarist Russia’s influence in Persia. Hulton Archive/Stringer/Getty Images