Posted by
Gabrielle Cusumano on Thursday, January 18, 2007 6:57:00 PM
[...]"President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia "
" Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the Soviet Union.
The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student").
Young zealots were sent to the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda were taught "sabotage skills" - terrorism.
Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated Twin Towers.
In Pakistan, they were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the SAS.
The result, quipped Brzezinski, was "a few stirred up Muslims" - meaning the Taliban.
At that time, the late 1970s, the American goal was to overthrow Afghanistan's first progressive, secular government, which had granted equal rights to women, established health care and literacy programmes and set out to break feudalism.
When the Taliban seized power in 1996, they hanged the former president from a lamp-post in Kabul.
His body was still a public spectacle when Clinton administration officials and oil company executives were entertaining Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas.
29 January 2002
NEXT WEEK the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami visits the United States. Though he will not meet government officials, the visit is significant and welcome. Khatami is reputedly a reformer. It may be possible, through him, to widen the gulf between Iranian pragmatists and theocratic populists.
But there is a risk. The current Iranian regime menaces Israel and has lied to the EU about its nuclear programme. It must not interpret Khatami’s visit as proof of the value of bellicosity. Khatami must get the message that the West will be receptive to concessions, but will face down belligerence. There lies the problem: Khatami’s host in the US is Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s poor reputation as president reflects a record not so much of incompetence as paralysis. He led his Administration mainly in the sense that its internal disagreements faithfully reflected his own philosophical chaos and administrative ineptitude. In domestic policy Carter zigzagged left and right, baffling equally the environmental activists he patronised and the churchgoers whose social values he claimed to share. His proposed system of federal energy controls failed comprehensively. In 1980 he acknowledged that inflation was near a “crisis stage”.
He proclaimed human rights while lauding the Shah of Iran’s repressive regime. When the Shah’s revolutionary successors held 52 American diplomats hostage for 14 months, Ayatollah Khomeini accurately sneered: “Neither does Carter have the guts for military action, nor would anyone listen to him.”
Carter cancelled the B1 bomber in the hope of gaining Soviet goodwill, later acknowledging bemusedly the Kremlin’s persisting “unfriendly rhetoric”. He earned the contempt of friendly European governments by announcing deployment of the neutron bomb and then cancelling it without consulting them.
Last weekend he impertinently attacked Tony Blair’s closeness to George Bush. Doubtless he prefers the model of transatlantic relations he pioneered with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany, who observed in exasperation that Carter was “just not big enough for the game”.
Less an elder statesman than a soft cushion who bears the impress of whoever sits on him, the 39th president is the last person Khatami should meet.
The contrast between the reality and the phantasm could hardly have been greater. At the time of the embassy seizure, the Iran section at the CIA consisted of exactly four people — who, moreover, were fumbling around in the dark since none of them spoke Farsi. In previous years, too, the CIA had failed actively to gather intelligence. Thus it announced in August 1978 — just six months before the revolution! — that Iran “is not in a revolutionary or even prerevolutionary situation.” The intelligence reports from France and Israel, which correctly predicted the imminent overthrow of the shah, were stubbornly dismissed as “alarmist.”3
The tendency toward wishful thinking continued even after the revolution in February 1979. Whereas Tehran increasingly viewed the U.S. through the darkly hued optic of its paranoid phantasms and loudly demonized America as its Enemy No. 1, Washington plugged its ears and looked back through rose-colored glasses.
The American Representative to the UN, Andrew Young, described Khomeini as “some kind of saint,” while National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was favorably disposed toward him, since he seemed to Brzezinski to represented an effective barrier against Soviet influence. “We can get along with Khomeini!” was the motto in that summer of 1979. Businesspeople were encouraged to invest in Iran. Members of Congress were subtly discouraged from making critical comments. Critical journalists who refused to follow the line were denigrated. The following episode, as described by Michael Ledeen and William Lewis, is illustrative of the atmosphere:
There was considerable consternation and disgruntlement in the State Department and the cia when three American newspapers published extensive accounts of Khomeini’s writings. The articles showed that Khomeini’s books revealed him as a violently anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic individual, who offered an unattractive alternative to the shah.
Yet as late as the first week in February 1979, when Khomeini was returning in triumph to Tehran, Henry Precht [the head of the State Department’s Iran desk] told an audience of some two hundred persons at the State Department “open forum” meeting that the newspaper accounts were severely misleading, and he went so far as to accuse Washington Post editorial columnist Stephen Rosenfeld of wittingly disseminating excerpts from a book that Precht considered at best a collection of notes taken by students, and at worst a forgery.
Precht was hardly an isolated case, for the conviction was widespread that Khomeini’s books were either false, exaggerated, or misunderstood.4
Thus, the State Department and the CIA defended their false picture of Khomeini against all intrusion of reality. Remarkably, somewhat later the CIA asked Rosenfeld if he could lend the agency the edition of the book he had cited, since it did not have its own copy. So much for the most omniscient and cunning intelligence agency of the most omniscient and cunning government in the world.
T he hostage-taking burst upon such idyllic reveries like a storm. Bowden invokes the shock that this first encounter with real Islamism represented. He describes how “the entire professional frame of reference” of embassy chargé d’affaires Bruce E. Laingen had to be overturned. Before the hostage-taking, Laingen possessed, in Bowden’s expression, “a constitutional bias toward hope.” He strongly believed that “things were getting better [in Iran]” and put all his trust in “the power of polite dialogue between nations.” Laingen was, in Bowden’s words, “bewildered” by the events of November 4. “Why? To what end?” he wrote in his journal four days after the seizure of the embassy, “We have tried by every available means over the past month to demonstrate, by word and deed, that we accept the Iranian revolution, indeed, that we wish it well — that a society strongly motivated by religion is a society we, as a religious nation, can identify with.”
President Carter responded to the challenge by dispatching Ramsey Clark and William Miller, two long-time opponents of America’s alliance with the shah, to Tehran. They brought with them a letter signed by Carter that they were supposed to deliver to Khomeini. It contained the assurance that the shah would remain in the U.S. only for the duration of his illness, as well as an offer to procure access to the shah’s doctors for Iranian representatives. Second, Carter explicitly recognized the independence and territorial integrity of Iran and expressed his willingness to resume arms exports. Third, he politely asked Khomeini to have the hostages released (“I ask that you release unharmed all Americans presently detained in Iran”) and pleaded for dialogue: “I have asked both men to meet with you and to hear from you your perspective on events in Iran and the problems which have arisen between our two countries. The people of the United States desire to have relations with Iran based upon equality, mutual respect and friendship.”
Thus was the first approach by the American president to the leader of the Iranian Revolution. No one could regard the tone of this letter as provocative — above all, on the background of an act of violence that in other circumstances would have been treated as a declaration of war. What Bowden writes of Precht, the head of the Iran desk at the State Department, applies also to Carter: he “was less concerned with expressing American indignation than with persuasion. He wanted to convince the imam [Khomeini], not confront him.” In light of the content of the Carter letter, it is astonishing that it is precisely the U.S. that is continually blamed for the deterioration of relations between the countries.
Carter’s attempted gesture of goodwill was dashed by the stony determination of the ayatollah. Khomeini was not even prepared to permit American emissaries into the country — not even the likes of Miller and Clark. The catalogue of American punitive measures that would then be taken — the expulsion of some Iranian diplomats, as well as all Iranians in the U.S. illegally; the cessation of oil imports from Iran; the freezing of Iranian assets in U.S. banks — likewise failed to make the slightest impression.
As his next step, Carter, via French mediators, entered into drawn-out negotiations with Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and his minister of foreign affairs, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh: two high-profile but in comparison to Khomeini virtually powerless figures. The negotiations quickly took on a peculiar pattern that Bowden describes as follows: “Carter would latch on to a deal proffered by a top Iranian official and grant minor but humiliating concessions, only to have it scotched at the last minute by Khomeini.”
It was not until April 7, 1980 — the 154th day of the hostage crisis — that Carter finally broke off diplomatic relations and began to prepare economic sanctions. But not even this seemed to disturb Khomeini. On the contrary, in a message to the Iranian people, he declared: “If Carter has ever done anything in his life to serve the interests of the oppressed, it is this breaking off of relations between an ascendant country that has freed itself from the clutches of the international plunderers and a world-devouring plunderer.”5
A fter Iran’s Islamic Revolution of February 1979, the American government actively sought a modus vivendi with the new regime. The occupation of the embassy was the turning point in the relationship between Islam and the West. It set in motion the process that would issue in the Shiite suicide attacks of the 1980s. On April 18, 1983, Iranian-sponsored suicide bombers blew up the American embassy in Lebanon (50 dead, including 17 Americans). On October 23, 1983, Islamist terrorists destroyed the barracks of American and French troops in Beirut, killing 241 Americans and 58 French. On January 19, 1984, the president of the American University in Beirut was also killed by Islamists. As Khomeini celebrated the fifth anniversary of his revolution in February 1984, America, subjected to yet another humiliation, withdrew from Lebanon.
The Beirut attacks confronted the world with the efficacy of a weapon that in 1979 was still wholly unknown: the Islamically motivated suicide attack. Only a few years later, the Islamist movement would receive additional impetus through the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Since the end of Marxism, Islam has replaced it,” Ahmad Khomeini, the son of the revolutionary leader, boasted. In the context of the Cold War, Khomeinism was still just a phenomenon of peripheral importance. Since then — and especially since 9/11 — Islamism has arguably become the most important antipode to the West. Today, it represents the only movement capable of challenging global capitalism on a grand scale: with important financial resources, a global presence, and a unified ideology. Ahmadinejad is today exploiting this unique potential.
At the same time, the current Iranian strategy displays a perfect continuity with the strategy pursued by Iran in its first confrontation with America in 1979–1980. Now as then, the Iranian leadership rejects the un Security Council and declares its resolutions null and void (“The Security Council is illegitimate. Its resolutions are illegitimate.”).
Now as then, the West’s threatened sanctions are ridiculed (“The day on which your sanctions are applied will be a national holiday for us.”). Now as then, Europe is played off against America (“If the Europeans oppose us, they will be the ones to suffer the consequences.”). In 1980, when it was a matter of confronting an Iranian crime against American citizens, the European nato countries abandoned their American ally to its own devices. Today, Iran threatens Israel with a new Holocaust, sponsors Islamist terror worldwide, and violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. What is the international community prepared to do now?"
Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War With Militant Islam.
Mark Bowden. Atlantic Monthly Press. 704 pages. $26.
Review article from:The Hoover Institution
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4884331.html