Podcast: Jimmy Carter's Legacy (Script)

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You’re listening to Iran’s Weekly Wire; I’m Roland Elliott Brown.

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More than any other US President, Jimmy Carter’s years in office were defined by his dealings with Iran.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution took him, like everyone else, by surprise.

Many Iranian monarchists still blame him either for the fall of the Shah, or for mistreating the Shah after he fell.

Carter’s inability to free US Embassy staff taken hostage by Ayatollah Khomeini’s new regime cost him reelection in 1980. He still says his failure to rescue the hostages is his biggest regret.

Carter is 90 now. Earlier this month, he announced that he will undergo treatment for cancer. Most people are wishing him well, but they’re also talking about his legacy.

So this week, I’m going to look at the big decisions Jimmy Carter made about Iran.

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Jimmy Carter came into office in 1977, having made his name as the Democratic governor of Georgia. He was regarded as something of an outsider, in part because of his focus on human rights.

Inside Iran, the political opposition noticed him before he became president. Here’s Mansour Farhang. He’s a professor of international relations at Bennington College. But after the revolution, he became Iran’s ambassador to the UN.

[Mansour Farhang] It is very interesting that even before actually coming to office, during his campaign, for the first time in an American presidential election, he focused on the importance of human rights as a dimension in American foreign policy. It was a response to public opinion and an atmosphere created by the anti-war movement, anti-Vietnam war movement. So his campaign, and after he came to office, even during his inaugural, this emphasis on human rights had an influence on Iranian dissident movement. Even in prison I remember even Rafsanjani talking to me when I was in Iran during the first year of the revolution saying how important president Carter's defence of human rights and promotion of human rights influenced Iranian authorities to be somewhat less repressive, to be somewhat conciliatory to dissident elements in Iran.

Of course, the Shah took notice as well.. Here’s Mehrdad Khonsari, He worked as a diplomat under the Shah’s government.

[Mehrdad Khonsari] Well, within the Shah's government I think that many of the senior officials led by the Shah himself were cognisant of the fact that human rights had been mentioned in the course of the presidential campaign, and I think that they sort of saw that as something that the US might want to be critical of in its relations with Iran. They gave it in my view far greater credence in US-Iran relations than I think the Carter administration intended, although they sort of did not understand that this strategy was aimed primarily at the Soviet Union rather than Iran. But they took that, and in order to avoid further criticism, they in essence tried to restrict some of the more, you might say aggressive behaviour within the country, and within the security establishment, which some people believe may have resulted in things, you might say, getting out of hand.

Meanwhile, the US foreign policy establishment still saw the Shah as America’s most important ally in the Persian Gulf.

Here’s Gary Sick.  He served on the US National Security Council under presidents Ford and Carter.

[Gary Sick] Basically, and I think contrary to popular opinion, he accepted the fact that the US had developed a very close relationship with Iran, that Iran in fact was deputised to defend US interests in the region, this had been done by Nixon and Kissinger, and I think he accepted that, but he did think, and I think this was very obvious, that Iran could stand some improvement in the way it dealt with human rights and other issues, and he made that clear to the Shah in private conversations. But in terms of the strategic relationship, he recognised it as being critical, and basically he attempted to actually underwrite the Shah and keep him there.

In 1977, Carter visited Iran on New Year’s Eve. Toasting the Shah at a state dinner, he called Iran “an island of stability” in a troubled region.

But in late 1978, a series of mass protests and bloody retaliations by the Shah’s forces began to destabilize the Shah’s regime.

In September, soldiers massacred demonstrators in Jaleh square. The incident became known as “Black Friday,” and united opposition to the Shah.

During the Shiite Ashura festival in December, millions of demonstrators filled the streets, strikes paralyzed the country, and the Shah began to wobble.

Carter was slow to realise how quickly the situation was escalating.

[Gary Sick] He took for granted what a lot of people took for granted at that point, and that is that the Shah was an experienced statesman, he had been on the throne for many years, he had been through other crises, and that basically he could handle this situation. And by the time everybody realised, including the Shah, that it was pretty much out of control, it was really too late to do anything about it.

In January 1979, Carter sent an American general, Robert Huyser, to try to hold the Iranian military together. The mission failed.

About a week later, the Shah fled Iran. In February, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile.

The Shah went first to Egypt, then to Morocco, the Bahamas, and Mexico.

And he was not well. He was dying of cancer. He wanted to enter the US for treatment. Carter feared the consequences.

[Gary Sick] Carter had to make an initial decision to let the Shah into the country. That was a very very difficult and potentially meaningful decision. He was advised by his closest advisers, all of the people around him. Brzezinski, Vance, Mondale, Hamilton Jordan, etcetera, all the people in the high councils of the government met with him and argued that the Shah should be permitted to come into the country. Cy Vance, the secretary of State, was slow in coming to that opinion but finally did, and so Carter was surrounded by his entire most trusted staff, all of whom unanimously said that he should let the Shah into the country, and at that point, Carter looked at all his people and said okay, I hear what you're saying, but what are you going to tell me when  they take our people hostage in Iran?

And as everyone knows, that’s exactly what happened. The Shah entered the US in October 1979, and in November, students supporting Khomeini took over the US Embassy in Tehran.

But at first, Carter under underestimated the severity of the incident.

[Gary Sick] Carter I think like all of us believed that this was a political act, that was intended as a gesture, a kind of sit in, which was very popular in American colleges in the 60s and 70s, you basically go in, you make a dramatic gesture, you take over the administration building, in this case the embassy, and you sit there and get maximum publicity and then some people say okay, that's enough, now you've made your point. And I think most people anticipated that this would be a matter of a few days, maybe a week or two weeks at the most. And what nobody anticipated, at least in the West, and even in Iran, was that the government instead of going to them and saying, “Okay fellas, it's time to get out of the embassy,” actually joined them, and basically gave them the job of running the place. The students who had also anticipated that this would be a short term thing where they would come in, take over, make their political statement and then leave, suddenly found themselves running a prison, where they had over 50 prisoners. They had to feed and clothe them, they had to take care of them day by day, they turned into jailers. And they were completely unprepared for that, but they gradually fell into that job, and went on with it for 444 days.

As the crisis deepened, Carter applied pressure on Iran through the world court and the UN to get the hostages out. He imposed sanctions, and and threatened to blockade Iran’s ports.

He also asked his administration to find another country to host the Shah.

Here’s Mansour Farhang on how Carter’s decisions looked inside Iran.

[Mansour Farhang] My judgement is that with the best of intentions, President Carter made two decisions that were immensely helpful to the Islamists in Iran, because they used the hostage taking as an instrument of eliminating the liberals and the leftists from the revolutionary movement, and they used it very effectively. They literally stole the issue from the left, they generated a great deal of support inside the country, because of hostility and propaganda and the history of US-Iranian relations and all that. The first mistake was to permit the Shah to come to the US, but the second mistake, which was even worse, was to kick him out. By kicking him out, he projected weakness that Khomeini used it, and from then on, the slogan in Iran became Carter has to go, Carter bayad berevad.

Farhang also thinks Carter’s sanguine view of religion caused him to misread Khomeini.

[Mansour Farhang] Carter was deeply religious. And his religion was the liberal type of Christianity, the Unitarianism of Christianity. And so he was faithful to his religious values from a very progressive and peaceful perspective all his life. So he had a positive view of the religious motives of Ayatollah Khomeini. Carter was definitely, in the beginning, he did not see the dark side of Khomeini. He saw Khomeini as a religious man, as a spiritual man, and assumed that he would be able to negotiate with him, and would be able to reach an agreement with him. This was his line of thinking when he decided to kick the Shah out of the United states, so he turned out to be wrong, but he was not the only one who turned out to be wrong about Khomeini.

When Carter ran out of ways to negotiate with Khomeini, he decided to launch a military operation to rescue the hostages.

In August 1980, he ordered Operation Eagle Claw, an attempt by US special forces to free the hostages, and fly them out of Iran with helicopters.

The mission ended with an explosive helicopter crash in a sandstorm in Iran’s eastern desert, which killed eight American servicemen.

Khomeini gloated over Carter’s humiliation, saying that the sandstorm had been sent by God.

For Carter, the political consequences were devastating.

Here’s Mehrdad Khonsari:

[Mehrdad Khonsari] Obviously the failure of that mission essentially sealed his fate, and it showed to many people in the third world that it is not just people in the West or in the US who determine who the leaders of a country in a developing country can be, but, a third world leader like Khomeini can decide the fate of the American people as well, and that came out in a sort of decisive manner, that Khomeini could in fact determine who would be the next president of the United States.

Later that year, Carter lost the election to Ronald Reagan.

I asked Gary Sick how Iran affected Carter’s legacy.

[Gary Sick] I think it was dominant. A lot of people look back on the Carter Presidency, incorrectly I believe, and all they remember is the inability to get hostages out, the failure of the rescue mission, and the sense of kind of helplessness, and I can understand why people adopt that view, but I also think that that is not an accurate representation of Carter's record, actually in office. Carter accomplished a great many things including, especially, the Camp David Accords, which transformed the politics of the Middle East. And he did a number of other major things, both domestically and in foreign policy which were dramatic. He worked with the Russians, he set the ground basically for what was later going to be the fall of the Soviet Empire, and so forth. There were a whole series of things that he did, some of which did not happen on his watch, but happened later, but he had laid the groundwork for it, and I think in time, Carter is going to get credit for those things.

So how do Iranians remember Carter?

Some monarchists will never forgive him for what they see as his poor treatment of the Shah, or his willingness to let the revolution happen. Some of them even celebrated news of his illness. Here’s Mehrdad Khonsari.

[Mehrdad Khonsari] I was very very sad to hear that he is suffering, and that he will probably die very soon, and I was disgusted at the approach that some Iranians had on Facebook and social media in expressing joy in the sense that it is because they blame him for what happened to Iran, or what happened to the Shah in those days, and I felt that the kind of reaction which I saw on Facebook when his name came up in recent weeks was totally, it was very obnoxious and totally unacceptable, this kind of behaviour, it really made me sick.

Leading figures in the Islamic Republic condemn him for different reasons.

[Mansour Farhang] The Iranian regime, people like Rafsanjani and Khamenei, they have a completely hypocritical, dishonest view of Carter. In private they know that Carter's defence of human rights was immensely helpful to them in the beginning, but in public they demonise him.

And it’s not hard to see from those answers that not much has changed in the past 35 years. Here’s Gary Sick.

[Gary Sick] There has been no real evolution or change. I think the Iranian public had a view of Carter during this period which was not a positive view, but at the same time, they haven't thought about it very much. I mean, people in Iran don't go around wondering, what about Jimmy Carter? Iranians in this country, expatriates do in fact think about that a lot because they are Americans, and they are aware of the role of the United States and they feel, I think incorrectly, that Jimmy Carter was basically responsible for all of the terrible things that happened to them. In Iran, the media doesn't dwell on these issues. They have an annual celebration of the takeover of  the US embassy, which is, they bring people in by bus, they stand outside the embassy, they shout slogans for a while, then they go home. And that's about it. The Iranian public, for the most part the Iranians I talk to are scarcely, they just don't think about these things very much. The hostage crisis is a huge issue in American politics, and I think correctly so. I think it was a major catastrophe for the United States, which actually was perceived that way in Iran. But in Iran, they just said let's moved on, and they don't think about that very much, so in my view I don't think people in Iran necessarily love Jimmy Carter, I don’t think they necessarily hate him, but they have a view which is created by the events of the time and the propaganda of the time, and that really hasn't changed.

These days, Carter is still thinking about Iran. Back in July, he hailed the nuclear deal between Iran and the US as “a major step in the right direction.”

But at the press conference where he announced his illness, a reporter asked him if there was anything he wished he had done differently as president.

He said he wished he had sent one more helicopter to rescue the hostages.

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That’s all from Iran’s Weekly Wire. If you want to find out more about Iran today, you can join us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit IranWire.com.