'The Crisis': Reading the Future in Tehran

Kenneth Pollack, The NY Times:

For most of the last 50 years or so, the United States has neglected the Muslim states of the greater Middle East. Neglected not in the sense of ignoring them -- we certainly have been forced to pay attention -- but in the sense of doing painfully little to help them develop economically, politically and socially. We have rarely applied much pressure to the autocrats of the region, nor have we been willing to invest significant economic resources or political clout to make it more attractive for them to liberalize.

In the coffee shops of the Middle East, where only conspiracies are believed and the simple truth is considered naivete or duplicity, America's motives are invariably assumed to be malicious. The conspiracy theorists are nearly always wrong. But there's no question that our neglect has contributed to many of the area's problems.

Sept. 11, 2001, was not the first time this neglect cost us dearly. There were plenty of other dates before it. The first was Nov. 4, 1979. On that day, 300 zealous Iranian college students stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took 66 American marines and diplomats hostage in a crisis that would last over a year. (Three of them were trapped in the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and 14 would be released for different reasons in subsequent months.)

The story of the origins of that crisis should by now be disturbingly familiar. The United States backed a friendly autocrat, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who repressed his people. The result was tremendous popular animosity toward him, and toward the United States for being his ally. When the pressure reached the bursting point, America was as much a target of Iranian furor as the shah himself. For nearly a year after his fall, Iranians looked for a way to lash out at the United States, until those 300 college students showed them how.

In truth, in Iran as elsewhere in the Middle East today, America's sins were principally those of omission, not commission. Of course, the Eisenhower administration had toppled the popular government of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 -- an event that has reached mythic proportions in Iranian minds. Thereafter, however, the United States paid little attention to what the reinstalled shah did. The Kennedy administration pressed him to reform, and got some traction for a brief time. But during the Johnson and especially the Nixon years, Washington simply stopped caring how the shah ruled. This was little understood by Iranians, who believed the United States was manipulating every development in their country.

Our painful experience with revolutionary Iran should teach us that there are other threats from America's neglect of the Muslim Middle East besides Osama bin Ladin and Al Qaeda. In the midst of a new war on terror, it is worth remembering the anger and frustration that Americans felt during those 444 days, when we first found ourselves attacked by an adversary who hated us with a fury we did not understand, motivated by beliefs we did not understand and pursuing a logic we did not understand. The danger that we face today is that the past could be our future if we are not willing to try to help the Middle East progress -- though slowly, very slowly, because haste could cause the same kinds of problems we are trying to avoid. ...