There is a deafening silence from all those students and street demonstrators who agitated so noisily against the Shah of Iran last year. There are no organized protests against the hundreds of secret trials and summary executions taking place under the reign of the so-called “holy man,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The Carter Administration is no longer demanding that political prisoners be released from Iranian jails. Yet many Iranian observers say that Khomeini now has more political prisoners in jail than the Shah had two years ago when he was still at the height of his power.
Why have all those once-talkative saurces become mute? Are they glad that the most progressive ruler in Iran’s history, who was pro-American, pro-Western, and a military ally of tremendous Strategic importance and economic necessity, has been replaced with a gang of fanatics who are virulently anti-American, anti-Semitic, and who have doubled in speed the alleged sins of the Shah?
The Shah’s police arrested and imprisoned for the sake of preventing the overthrow of the government by force and violence, especially after the Communist coup in Afghanistan started a massive infiltration of Soviet K.G.B. agents, spies, and troublemakers across their common border. Today under Khomeini’s kangaroo-court rule, according to an Iranian journalist interviewed by the Washington Post, “there are no criteria for justice retribution, arrest or detention. There are no criteria for punishment, which is purely arbitrary. It’s straw-vote justice and straw-vote punishment.”
Under Khomeini, the “Khomitehs,” or Committees, round up defendants for the secret revolutionary courts which then make decisions capriciously, without any standards. For example, a 72-year-old colonel, retired for 20 years, was arrested “by mistake” and found not guilty, but then the authorities demanded the equivalent of $71,000 in “bail” to release him.
The Khomeini courts follow the Systematic Marxist practice of liquidating the. leadership class. Khomeini’s prison director admits to holding 1,700 political prisoners who were connected with the previous government. Informed observers believe the number is far higher. Red Cross interviews have uncovered arbitrary arrests, confiscation of property, refusal to allow defense lawyers, and demands for large bribes.
In reciting the offenses against human rights by the new Iranian rulers, we cannot shrug our shoulders with the old French saying, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The cost to Americans is fundamentally, expensively, and tragically different,
Under the Shah, Iran was a tremendous military asset. It provided military stability to the Middle East and was a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Iran gave the United States indispensable bases near the Soviet Union to monitor its missile launches. Iran sold oil to us, Israel, and Western Europe,
That’s all gone under Khomeini. Today, Iran is a mass of political, military, and economic instability. It is an invitation to Soviet expansionism. We are already paying part of the cost in gasoline lines in the United States and in our pledge to make up for Israel’s loss of Iranian oil.
To partially replace our missile monitoring bases in Iran, we must now ask Turkey to loan us bases for U-2 intelligence flights. But Turkey, realizing what a bind we are in, has decided to hold our feet to the fire and make us pay and pay. Turkey’s price is $1 billion a year for at least five years.
Who is to blame for the conversion of Iran from a pro-American military ally and economic partner into an anti-American dictatorship which has many more faults than the Shah and none of his assets?
President Carter invited the Shah to Washington for a state visit in November 1977 and allowed him to be insulted and tear-gassed in front of the White House by thousands of terrorist demonstrators. This public offense to a visiting head of state was accompanied by private demands that the Shah abandon his internal security against Marxist agitators, open Iranian jails, and allow terrorists and subversives to agitate freely. When the Shah was overthrown in February, only a few dozen political prisoners were in jail.
Even the Communist coup in Afghanistan in April 1978 brought no change in Carter’s demands on the Shah. The Carter Administration simply closed its eyes to the massive evidence of Soviet K.G.B. agents moving across the Afghan border into Iran, the propaganda and espionage coming out of the Soviet Embassy in Teheran, and The Communist Party’s support of Khomeini.
The loss of Iran could not have happened without the active complicity of the Carter Administration. It was a deliberate policy that resulted in no gains, but incalculable costs.
