The real explanation for why the great United States had to endure weeks of unprecedented national humiliation and mistreatment of our citizens at the embassy in Teheran was contained in a small AP dispatch which didn’t even reach the top of the news. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko assured Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that the Soviet Union would not tolerate U.S. military action against Iran.
Why didn’t the United States try to duplicate the brilliant and daring Israeli commando raid on the Fourth of July, 1976, which rescued 104 hostages from terrorists at the Uganda airport? The military superiority of the United States over Iran, and our capability to carry out such a raid, is at least as great as the superiority of Israel over Uganda.
Why didn’t the United States emulate the repeatedly successful tactics used by our police departments in rescuing hostages from snipers, hijackers and other varieties of madmen who grab hostages and then hurl their unreasonable demands on society? The police surround the criminal, isolate him, and cut off all communication and supplies, until he knows that he is cornered like a rat, soon to be without food, and then he usually becomes more reasonable.
Iran imports at least 30 percent of its food. To blockade Iran and cut off its food supply would have been an easy mission for the U.S. Navy. The Soviet Union, which is in short food supply itself because of poor grain harvests, would not have been able to feed Iran.
So why were we humiliated for weeks, with embassy personnel tied up, while the international blackmailers reviled us and marched through the streets in the largest anti-American demonstration in history. Some reports estimated the angry, shouting, anti-American mob at a million persons.
For years, the American people have been told we must bend our military and diplomatic policies because of an undefinable something called “world opinion.” What if there is any such thing as world opinion, it is with us and the hostages, and against the Khomeini regime which has violated all rules of international conduct.
But Khomeini cares absolutely nothing about world opinion. Like other dictators of the world, he cares only for power. He knows he is safe from the mighty American Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marines because the United States does not dare to use them after Gromyko says “Nyet.”
Gromyko is not a magician who can weave a spell or a prophet who has a supernatural gift. The power he holds up his sleeve is the power of Soviet nuclear-weapons superiority over the United States. The holding of American hostages in Teheran is only one little taste of what that superiority can do.
Soviet strategic superiority is the reason why President Carter cannot make the Russians take their combat troops out of Cuba. He doesn’t even dare to ask them.
If we cannot make the Soviets take their troops out of Cuba, we cannot make them take out their missiles, bombers, or submarines.
Treaties, negotiations, the United Nations, and “world opinion” are all irrelevancies in the real world. Power is what determines whether nations live or die, whether freedom endures or perishes, and whether civilization is sustained or is trampeled on by the barbarians.
So the issue in Iran is the same as the issue in Cuba and is the same as the issue in SALT II: which is the preeminent world power, America or Russia? Iran and Cuba have answered that question for today. SALT II will answer that question for our lifetime, and maybe for all the foreseeable future because it accords to the Soviets the right to build every weapon they could conceivably want in order to control the world, and it prohibits us from ever catching up.
The solution is to start a crash strategic weapons-building program immediately in order to restore America to its place in world leadership. We need B-1s and MXs and mobile Minuteman IIIs and Tridents and a modern Navy and anti-ballistic missiles and civil defense. The total price tag on all the weapons we need is still cheaper than the colossal loss we would suffer if we are cut off from the 40 percent of our oil, which comes from Africa and the Middle East.
