Reagan and Iran----the Battle Ahead : President Manages to Score a Nearly Perfect Failure

The Bay of Pigs was once described as “that rarest of all political-military events, a perfect failure.” But perfect failures are no longer so rare as they were in 1961.

Thus, matching John F. Kennedy’s achievement at the Bay of Pigs, Jimmy Carter in 1980 racked up a perfect failure of his own when Desert One, the military operation to rescue the American hostages then being held in our embassy in Tehran, was literally unable to get off the ground. In 1982 Ronald Reagan followed suit by sending the Marines into Lebanon on an ill-defined mission and refusing to retaliate when more than 200 of them were murdered by terrorists.

Now Reagan, topping both Kennedy and Carter, has scored another perfect failure in his policy toward Iran.

It can, of course, be argued that the negative perfection of Reagan’s secret decision to ship arms to Iran has been marred by the return of three American hostages who were being held in Lebanon by terrorists under Iranian control. But Reagan and his people cannot claim this as a success without admitting that they were doing what they had said they would never do, and still, even today, deny that they did. “Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands,” the President declared in his speech last week. “We did not--repeat--did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”

Yet suppose that with Whitmanesque bravado (“Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman once asked. “Very well, then, I contradict myself”), Reagan were to cite the release of the three hostages as evidence that his policy has been successful. He would still be faced with the awkward fact that the freed hostages have already been replaced by three other Americans seized by Iranian-backed terrorists since the arms shipments began. No spoiling of the perfect failure there.

But what about the geopolitical purpose of the policy? May it not be that something good will come of this effort to help the “moderate” forces in their struggle with the radicals for control of Iran after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dies?

It is hard to see how. Certainly the United States has a vital strategic interest in keeping Iran from falling under Soviet influence. Certainly, too, we would benefit from a lessening of Iranian hostility toward the West.

But how could Reagan’s policy have been expected to further these objectives? It is one thing to help a friendly faction fighting a regime unfriendly to us. This is what we are doing in Angola and Nicaragua, and we are right to do it. We are also capable of doing it. Even those who mistakenly believe that we are on the wrong side in those two conflicts acknowledge that we have the power and the means to strengthen the side that we’ve chosen.

Neither of these conditions obtains in Iran. First of all, we have been shipping arms not to an insurgency trying to topple the anti-American Khomeini regime but to supposedly moderate elements within that regime itself.

Second, it seems highly doubtful that anyone in Washington knows enough about those elements to know who they really are or understands the political situation in Iran well enough to maneuver effectively there. The last time that we intervened in the politics of Iran (by pressuring the shah into liberal reforms that were offensive to Islam), we helped trigger the very revolution whose effects we are now trying to undo. What makes the people in Washington think that they can find their way any more sure-footedly today through an even more inscrutable political maze?

The answer is that they relied on the Israelis who, presumably, understand Iran better than we do. Yet, with all due respect to the legendary accomplishments of their intelligence service, the Israelis have not shown much greater skill than we have in their efforts to reshape the internal politics of other countries. Their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 is a significant case in point.

Finally, even if the covert arms shipments to Iran could be justified on geopolitical grounds, they were bound to make matters worse the minute they came to light, as it was inevitable they eventually would. Reagan should have anticipated this inevitability. Obviously he did not.

No spoiling of the perfect failure there, either.

There is, however, one small flaw in the otherwise unmarred record of this policy. It has been taken for granted that paying ransom to terrorist kidnapers represents a shocking deviation from Reagan’s own past practice. If that were so, it would undoubtedly enhance the negative perfection of the policy.

The problem is that as recently as the summer of 1985 Reagan did much the same thing. Announcing (again with bravado though without Whitmanesque candor) that “the United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees,” he secured the release of hostages from a hijacked TWA flight precisely by persuading the Israelis to give the terrorists the very rewards that they were demanding.

A little spoiling, then, of the perfect failure there. But not enough, surely, to disqualify this latest and most devastating of Reagan’s blows to the anti-terrorist cause from taking its place as another worthy successor to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs and Carter’s Desert One.