Tag: Iran

Miss Lambton’s advice

On By Martin Kramer

Ann (Nancy) K.S. Lambton, the distinguished British historian of medieval and modern Iran, died on July 19 at the age of 96. Her obituaries tell some of her remarkable story as a pioneering scholar and a formidable personality. They are also interesting for what they omit, regarding her role in the idea of removing Mohammad Mossadegh from power in Iran.

The Independent obit says nothing. The Times obit makes an all-too-brief allusion: “She was consulted by British officials on developments in Irano-British relations, especially during the crisis in 1951 when Iran’s Prime Minister, Muhammad Mussadiq, caused a furore by nationalising British oil interests in Iran.” Yet we are not told exactly what she proposed in these consultations. The Telegraph is more explicit: “Lambton’s insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Iran’s then prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, proved a valuable aid to Britain’s eventual success, in concert with America, in precipitating an end to Mossadegh’s premiership and in ensuring a continued, though reduced, British share in Iran’s oil production.” Yet we are not told just how she imparted these “insights,” or why they were “valuable.” The Guardian quotes a historian as saying her advice “marked the beginnings” of the 1953 coup, but does not explain what she advised or how she had such a profound effect. So what is the fuller story behind these allusions?

In 1951, Ann Lambton was a Reader in Persian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She had many connections in Whitehall, and her standing as an oracle on matters of Persian politics was unassailable. She had completed her doctorate in 1939 after a year of field work in Iran, and then spent the war years as press attaché in the British Legation (later Embassy) in Tehran, under the most seasoned of old hands, Sir Reader Bullard. She also came from a prominent landed family with assorted estates (including, yes, a Lambton Castle)—an advantage of pedigree that largely made up for what still was, in those days, a gender deficiency. When Nancy Lambton spoke, people listened—and when it came to Mohammad Mossadegh, she had strong views.

The historian Wm. Roger Louis first went through the British archives on the Mossadegh affair just after they were opened in the early 1980s, and he has told the story three times, in two books and an article (most recently here). “Here the historian treads on patchy ground,” warns Louis. “The British archives have been carefully ‘weeded’ in order to protect identities and indeed to obscure the truth about British complicity.” But he came across the minutes of conversations between Lambton and a Foreign Office official who described her as someone who knew Iran “better than anyone else in this country.”

Lambton, the official reported in June 1951, “was of the decided opinion that it was impossible to do business” with Mossadegh, and that no concessions should be made to him. She urged “covert means” to undermine his position, consisting of support for Iranians who would speak out against him, and stirring opposition to him “from the bazaars upwards.” The official added: “Miss Lambton feels that without a campaign on the above lines it is not possible to create the sort of climate in Tehran which is necessary to change the regime.” He then relayed her practical recommendation: entrust the mission to Robert (Robin) Zaehner, a quixotic Oxford don and former intelligence agent, fully fluent in Persian, whom Lambton described as “the ideal man” for the job. On Lambton’s recommendation, the Foreign Office dispatched Zaehner to Tehran, where he put together a network of disaffected opponents of Mossadegh’s regime.

This effort came to naught, partly because the Truman Administration still thought the British should deal with Mossadegh. In November 1951, Lambton complained: “The Americans do not have the experience or the psychological insight to understand Persia.” But she did not relent: “If only we keep steady, Dr. Mossadegh will fall. There may be a period of chaos, but ultimately a government with which we can deal will come back.” Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, added this note: “I agree with Miss Lambton. She has a remarkable first hand knowledge of Persians & their mentality.”

Yet Mossadegh hung on, and a year later he shut down the British diplomatic mission. According to Lambton’s Foreign Office contact, she thought that the British policy of not making “unjustifiable concessions” to Mossadegh “would have been successful had it not been for American vacillations,” and she insisted that “it is still useless to accept any settlement” with Mossadegh, “because he would immediately renege.”

This was the prevailing British view, and persistence ultimately paid off. In November 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was elected U.S. president, and the new team in Washington took a very different (and dimmer) view of Mossadegh. Anthony Eden met with the president-elect to discuss “the Persia question,” and the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt and Donald Wilbur set in motion the wheels of the August 1953 coup—an American-led, joint CIA-MI6 production.

“In that [first] minute [of June 1951],” writes historian Louis, “may thus be found the origins of the ‘Zaehner mission’ and the beginnings of the 1953 coup.” Louis asserts that “the archives, for better or worse, link Professor Lambton with the planning to undermine Musaddiq.” He notes that “Lambton herself, as if wary of future historians, rarely committed her thoughts on covert operations to writing. The quotations of her comments by various officials, however, are internally consistent and invariably reveal a hard-line attitude towards Musaddiq.”

In the latest 2006 retelling of the tale by Louis, he has somewhat trimmed his estimate of Lambton’s role. “I have the impression from the minutes,” he writes in a footnote, “that the officials quoting [Lambton] sometimes wanted to invoke her authority to lend credibility to their own views.” Louis also adds that Lambton’s “views were entirely in line with those of other British authorities on Iran.” In other words, she was urging them to think or do something they already thought or wanted to do anyway, but for which they needed an authoritative footnote.

But there can be no doubt that her advice bolstered the advocates of toughing it out and bringing Mossadegh down. The obits tend to downplay this story because the 1953 coup has come to be seen as some sort of original sin—as the root cause of the Islamic revolution that unfolded a full quarter-century later. But wherever one puts the 1953 coup in the great chain of causation, Lambton’s assessments at the time should inspire awe. Years of experience in Iran, exact knowledge of Persian, and wide travels within the country, all had led her to conclude that Mossadegh could be pushed out, as against the view that he had to be accommodated. She was right. Given the propensity of Western experts on Iran to get so many things wrong over the years, Lambton’s call is all the more remarkable.

The present incumbents in power in Iran are careful to shut out Western Orientalists, not because they fear the situation in Iran will be misrepresented but because it might be accurately represented, exposing the weaknesses of their regime. The historian Ervand Abrahamian, mentioning Lambton (and Zaehner), writes that it should not be surprising that the coup “gave rise to conspiracy theories [among Iranians], including cloak and dagger stories of Orientalist professors moonlighting as spies, forgers, and even assassins. Reality—in this case—was stranger than fiction.” The reality is that it isn’t easy to hide one’s vulnerabilities from an intimate stranger such as Lambton. The fear of Orientalist professors, both there and here, has never been that they might get things wrong, but that they are very likely to get them right.

Originally posted at Middle East Strategy at Harvard.

The Wilson Center held hostage

On By Martin Kramer

Outrage is building over the affair of Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. In December, she went to Tehran to visit her 93-year-old mother, a trip she’d made in the past. This time, she was detained and interrogated, and on May 8 she was thrown into the notorious Evin prison. Esfandiari has been pulled down into the Kafkaesque realm that lies just beneath the surface of Iran–a realm so remote from us that it might as well exist in another dimension.

My own vantage point on this story isn’t remote. I’ve done two stretches at the Wilson Center, the first as a fellow, the second as a public policy scholar. I know Esfandiari, and I’ve known her husband, Shaul Bakhash, even longer–from my graduate student days, when he came out of Khomeini’s Iran and landed in Princeton. I’ve participated in Wilson Center events organized by Esfandiari, and in the fall I wrote a piece for the latest issue of her newsletter, devoted to last summer’s Lebanon war. The issue is a typical Esfandiari product, bringing together an Israeli, an Iranian, a Lebanese, a Syrian, a Turk, and an American. Disclaimer for what follows: the people and the institution are dear to me.

There’s been considerable speculation as to why the Iranian regime decided to turn Esfandiari into a hostage. Well, why not? Let’s remember who we’re dealing with: a clique of messianic-minded, nuke-bent, Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorists who’ve embedded themselves in positions of power, from which they occasionally extend a black hand to haul someone down into their depths. It’s the very nature of the regime, and it would be surprising if it didn’t claim an innocent victim from time to time, to feed the mania.

The only surprise is the choice of Esfandiari. She’s not a dissident campaigner, and she hasn’t made a career of challenging or provoking the regime. But it turns out she’s a very convenient proxy hostage. Her tormentors are using her to humiliate the Wilson Center and, through it, the United States Congress and the U.S. government, which are the mainstays of the Center.

In the campaign to free Esfandiari, there’s been a tendency to obscure this truth, by keeping the focus solely on her, or making inaccurate assertions about the Wilson Center. For example, the Voice of America, in reporting the affair, described the Wilson Center as a “non-governmental academic Center.” It’s a misleading description for an institution established by an act of Congress (PL 90-637, 1968) as the nation’s official memorial to Woodrow Wilson. The President of the United States appoints its board of trustees, Congress provides a third of its budget, and the Center is housed in a wing of the Ronald Reagan Building, a federal complex.

It’s because the Wilson Center inhabits this liminal space between academe and government that it’s a perfect focus for Iranian conspiracy theories. These are on dramatic display in the May 21 statement on Esfandiari issued by the Iranian intelligence ministry. “Certain U.S. institutes, foundations, and organizations [are] aimed at influencing the developments in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the statement asserts. Behind these façades, an “unseen key role [is] played by certain intelligence agents and undercover officials in pushing forth the objectives of such projects.” In particular, the Wilson Center, “whose budget is allocated by the U.S. Congress…. is the connection ring between the Iranians and the U.S. organizations and foundations whose main objective is fortifying the social trends that act in line with the interests of the aliens…. The ultimate goal of those foundations… is aimed at soft overthrowing of the system.”

When the Wilson Center went public with Esfandiari’s case, it revealed that her interrogation focused on its activities, not on anything Esfandiari had said or written.

The [Iranian] questioning [of Esfandiari] focused almost entirely on the activities and programs of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center. Dr. Esfandiari answered all questions fully; when she understandably could not remember details of programs stretching back five and even eight years, the staff at the Wilson Center provided her all the information requested…. Repeatedly during the interrogation, Dr. Esfandiari was pressured to make a false confession or to falsely implicate the Wilson Center in activities in which it had no part.

The Wilson Center’s statement then summarized a letter sent by Center president and director Lee Hamilton to Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad on February 20. In it, Hamilton went to extraordinary lengths to portray the Wilson Center as a simple podium:

[Hamilton] pointed out the obvious: that the Wilson Center’s mission is to provide a forum for the exchange of views; that the Wilson Center does not take positions on issues; and that it does not try to influence or to determine specific policies or directions of the Iranian Government or any government in the Middle East. He pointed out that there is no “agenda” behind Wilson Center programs on the Middle East, including Iran; that he would not allow it; nor would Dr. Esfandiari.

It’s clear, then, that the Wilson Center itself is at issue, and I confess that I stirred uneasily when I read this statement. For while it’s absolutely true that Wilson Center programs have no “agenda,” the Wilson Center does have a mission, and it goes beyond serving as a “forum for the exchange of views.” Hamilton may have found it politic to blur or omit the rest of this mission in his appeal to Ahmadinejad, but Iran’s thugs shouldn’t be allowed to presume, even for a moment, that their act of intimidation has compromised it in any way.

The Wilson Center’s mission statement is explicit: “The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars aims to unite the world of ideas to the world of policy by supporting pre-eminent scholarship and linking that scholarship to issues of concern to officials in Washington.” The Wilson Center seeks “to bridge the gap between the world of ideas and the world of policy, bringing them into creative contact, enriching the work of both, and enabling each to learn from the other.” The Center is “not an advocacy think tank developing specific policy recommendations,” but neither is it just a talk shop: “The Center’s outreach emphasizes contacts between scholars and public officials in Congress and the Executive Branch.”

The Wilson Center didn’t always have this clear mandate to engage government. I have a brochure published exactly twenty years ago, defining the mission in a much more diffuse way. There was no explicit mention of contacts between scholars and U.S. officials back then. The Center’s role was to promote “fundamental studies which will illuminate our understanding of past and present.” During my first fellowship, in 1989, the Center had the feel of an academic humanities center transplanted from a campus. (It even had a campus ambience: back then, it still resided in the Smithsonian Castle, and I spent the year way up in the clock tower–truly the closest thing to an ivory tower in Washington.) The director in those days, Charles Blitzer, a man of vast erudition who’d specialized in seventeenth-century English political theory, previously headed the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and he ran the Wilson Center in the same spirit. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1990 portrayed the Center as a “haven” from “Washington’s seductions,” and noted that Blitzer had “tried to increase the emphasis on pure scholarship–provoking some controversy in the process.”

That controversy nearly wrecked the Center. In the mid-1990s, the Center came under assault by Republicans in Congress, and especially Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), who chaired the subcommittee overseeing the Center’s budget. “I don’t see much in the way of tangible benefit [of the Wilson Center] to the people or to the government,” Regula said, in proposing its phase-out. “Many of the members [of Congress] I’ve talked to don’t even know what it is.” At one hearing, Regula contemptuously read out a list of some of the more arcane research projects the Wilson Center had sponsored. At about the same time, the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) issued a report criticizing the Center for not contributing to policy debates in Washington. Democrats in Congress had to work hard to save the Center from extinction, and Blitzer (for whom I had a great affection) chose to step down.

The reinvention of the Wilson Center began in 1999, when Lee Hamilton took over. Coming straight from 35 years in Congress, he knew how to manage the critics on the Hill. But more important, he came with a vision of a different kind of Center, one closely attuned to informing foreign policy debates. When I returned to the Wilson Center as a public policy scholar in 2000, the Hamilton era was well underway. The Center had moved into spanking new quarters, and every program had been realigned with the mission of policy relevance. Personally, I liked the change, and it suited me while I wrote about a third of my book Ivory Towers on Sand–to be precise, the chapters on the policy irrelevance of Middle Eastern studies.

The Wilson Center today is a privileged conduit between government and academe, and it’s now urgent to defend that space against its enemies, foreign and domestic. Abroad, there are Middle Eastern governments like Iran’s, which cannot imagine an institution like the Wilson Center as anything but a front for espionage and subversion. But the academic left in America is as doctrinaire as Iran’s fanatics in shunning the United States government as though it were the Great Satan incarnate.

An example is Ervand Abrahamian, an Iran specialist at the City University of New York, who said this in response to Esfandiari’s arrest: “It has to be stressed that scholars such as Haleh have nothing to do with U.S. policy of ‘regime change.’ We academics need to distance ourselves from policy makers in D.C.” Abrahamian is right about Esfandiari–she hasn’t been an advocate of regime change–but he’s utterly ignorant of the Wilson Center’s mission, which is to engage policy makers on a continuous basis. If Wilson Center fellows distanced themselves from policy makers, there would be no point in the taxpayer maintaining them in Washington. The Center’s fellows and staff could be dispersed to the universities, where they could talk to one another and to Abrahamian–on someone else’s tab.

So the Esfandiari affair is really about this: her right, and the right of all scholars, to enjoy open and private contacts with U.S. policy makers and U.S. public officials. This too is an element of academic freedom, and it’s precisely this element that’s under assault by Iran in Esfandiari’s case. This is why I’m pleased to see the likes of the Middle East Studies Association rising to Esfandiari’s defense: inadvertently, no doubt, they’re defending the mission of the Wilson Center, and the right of every scholar to enter and inhabit that space between academe and government, without being accused, Iran-style, of espionage, collusion, or complicity.

One spin on the Esfandiari case actually undermines that right. Robin Wright of the Washington Post, who can be relied upon to get everything wrong, described the arrest of Esfandiari and other “soft hostages” as “an Iranian reaction to the Bush administration’s $75 million program to promote democracy in Iran.” The Wilson Center even felt compelled to note that it doesn’t receive funding from that pot. Come on. For nearly thirty years, Iran’s leaders have lived in the certainty that Washington is running a massive covert operation to subvert them, one that makes $75 million look like chump change. If they’ve decided you’re a part of the plot, one more proof against you is that you don’t get a share of the overt money. So repeat after me: It’s not Bush’s fault. If you split the responsibility for Esfandiari’s fate, you’re helping to seal it, and undercutting everyone else’s academic freedom.

So what is to be done by the rest of us, beyond signing petitions? (I signed this one.) I don’t support the idea of an academic boycott of Iranian scholars, but Iran’s official representatives are another matter. For example, there’s Iran’s smooth-talking ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who’s finishing his stint in New York. He did the rounds of universities and think tanks this spring, even as Iran barred Esfandiari from leaving his country. Zarif spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations (March 27), the Nixon Center (March 29), and Columbia University’s Middle East Seminar (May 2), and I saw him perform via video link at Harvard University’s Belfer Center (May 8–the day Esfandiari was thrown into prison). No academic institution or think tank should agree to host him, his successor, or any other Iranian official until Esfandiari is freed. Collegial solidarity demands no less, and allows no exceptions.

Beyond that, I recommend doing what I’ve just done: make a gift to the Wilson Center. You don’t have to agree with everything it’s sponsored over the last few years to cherish what it legitimizes: scholarship in the nation’s service.

Finally, as someone who’s appreciated the transformation Lee Hamilton has wrought at the Wilson Center, I’d like him to reassure the American people, as well as Ahmadinejad, that the Wilson Center won’t depart from the course he set for it. Indeed, even as Esfandiari languishes in prison, it’s incumbent on the Wilson Center to sponsor discussion and analysis of what her arrest tells us about the situation in Iran (nothing good, I believe), and convey that to officials in Congress and the Executive Branch.

May Haleh soon be among us again.

Update, May 29: A spokesman for Iran’s judiciary made this announcement today: “Esfandiari has been formally charged with endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners. She has been informed of the charges against her.”

Geopolitics of the Jews

On By Martin Kramer

Over the winter, I gave a short address to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, at a meeting in Jerusalem. I took the assignment seriously, and offered these thoughts, more to highlight problems than offer solutions. In this week between Holocaust Memorial Day and Israel’s Independence Day, I share them for wider reflection.

The title of our panel is “Looking Back, Looking Ahead: The Geopolitical Situation of the Jewish People.” This is a moving target: the geopolitical situation of the Jews hasn’t ever been stable. As a people, our geopolitics are one part our preferences, and two parts historical forces. These forces never rest. Seventy years ago, the Jewish world was centered in Europe. Now we mostly just fly over it. The United States and Israel are today the poles of the Jewish world, because some Jews sensed tremors before the earthquake. When the earth opened up and Europe descended into the inferno, parts of the Jewish people already had a Plan B in place. We are living that Plan B.

Today the Jewish people is in an enviable geopolitical position. It has one foot planted in a Jewish sovereign state, and the other in the world’s most open and powerful society. One is tempted to say that never in their long history has the geopolitical situation of the Jews been better. Jews did have sovereignty before, in antiquity, but they did not have a strategic alliance with the greatest power on earth. And since it is difficult to imagine a better geopolitical position, the Jewish people has become a status quo people. Once we were revolutionaries; now we don’t need the world to change. Of course we would like an improvement in Israel’s standing with some of its neighbors—what dreamers call “peace.” But we are generally confident or complacent enough to prefer the status quo to the risks of changing it.

Yet as we all should know, history stops for no man, and for no people. I was trained as a historian, and while this gives me no powers of prophecy, I can assure you of one thing. What is, will not be. Balances of power will change. Identities will be recast. Eventually, too, the map of the Middle East will be redrawn.

When we worry, we tend to focus on apocalyptic scenarios. But I invite you to think for a moment about five long-term trends that could erode the status quo, but that fall short of a mushroom cloud. I will proceed from the far to the near, and I will focus on the Israeli side of the equation.

First, U.S. influence in the Middle East could wane. Perhaps you have read the article by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, entitled “The New Middle East.” He wrote: “Less than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the American era in the Middle East… has ended….  The second Iraq war… has precipitated its end.” I think this is premature—America’s era in the Middle East will end one day, but it hasn’t ended yet, and it will take more than Iraq to end it. But Haass’s statement is indicative of a spreading mood. Add this to technological change that could reduce American dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and it is possible that in twenty years’ time, America will be less interested and engaged in the Middle East. What is our Plan B then?

Second, Europe could be subtracted from the sum power of the West. The trends there, of low birth rates, Muslim immigration, multiculturalism—if they are not stopped or reversed, they could have the effect of de-Westernizing Europe. Europe, even without Jews, is part of a cultural and strategic continuum, linking Israel to America. Without that link, Israel would become still more encircled by Islam-inflected hostility. So what is our Plan B then?

Third, Iran could gain regional power status. In fact, the imperial ambition of Iran may be a long-term trend independent of the nature of its regime. Iran could become Israel’s regional rival, even if it postpones its nuclear plans and drops Ahmadinejad. Iran is already using every ounce of its leverage to establish its dominance in Iraq and its influence elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. If Iran emerges as a power on par with Israel—a power intent on drawing Israel into a long cold war of attrition—what is our Plan B?

Fourth, the Arab states around us could succumb to the same sort of disease that is causing Iraq to hemorrhage internally. That disease is the lack of legitimacy. When you look at a map of the Middle East, you are looking at a gerrymandered hodgepodge, drawn a century ago to serve the interests of the long-defunct empires of Britain and France. If Iraq breaks up—and I believe it will—other states could begin to crumble. In some places, it might be Shiites against Sunnis; elsewhere, Islamists against nationalists. This could engulf states on Israel’s borders, and Israel could find itself opposite not one Hezbollah but many. So what is our Plan B?

Fifth, and closest to home, there is the possibility that the two-state solution will become passé, because the Palestinians will fail as a nation. By failure I mean they will not have the cohesion necessary to translate their identity into nation-statehood. Many in Israel presently speak as if the creation of a Palestinian state is essential to Israel’s own legitimacy and even survival. But what if such a state proves to be impossible? A binational state, Israeli-Palestinian, is anathema, so what is our Plan B?

Now one would have to be a grim pessimist to believe that all five of these trends could merge into a perfect storm. But one would have to be an incurable optimist to believe that that we won’t be lashed by any of these storms. And what I am arguing is that we should anticipate conditions that will make storms more frequent than they have been in the last few decades.

We have had a remarkable run these last thirty years. Israel has flourished under the pax Americana. There has been no general Arab-Israeli war since 1973, and peace prevails on most of Israel’s borders. The country’s population has grown, foreign investment has poured in. Israel has expanding relations with the up-and-coming powers in the world. And American Jewry has gained stature and influence, in part by mediating for Israel. This has been a long and productive peace.

But when Herzl wrote The Jewish State, Europe was also thirty years into its long peace. He knew it would not last, that its foundations were weak. He planned accordingly. We should recognize that the status quo in the Middle East won’t last indefinitely, and we have to plan accordingly. I haven’t said what I think has to be done—what alliances to make, what targets to strike, what borders to redraw. But I do say that Israel will have to make alliances, strike targets, and redraw borders—and they won’t necessarily be the familiar ones.

This is going to create stress in the world, and even within the Jewish people. So your tasks will multiply, and they will become more urgent. If you got into this business ten years ago, thinking it would be all gala dinners on the way to a new Middle East, I apologize on behalf of history. The man was on the mark who said that the trouble with our times is that the future just isn’t what it used to be.

See the response of Saul Singer to this post.

Spanish translation here.