Page 489 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

486 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

tell, he asked Ellsworth, what the national interests of the United States were
hkely to be in twenty or even ten years’ time? To act upon the presumption of a

continuing identity of interests would land the United Slates in the position of
having armed Persia to the teeth without knowing what the future held for that
country, or in which direction it might turn. Humphrey, though he would
have been the last to claim any special knowledge of Persia and Persian history,

showed a great deal more prescience than the State or Defence Departments.5
The chickens, whose far-off flutterings he had detected, were to come home to
roost barely two years later.

How the Soviet Union was supposed to view the continued build-up of the
Persian armed forces with the most advanced American military equipment
and aircraft was a question to which officials of the two departments never
seriously addressed themselves in their public testimony. It was obvious to

even the most casual observer that, however many arms Persia accumulated,
she could never by her own efforts ensure her defence against the Soviet Union,
or even acquire sufficient military strength to give the Russians cause to
hesitate before launching an offensive across her borders. If this was so, and if,

as the Soviet government was prepared tacitly to concede (however much its
official propaganda might assert the contrary), the continued independence of
Persia depended, in the last analysis, upon the support of the United Slates,

what were the Russians to make of this vast supply of modern weapons to
Persia, especially when it was accompanied by frequent and fervent assertions
about a close identity of American and Persian political interests and strategic
objectives? By tying itself so closely to the shah and his pretensions, the United
States government (so it must have seemed to the Russians) was running a

serious risk of finding itself drawn further and further into the internal affairs
of Persia, especially if the shah should find himself in domestic difficulties or at
odds with his neighbours. If such an eventuality were to occur, and if by that
time the connexion of the United States with Persia had attained anything like

the proportions of the Soviet Union’s involvement in Cuba, the two great
powers would inevitably have been brought into close and exceedingly danger

ous proximity. .
The Russians were not to know, of course, that when the moment o trut
came the United States would desert the shah in the midst of his travails, e\en

to the point of urging him to quit his throne and his country. All the fine wor $
and noble sentiments expressed by the State Department’s officials in 19/^

swiftly evaporated in the civil conflagration that broke out in Persia a
1978. It required only a growled warning from President Brezhnev in t ®
week of November 1978 - ‘it must be clear that any interference,esp
military interference, in the affairs of Persia, a state which directly•
the Soviet Union, would be regarded by the USSR as a matte; $8^

security interests’ - to elicit a hurried disclaimer from the
government of any thought of intervening to save the shah. Al