On Gonzo Station, Part Three

Editor’s Note: It is Raven’s birthday, my father having been born August 8, 1923. He would have been 89 this circle around the sun. This is the first of his birthdays he is not here to enjoy. Meanwhile, I am out of the real world, ignoring the endless campaign and the mad shooters and lost in the dream world of youth and ancient outrage. This story is a narrative discovered in the Socotra vaults, and presented here to demonstrate the context between the end-game of the authoritarian Assad regime in Syria, and the implications for the Shia religious theocracy in Iran that was born in 1979, with a merry band of Midway Sailors in attendance. Attitudes and terms are presented as they were written in the interest of historical accuracy and they make me flinch, too.

The plague was spreading.

In Pakistan, the Cricket tests were underway. Whether the nasty rumor was spread by the broadcasters of the matches, or whether the contagion of Radio Tehran was sufficient is a moot point. What happened plunged me into the deepest depression. In an operation that smacked of severe pre-planning, busloads of demonstrators showed up at U.S. facilities all over Pakistan. Consulates were burned, American cultural centers ravaged, and ubiquitous signs of capitalism like the American Express in Rawalpindi, were burned.

But the worst by far was at the Embassy in Islamabad. The messages as they flowed in depicted the events in over- graphic detail; the buildings burning, rioters on the second floor, over a hundred Embassy Staffers trapped in the secure vault with air getting thin. The British Ambassador protested, but Gen. Zia could not be reached. In the end, the Army did act. They swept the demonstrators from the roof and evacuated the staffers to the British compound.

It was a little bit late for the US Army Warrant Officer, whose charred body was found in the rubble the next day, along with the Marine Corporal shot dead the night before.

If there was a moment when I would have lashed out with all the force at my command that would have been it. But not our boy, Mr. Carter. I have to admire his restraint (if that is indeed what it is, and not some total paralysis of the lower bowels, which renders him unable to act under any circumstance), as I would have had the Strike Force moving north and west within the hour.

Intellectually, I know that such an action could only lead to the immediate demise of the hostages whose lives we were present ostensibly to preserve. But I think a fundamental stage had been reached in the crisis where the hostages began to become irrelevant. Past this point we could no longer strike with the Embassy occupation in Tehran as the sole cause. Now, it appeared to be Jihad, and our response could only be taken as an assault of Islam itself.

The focus in Iran seemed to be on the Constitutional Amendment.

This would enable Khomeini (who we have taken to our vision of the evil Vizier of the Arabian Nights) to assume the legal power he has hitherto exercised only morally. It is interesting to contrast his version of moral authority with Prez Carter; but I wander from the issue. They have shown the Mike Wallace interview with the old man, and there have been some interesting responses. I personally was livid with anger for hours, and I am not certain whether it is because I was burned out with fatigue, or because I was overcome by loathing for the ministers who surrounded him, refusing even to pose certain questions.

The logic of the situation runs something like this: the shortages incurred by the drastic cutback in oil production have forced forward the inexorable pincers of inflation, of the hoarding of rice, the limited supply of kerosene, the slow drying up of the availability to carry on the commerce which fed the growing bourgeoisie. That, and the aftermath of the Shah’s profligate ways, have left them in grim shape economically. The oil is a finite resource. At the Shah’s pace of something well over four million barrels a day, it would have been exhausted by the late eighties.

Even the greatly reduced production of the new Islamic Oil Ministry (to something under three mbbl/day) placed on the lucrative spot market is barely enough to cover the lean essentials of public services. Inexorably, Khomeini is faced with a no-win situation, much like the sorry nations of Pakistan and India, who add million: to already burdened populations each year. Scarce resources preclude reaching the light-off point for capital investment.

A society so consistently subject to the vagaries of the monsoon mu I think it is inevitable that the enthusiasm of the Revolution would wither before the re-emergence of the eternal plagues of hunger and cold. The indicators I read pointed to a consistent erosion of Khomeini’s authority. The answer, and an astute one in the short term, was to drum up the foreign bogeyman.

There could hardly be a better one than the U.S. I make no breast beating case for the horrible crimes of stabilizing a nation, and paying it the going rate for what was then a non-essential commodity Our interests were well served by the listening posts that constantly read telemetry from the Turytam Proving Grounds, and as our national oil-aholism grew, so did our need for a steady and dependable source of crude. That we could also build a powerful ally on the very flank of the Soviet Union also was of great utility. Most important, it stood as a powerful bastion between the Bear and the vital House of Saud in the thinly populated sands of the empty Quarter.

But we did fuck it up. We were guilty of wishful thinking as a national policy. What we hoped was true we formulated in concrete, and in the blood of the victims of SAVAK. The truth was there all along, had we but taken the time to look for it. As far back as ’71 , my high school pal George brought back the news that Iran was a police state; that giant portraits of the Shah emblazoned ail the custom’s gates, and that to walk his path brought no trouble, but the hint of criticism could bring the agonies of prison.

His enemies disappeared, were worked over and exiled, but we still believed that a bastion in our favor was far preferable to uncertainty. The military contracts were good business. They brought down the unit costs on the F-14 to a manageable level, where we could procure more for ourselves. The cruise missiles are there today, and provide an element of unease in the Fleet never present in the waters of Yankee station off Vietnam .

(Iranian P-3F in flight over the Northern Arabian Sea. Photo USN).

State-of-the-art Iranian P-3 Charlies fly out to do maritime surveillance on us. (They are actually Foxtrot, or “foreign” models, but there were only six constructed, and they carry U.S. Navy Bureau numbers still.)

And of course we trained SAVAK personnel at the Farm down in in York County. The bucolic pastures of Tidewater Virginia were the practice area for the men who killed one of Khomeini’s sons. He can nevere forget that, ort the waiting he himself did in the Shah’s jail cell as he hoped that Ayatollah Shariat Madeiri could win through to a secret meeting an have him confirmed to the ranks of the senior clerisy, that he might escape the death penalty.

Khomeini is not a man given to forgive and forget. I think that these personal injuries help him formulate policy to this day. I believe he can, with no basic contradiction in his mental processes, both order the arrest and confinement  of our diplomats and still baldly state that “Iranian Government policy has never been one to condone terrorism,” (as he did in dismissing Kalhkari, the Hanging Judge).

But the beauty of it all is that however one attempts to come to grips with the attractive self-flagellatory argument of “How We Lost Iran” that is not the issue. It isn’t even close. I can even grant the Iranians have many points with which I do not disagree. Some I heartily endorse, as a lover of Liberty in my own homeland.

The issue is so simple that in the last 37 days it has been entirely obscured. A civilized nation does not take hostages of persons under diplomatic immunity. It may, should it so choose, expel those who it considers active (or hyper-active, rather, as all nations engage in the collections of Intelligence in their embassies) and bid them good riddance as they pass through customs on their way out. It may not capture a sovereign building, on what is in point of law another nation’s soil, root about in it’s internal paperwork, and come up with evidence to run show trials.

Were that the case, I would dearly love to paw over the Soviet’s files in the United States.

But there it was, and it was so simple that in the exhaustive search for peaceful justice it became lost altogether. The big lie was again triumphant. They shouted: ‘Espionage!’ and “CIA” and they shouted SO LOUD and so long that those two words became the issue, in part of the long self destructive retreat from Watergate that haunts us still. Even Ted Kennedy, damn his liberal hide, jumped on the bandwagon. It is the first time that a Presidential Aspirant has even had a hand in helping me lose my Christmas.

THE TIME JUST FILES ON. Here it is, the hostages are going in to their forty-fourth day of captivity (quite a jump in lust two paragraphs!) and we still just orbit endlessly. I am reduced to dealing with the hostage taking of our puppets Gonzo and Kermit in the daily Nick Banger episodes! Poor blockheaded Nick has gone over 100 episodes now in this great year, soon to fade into the void of all the other dead years.

The Shah has finally taken his leave of us and left the US for Panama; or to better put it (as the Foreign BROADCAST Intercept Service puts it) “The Iranian People have struck another great blow against the Imperialists,”

The situation rankles now as much as it ever did. We have steamed around here in the Gulf for THIRTY-ONE days; it has been THIRTY-SIX SINCE WE LEFT MOMBASA. JESUS! It is the longest single line period since I have been out here (twenty-one months) and with the transit time remaining before we see land again, it will stretch on another couple weeks.

Worse, there is no sign whatsoever that there is an end to this situation in sight. We saw a most disturbing message that had Nimitz (from LantFleet) relieving Kitty Hawk in the middle of January, and Forrestal arriving to let us go away in the merry month of February, It is enough to positively make the skin crawl.

Apparently people are nervous about having the new nuclear carrier transit the Suez Canal, and they may assemble and all-nuke task group to dial up warp speed and transit around the African continent via the Cape of Good Hope and then into the Indian Ocean to join us.

Damn, that would be cool.

The nature of the beast is so open-ended that we are reduced to just going at it one day at a time. That is the way people serve jail terms, as I understand it.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com