Foreign Relations: Blunt Business

FOREIGN RELATIONS

The Army drum and bugle corps blared an ear-splitting fanfare, the Navy Band came in on cue, and an Army detachment fired a 21-gun salute. Iran’s Shahanshah (King of Kings), His Imperial Majesty Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, was properly impressed by the pomp, but his visit to Washington last week was no pleasure trip. At the very first opportunity he and his old friend Lyndon Johnson got down to some blunt business.

Plea for U.S. Support. First on the agenda was a special message from Jordan’s King Hussein and Kuwait’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister, Sheik Jaber al Ahmed es Sabah. The gist of their joint communication as delivered by the Shah: the U.S. must find some way of expressing concrete support for the Arab moderates, lest pressure from the left force them to look to Russia for future support and assistance. The most practical support, suggested the Shah, would be arms. Not only was the Shah concerned about Senators who want to limit or end U.S. arms sales abroad; there was also the problem that deliveries already promised are simply not coming through. For at least four years, Washington repeatedly turned down Hussein’s requests for some jet fighters. Not until Russia offered the King null at a bargain $70,000 per plane last year did the Administration finally decide to sell Hussein 36 F-104s. The shipment has yet to arrive. The Shah also complained that the U.S. has yet to deliver the two squadrons of F-4 Phantoms that were promised to Iran.

In meetings with Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Senate For eign Relations Committee members, the Shah argued that Senators who try to limit or eliminate U.S. arms sales abroad “don’t know what they are talking about.” How many times, he asked, can the U.S. intervene all over the world to support friendly governments? “You can’t,” he answered. “And why should you?” Friendly governments, he said, should be helped to become strong enough to defend themselves. Any unilateral U.S. ban on arms sales, the Shah insisted, would only weaken U.S. influence among its friends and create a vacuum that will be filled by Russia.

Source of Pride. He spoke with the authority of a man who has not let his own dealings with Russia dim his basic Western sympathies. And he obviously has an admirer in Lyndon Johnson. “When I visited Iran just five years ago,” the President noted last week at a White House dinner for his guest, “Iran’s land reform program had barely begun. Today, 50% of Iran’s rural families farm their own land. Some 7,000 rural cooperatives have been established and 800 extension corpsmen are helping farmers acquire new skills.” It is no accident that Iran’s economy is the strongest in the Middle East. And no one is prouder of his country’s achievements than the Shah himself.