272. Memorandum From Harold H. Saunders of the National Security Council Staff to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (Battle)1
SUBJECT
- IRG Discussion on Iran
On mulling over our discussion of the military threat to Iran, I should like to come back to one major point. You said several times you could not find anybody around the room who challenged the military justification for the package. I wish now that I had, because I feel that a basic challenge was implicit in everything that was said. For instance:
- —Stuart Rockwell led off by saying quite accurately that what we are coping with here is the Shah’s assessment of what he needs. This political reality is our central problem.
- —Harry Schwartz, when you asked him to discuss the specific questions of Iranian absorptive capacity and the like, said quite frankly that he could not provide this kind of justification for the package. As I understood [Page 487] him, he said that the package is the sum of a lot of elements—the Shah’s assessments of his needs, our assessment of what he can afford, our estimate of what we can afford, our estimate of what Congress will stand for, etc. But nowhere did I hear him say anything about the kinds of wars he might have to fight with the Arabs—Harry excluded the Soviet threat—and the specific kinds of equipment he’d need to fight those wars.
- —Jim Critchfield’s eloquent description of the threat was largely a description of the world as the Shah sees it emerging. This is valid, and we have to cope with it. But there was no intelligence estimate, such as we are striving for on the Israeli-UAR front, that the Iranians could defeat the Iraqis in five days, that the balance between Syria-UAR-Iraq and Iran would tip in the radicals’ favor by January 1970 or any of the other measurable dangers one might conceive if one tried to war-game the threat against Iran precisely.
In short, while there was some side-talk about naval needs, no one at the meeting challenged the military element of the package. Someone said that the Shah’s main objective is to be so strong as to deter attack, but we didn’t take the next logical step to admit that there really isn’t a pure military justification.2 While no one challenged, nobody really justified either. What we have done is started with the Shah’s first bargaining shot of $800 million and squeezed the most obvious bargaining components out of that package. Now we have reached a hard collection of items that the Shah says he needs.
Like you, I don’t question for a moment the political rationale for the program, but I think we ought to be quite candid with ourselves in admitting that the political rationale is also pretty much the military rationale. Unquestionably, the Shah needs some modernization, and I’m sure General Jablonsky must have some military rationale, but it hasn’t surfaced in the IRG. You’ll recall that no one argued against your 5–7 year idea on military grounds at all. All of the arguments were related to “reliability“, bargaining, Congress, etc.
I’m not sure that it is possible to be more precise on the military side, although I think there may be some virtue in trying. The economic problems which Maury Williams mentioned are much more measurable and do warrant a real review. But if in the course of the next two weeks, no one in the Pentagon can give us a military picture comparable to the economic one, I think we ought to reduce the military aspects of this problem to the political question of how far we can safely bargain the Shah down.