If these people think they have us on the run, they will plainly not be satisfied until they have us completely out, lock, stock, and barrel, and then they will want to crow for decades to come about their triumph, in a way that will hardly be compatible with minimum requirements of western prestige. The idea that the appetites of local potentates can be satiated and their deep-seated resentments turned into devotion by piecemeal concessions and partial withdrawals is surely naïve to a degree that should make us blush to entertain it. There is nothing else that will avail us.” The least concession would invite disaster: Indeed, if any of the West’s vital strategic assets in the Middle East were jeopardized by “local hostility,” Kennan argued, they should be “militarily secured with the greatest possible despatch.” “To retain these facilities and positions we can use today only one thing: military strength, backed by the resolution and courage to employ it. Abadan is a long way from the Soviet frontier.” But if the Soviets wanted war, “I doubt that Abadan would be the place they would choose to start it. “The thesis to which we acquiesced in Iran,” he wrote, “that such arrangements can be cancelled or reversed abruptly, on the basis of somebody’s whim or mood, is preposterous and indefensible.” The West had every right to thwart Iran’s actions by force: “Had the British occupied Abadan, I would personally have no great worry about what happened to the rest of the country.” The only possible concern, he added, was the Soviet response. This prompted Kennan (by that time, January 1952, a private citizen awaiting confirmation as ambassador to the Soviet Union) to write a long, unsolicited memo intended for Secretary of State Dean Acheson. In 1951, Iran’s new nationalist premier Mohamed Mossadegh challenged Britain over control of Iran’s oil. During two crises, in 19, he made policy recommendations-in 1952, to the State Department in private, and in 1980, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in public. But if the exercise is valid at all, perhaps it is only fair to ask what Kennan did say about Iran. Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101, and just what he would say about Iran today is anybody’s guess. In the process, Kennan would caution, America should remain ‘at all times cool and collected’-and allow the march of history to run its course.” One is led to conclude that a resurrected Kennan would have the United States avoid military confrontation with Iran, preferring to “contain” it by other means. Kennan is thus transformed into a full-blown prophet “anticipating today’s Iran.… Kennan’s wisdom does not call on the United States to shun dialogue with Tehran, but merely to temper its expectations. Sadjadpour employs the rhetorical device of taking ten passages in Kennan’s famous essay and substituting “Iranian” for “Soviet,” “Tehran” for “Moscow,” “Khamene’i” for “Stalin,” and so on.
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