Baiting the U.S.

With American help

Carter is vainly trying to intimidate nation yearning for martyrdom. We prefer to ride donkeys, live in dire misery, but never again to become enslaved under U.S. domination." So said Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, speaking from the balcony of his home north of Tehran and, as usual, fulminating against America. He was not the only one. In Iran last week everyone, it seemed, had it in for the U.S. Some 500 delegates from 50 countries met in the capital for the express purpose of castigating "U.S. interventions in Iran." Among them was a group of ten prominent Americans, headed by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had defied a presidential ban on travel to Iran in order to attend the four-day official conference.

It was not Clark's first foray into controversy. As an antiwar activist in 1972, he had visited North Viet Nam to investigate U.S. bombing of civilian targets. Shortly after the embassy takeover last November, he headed for Tehran as President Carter's negotiator, but turned back when Khomeini refused to receive him. Among others who accompanied him last week were Nobel Laureate George Wald of Harvard, Civil Rights Activist Paul Washington, and Clergymen John Walsh and Charles Kimball, who had visited the hostages in December. Their purpose, according to Wald: to convince the Iranians that the hostage crisis "has become a liability for them."

Addressing the assembly in the ornate ballroom of the Tehran Hilton, Clark bitterly denounced U.S. interference in Iran, Chile and Viet Nam. The lanky, pugnacious Texan also called for the release of the 53 U.S. hostages held in Iran since Nov. 4; but he sugar-coated his criticism by emotionally professing that he "could understand the seizure of the hostages in human terms." At the same time, Clark demanded the trial of the Shah by an international tribunal, and criticized Carter's support for the ousted monarch.

After defending the Iranian revolution from the podium, Clark met privately with Iran's President Abolhassan Banisadr and went even further. The maverick U.S. lawyer said he had been persuaded to form a stateside commission to investigate alleged U.S. crimes against Iran. But Clark's initiative apparently did not strengthen his standing at the conference: the American delegation was unable to get a single reference to the hostages into the final resolution. Furthermore, Clark himself was denounced as a possible spy acting on Carter's behalf in the resolution, which accused him of plotting like a "latterday Rudolf Hess."

In the U.S., Clark and his traveling companions were widely criticized as tools of Iranian propaganda. White House Spokesman Jody Powell noted that the violation of the presidential travel ban could legally be punished by $50,000 fines and ten-year prison sentences. Several members of the group were briefly detained when they arrived in New York late last week. Customs officials confiscated conference-related documents and copied them before returning them.

Few of Washington's Iran experts feel that Clark's trip or his proposed investigation will help advance the release of the hostages. As one analyst noted, "Mea culpas don't have any effect on the militants." There was talk at week's end of a new Banisadr-Clark plan that, in addition to the Clark "investigation," called for 1) a halt to U.S. support for the Shah's family, 2) the completion of abandoned U.S. projects in Iran, and 3) a U.S. pledge of nonintervention in Iran. Whatever the merits of that scenario, which appeared to be as nebulous as numerous others in the past, there seems to be little hope for any resolution of the crisis until the new Iranian parliament--towhich Khomeini has entrusted the ultimate fate of the hostages--can overcome its internal dissensions and at least name a Prime Minister and Cabinet.

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