I've always been puzzled why Reagan didn't try to punish Iran for taking American hostages. And then barely reacted when Hezbollah killed over 200 marines, and tortured CIA station chief Buckley to death. And then tried to sell weapons to Iran. Near as I can tell, it's because the Reagan Administration had one huge priority, and that was to defeat Communism. (Although we did back Saddam for a while against Iran.) Fanatical muslims, Administration officials hoped, were potential allies of the U.S. against godless Communism, just as they turned out to be in Afghanistan. Is this a reasonable summary? Any commentors with expertise on this?
You can't really blame the Reaganites too much, as they did indeed defeat Communism. But they also seem to have sowed the seeds of WWIII, by allowing and sometimes encouraging fanatical anti-Western Sunni and Shiite Islamicism to flourish, just as Roosevelt and Truman laid the groundwork for the Cold War by cooperating with Stalin to defeat Hitler--and being way too naive about their putative "ally."
Finally, Iran probably didn't seem like too big a threat as long as it was embroiled in a prolonged and costly war with Iraq, as it was throughout almost the entire time Reagan was in office.
That said, the Reagan Administration did commit a grave error in agreeing to the "arms for hostages" deal, in failing to punish Hezbollah for the Beirut bombing (even though I think the US should have stayed out of Lebanon entirely at that time), and in generally allowing the Iranians to think that the Great Satan is a paper tiger. Even given the constraints of the Cold War, Reagan could probably have been somewhat tougher on Iran than he was.
Um... what do you expect them to have done? Seriously? Invade Iran? Realistic options were strictly limited.
Second, intelligence believed that the Sunni/Shia split would limit Iran's ambit. Little did the analysts realize that the Ayatolla's thumbing his nose at the US would lead to dramatically increased funding for Wahhabi madrassas, as the Wahhabi's feared being outdone in their preaching of terror by the Shia's popularity.
I think that Reagan wanted to avoid getting into another proxy war vs. the terror groups and focus on bringing down the main enemy by economic means. instead of spending our own lives while the Sovs spent the lives of puppets, we spent money that we had in carlot loads making the USSR try to build up militarily to match us. instead of shooting at them, we collapsed their economy. now we get the task of cleaning up the mess they left behind.
i think it is a bit of a cheap shot to complain that the US, having run the Evil Empire out of business, failed to kill off the USSR's puppet terrorists at the same time.
watch the series "Commanding Heights" for a quick rundown on the strategy we used to run the USSR out of business.
I don't understand this comparison. Roosevelt and Truman obviously had no choice but to cooperate with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Recall that WWII basically was the fight between Hitler and Stalin. The importance of every other theater totally paled in comparison. As just one example, the Soviets had 200,000 casualties in the first ten days of the Battle of Kursk alone.
the basic reason was the Soviet Union. the USSR was supplying all the arab regimes and supporting and directing a lot of the terror groups. can you think of another reason that still to this day the terror groups spout marxist jargon?
2. Heh some people have no friggin clue. The only "regimes" that Soviet Union supported during the Regan time are Syria, part of Yemen and to some extent Iraq. Lebanon was a black hole, Egypt and Jordan were US proxy's - forget 1979 peace treaty?, Saudi Arabia and the other sheikhdoms were also largly influenced by the US policies.
3. PLO was the only terrorist group in the region funded by the Soviets. HAMAS - Muslim Brotherhood - Hezbollah - they were movements funded by Iran and by the Saudis, there are no records of Soviets funding them (if you see a picture of a guy with an AK, it does not mean he bought it off the Russians - by the 80's there were billions of them floating in the world)
4. If someone like Putin came to power 26 years ago, USSR would still be alive and kicking, Reagan or no Reagan, the economic policies while significant in it of themselves, are being greatly overemphasized here.
Roosevelt and Truman obviously had no choice but to cooperate with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Recall that WWII basically was the fight between Hitler and Stalin. The importance of every other theater totally paled in comparison.
Don't even bother, most everybody on this blog assumes that lend-lease was the most important thing that won the war. Soviets were just a conveninet proxy for the might of the Studebacker truck. Hell, even if turks would get those trucks then they would kick Hitler's ass to the stratosphere.
Sorry, but no way were the Czars as bad as Stalin - or lenin (although Lenin didn't kill quite as many people as Stalin). The Czars' victims measure in the thousands - low thousands, I believe - while Lenin and Stalin killed tens of millions. Check out Solzhenytsyn's Gulag Archipelago or Robert Conquest's The Great Famine as a start - just a start, mind you. Solzhenytsyn covers the czarist situation, so you can get some reference.
heh, if you take all teh tsars together, proportionately they killed a hell of a lot of people, but they had more time to do it. As for Solzhenitsyn, he is a committed monarchist, anti-semite, and in recent times a complete loon. He is longing to bring the monarchy back to Russia along with the revival of the Cossacks.
His works should not be looked upon as any sort of historical research, which unfortunately it is being cited as.
A pragmatist doesn't trade arms for hostages, thereby encouraging Iran to take more hostages (which is exactly what happened).
Reagan was taken in by his subordinates &by his own failure to manage them.
We've seen how much trouble Israel has had in dealing with Arabs. We see how much difficulty we're having in the current Iraq war.
Now imagine the current Iraq war, but take away two decades of American military research and technology. Take away political correctness, which, for all of the bad things it brings to the acadame, is downright helpful in putting together a disciplined army that will commit fewer war crimes. Take away 9/11, which created a commitment in most Americans--gave us a really good reason to want to fight against terror, even overseas, in someone else's country.
Then watch all of the Arab nations cuddle up even closer to the USSR. Arabs might be upset about Afghanistan, but ArabsMuslims have always put the interests--and pride--of Arab Muslims over other Muslims or other Arabs. The genocide in Darfur is accceptable because the black Muslims are n---ers in the eyes of the Arabs.
It would have been disastrous for America to take on Hezbollah all-out, and it would have been counter-productive to half-heartedly attack Hezbollah.
It's too bad that we can't fight every good fight and can't win every good war (f--- yeah, Utopia now!). But we have to act accordingly. And sometimes, that means temporarily letting bad guys off the hook. America will pay Hezbollah back for what it did, sooner rather than later--there's no point in Israel going in half-heartedly.
He does if it means we get hostages back, and Iranians use those weapons to kill Arabs.
A very cynical pragmatist, perhaps, but a pragmatist through-and-through.
The largest Communist state, China, has been far from defeated, and the Chinese Communist Party, however clumsily, has managed to maintain authority while evolving to accommodate a far-from-free market economy.
In the case of the collapse of the Soviet Union, internal factors played a role that cannot be discounted. One factor alone, the inability to create an information infrastructure for determining prices in a command economy, may well have been the single greatest factor in the collapse. Of course, external military pressure played a role, but by all measures, aside from missle strength, the capacity of the Soviet military for rapid and coordinated action had been seriously reduced over the last decades of the Soviet Union. Again, the lack of a modern information infrastructure played a major role. From this viewpoint, the single most important factor in the West's response to Communism was an embargo on technology transfers, a policy that was actually somewhat weakened in the Reagan years.
Well, I think a certain V.I. Lenin, a sometime political prisoner of the last Czar, would probably disagree with you. Would Lenin or Stalin have released their own Lenin? Not a chance...
Truman couldn't correct the problem.
Reagan did want to focus on defeating the soviets, and did a fine job of it. It's just that he and his administration could have acted somewhat differently if they'd understood what a threat the mullahs would turn out to be, and maybe spared us some of our current troubles, but it's hard to tell, and we can only speculate.
Reagan did not bring down the USSR. It fell of its internal contradictions, primarily its disastrous agricultural policy.
Reagan did not take on Iran because he never took on anybody more formidable than Panama. He spent most of his time sleeping and telling fantasy stories that he could not distinguish from reality. As Adelman says in his admiring book about arms control, Reagan managed to devote exactly one hour to strategizing about that one.
It's true that Reagan was obsessed with communism, to the exclusion of having any other meaningful foreign policy.
With no direction from the top, US attitudes were the traditional hesitancies of Foggy Bottom, which had been inherited intact from the hesitancies of the British Empire.
The British learned (in 1857 if not earlier) that meddling very deeply in any limited area of Islam brought with it the distinct danger of an explosion elsewhere and almost everywhere in Islam -- exactly the behavior we see in 2006.
Carter tried to square a circle: he wanted to treat a Muslim country as if it were capable of integration into a modernist political/social system. This is not possible. All majority Muslim states are failed states. This was not Carter's fault.
Very few people in 1979 were willing to write off Islam, even fewer to identify it as a system that will have to be remade (to the point of destruction) in order to integrate into a world of intimate communications. Even in 2006, only a smallish minority have grasped the first point; very, very few indeed the second.
The Islamists get it, though. They keep telling their co-religionists and us that Islam and Dar-al-Harb cannot coexist. We should listen.
++++
As for the side issue about the US and UK allying with the USSR to defeat Hitler, the issue there is not whether Roosevelt was naive. If we hadn't allied with the USSR, we would not have defeated Hitler.
During the months of June-July 1944, while a small western army was bottled up in Normandy, the Red Army destroyed Army Group Center, a formation that was as large as all the German forces in western Europe (excluding the Italian theater). On his own, Eisenhower would still be in London.
Oh please! As a long-time China resident, I can assure you that China ceased being Communist in anything but name and formalistic ritual many years ago. The CCP maintained control by transforming itself into what is essentially a nationalist facist party.
Actual Communism was defeated in China as surely as it was in the Soviet block. The fact that the same band of kack-handed kleptocrats managed to retain their grasp on political power in China doesn't change the fact that they had to jetison their communist ideology to do so.
They should have invaded Iraq! :)
Sigh. Communism defeated itself.
To "some extent"? Only 69% of the dollar value of all arms sales to Iraq, 1973-1990, came from the USSR and her Warsaw Pact lackeys, compared to 0.5% from the US, which is what provokes all the screaming on the Left that "Reagan armed Saddam".
Let's not forget Libya, Algeria, Ethiopia, and Iran, all recipients of significant Soviet aid in the 1980s.
Now imagine the current Iraq war, but take away two decades of American military research and technology.
Except that much of the technology developed since 1980 is irrelevant to fighting the war in Iraq. We would have whipped Saddam in short order with the 1981 US military, and we would have had just as much of a problem with insurgents with the 1981 US military.
I think Reagan giving Iran a pass may have something to do with something I vaguely remember called "Iran/Contra".
Think again. Your timing is off. Hezbollah took hostages in 1983, and McFarlane didn't approach the Israelis about arms for Iran until mid-1985.
The British learned (in 1857 if not earlier) that meddling very deeply in any limited area of Islam brought with it the distinct danger of an explosion elsewhere and almost everywhere in Islam -- exactly the behavior we see in 2006.
What are you talking about? The Brits spent the entire century from 1857-1956 "meddling in limited areas of Islam" (and even in LARGE areas of Islam) and this brought no explosion elsewhere and everywhere in Islam.
First and foremost US foreign policy after WWII was fighting communism. That's how we got ourselves involved in Korea, Panama, Nicaragua, Viet Nam, etc. We viewed the world as strictly bi polar. Terrorism, while very much a part of the international scene, was viewed as secondary to defeating the "Red Menace". Reagan knew, as did other US presidents, that the USSR was shaky. It was viewed as no better than an LDC as a sort of Upper Volta with missiles. Reagan knew that the collapse was inevitable which is why he sounded so bellicose. He realized that as long as the USSR thought we were building our military might they would do so as well. The catch was however, that the US has the largest economy on earth, and it can afford the cost of "guns and butter" scenario, the USSR, could not. Ultimately, Reagan was proven correct.
However, during the Cold War, which I think was WWIII, we neglected the other areas of potential danger. we thought we could use the old fashion Hans Morenthau Balance of Power approach. However,this did not prove to work as effectively in a post Soviet world.
After the defeat of communism everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and for several years foreign policy was actually boring.
Then came new flare ups in the Middle East, and incidents with Muslim terrorists. World War IV actually began!!!!
Unfortunately, this is going to be a protracted and frustrating war. For years, we had used Israel as our proxy in the ME,howver, with Saddam this was different. Let's face it whether he had any real power or not, he was definately a destablizing force. The Saudis hated him, thw Kuwaitis hated him the Iraqis hated him, not to mention Israel. It was just a matter of time before someone took him out. We could not let Israel do it lest they ignight the entire region, so the task was left to the US. Unfortunately, Bush I did not do it, so he left the job for his successor. Clinton was inept at foreign policy, so that meant Bush II was left holding the bag. I do not think the US had a real "plan" for the Mid East, and just got stuck.
One more thing. As far as Commmunist China is concerned, I think the country is ready for a free fall.
The Renmimdi rate is fixed, and is artificially overvalued because it is tied to the US dollar and not allowed to float. The formally "red hot" economy, no pun intended, is beginning to slow, and Chinese labor is no longer the cheapest in the region. Manufacturing jobs are leaving the country as a result. What is bound to happen is a major financial crises, which will take the country years to repair. Remember, it does not have a capitalist infrastructure, and its leaders are basically despots in ill fitting siuts.
Thus, it was possible for the British to conduct a war against the Mahdist army but not to reform the Egyptian legal system. It was possible for the British to bomb villages in Iraq but not to maintain its fleet in the Golden Horn.
Islamic politics are nothing if not complicated, but the Australian Islamophobe makes the point neatly this morning in a comment about the murder of Turrabi: 'You try to be the best little civilisation-hater you can be, railing against Israel and the US, and you still get blown to pieces by insane Islamic suicide bombers.'
Here's an idea: The United States should withdraw its military from outside the borders of the United States, starting with Iraq. All foreign military bases should be shut down. The U.S. should withdraw from all foreign defense alliances. All foreign aid should be ended, including aid to Israel. The President of the United States should announce that despite these actions, the United States will, of course, respond to any attack on its territory.
Brilliant idea, because isolationism worked so well in keeping the US out of WWI and WWII, and unilateral withdrawl is clearly the source of the unprecedented peace and security the Israelis are now enjoying, and Islamists would certainly recognize US withdrawl as a sign of America's strength and confidence and be too intimidated by it to launch further domestic attacks.
It is problematic to describe British policy towards the Islamic world as one of prudence, caution, and restraint when it included such things as the occupation of Cairo, Constantinople, Damascus, Baghdad and Jerusalem, the partition of the region after World War I, the installation of local puppet rulers, and the harsh suppression of local revolts. In 1914, Kitchener proposed to "capture" and control Islam by installing a pro-British puppet Caliph in Mecca - this is your idea of wise, limited and careful meddling?
In fact, British understanding of Islam until 1945 was dismissive and unsophisticated. They thought that Islam could be bought, manipulated, and controlled by buying, manipulating and controlling its leaders, just as they had bought, manipulated and controlled countless local puppet rulers in Asia and Africa for centuries. Furthermore, while the British recognized the existence of Islam as a political fact with which they had to contend, they felt that Islamic opposition to the forces of modernization would diminish over time, just as the political power of Christianity had faded over time in the West.
He does if it means we get hostages back, and Iranians use those weapons to kill Arabs.
What seems to have been forgotten here is that, if that was actually supposed to be an arms for hostages deal, we were cheated - and Oliver North and company kept coming back to be cheated again. I can't see any evidence that any hostages ever were released because of this deal.
This had nothing to do with the embassy hostages; the Ayatollah's regime wisely sent them back before Reagan even took office. The "arms for hostages" deals concerned a half-dozen or so American kidnapped in Lebanon. We weren't giving the arms to the (mostly unknown)groups or families that actually were holding these hostages, but selling them (at a nice profit) to allegedly moderate Iranis who claimed to have some influence over the hostage takers. The arms were delivered and paid for, but no hostages were released. More rounds of armament sales were arranged, but the only hostage released was a rabidly pro-Islamic American teacher whom only idiots would have kidnapped in the first place. (His wife claimed that this release was due to her finally convincing an Arab leaders to find and reason with said idiots.) Another hostage was beaten to death, but two more Americans were soon kidnapped as replacements. And yet the arms shipments continued...
It is correct to say that Reagan's overriding foreign policy goal was to bring about the collapse of the USSR without open war and defuse the US-USSR nuclear standoff. Other foreign issues could not -- and should not have been -- considered independently of this. In this sense Reagan did not "coddle" Iran.
It is not correct to say that Reagan saw the Iranians as potential allies of the U.S. against godless Communism. They were a factor that needed to be managed, especially with the Soviet military active next door.
Nor is it accurate to say that Reagan "sowed the seeds of WWIII, by allowing and sometimes encouraging fanatical anti-Western Sunni and Shiite Islamicism to flourish." It is accurate to say that Reagan did not kill these seeds, mainly because her was not in a position to do so.
It is also accurate to say that the collapse of the USSR help create the conditions necessary for fanatical Islamicism to flourish, in that radical Islam could not become a potent international force with a vigorous USSR in the world. However, Reagan's "neglect" the problem of radical Islam is not the root cause of today's conflict. Carter deserves some blame for this, as has been pointed out, but Clinton deserves more. (The previous Bush administration deserves some blame as well, though for very reasons.) Those who doubt this proposition are referred to the many writings of OBL from the 90s as well as various interviews he gave. This is not the only evidence, of course, but it is among the most accessible.
Finally, though not directly related, those to hold the view that the USSR collapsed because of internal contradictions, "disastrous" policy decisions, and the like, base their conclusion on false premises and unfounded assumptions. Again, there is not enough space here to go into this in detail (if this discomfits those who disagree with me, sorry.) But to put a major point as succinctly as I can: policy decisions are only "disastrous" compared to the expectations of those making them and/or those affected by them. People can endure extraordinary hardship without social collapse, as both N. Korea and Cuba show, and both countries are worse off than the USSR was at the time it collapsed and have been for decades. Yet N. Korea remains a serious threat.
Likewise, internal contradictions do not necessarily predispose a society to collapse. They collapse when pressure is brought to bear that makes those contradictions operative and critical. Reagan's genius -- and I do not use that term lightly -- was that he saw this and applied exactly the right pressure to cause the USSR to fold. How exactly this came about is a fascinating story, but one for a book, not this space.
As for blaming the victims, whichever US president you choose, that's just silly. Islam in 2006 is just what it was in 806. It has a program. The program looked positive for Islam up to about 1709 (when the last Muslim ruler who controlled a really potent army died), and then it got smashed badly every time any Muslim attempted to pursue it for the next 300 years.
A lot of stuff happened since 1898, but for Muslims the lesson they think they have learned is that there will never be another Omdurman. So they can go back to the program they pursued up until the 18th century (and later in areas where European policy was indifferent).
Ahem. I really don't understand the hero worship.
"America can't do a Thing", by Amir Taheri.
Was undermining the Somoza regime in Nicaragua part of the "Green Belt" strategy? If so, its effect was opposite from the one intended.
I was under the impression that Carter's snafus in Nicaragua and Iran were fueled primarily by his hamhanded meddling in human rights issues, and his naivete about who was waiting in the wings to replace Somoza and the Shah. Not very many presidents can claim to have played a role in the advancement of totalitarianism in two separate countries.
If the Soviet Union was falling of its own weight, why didn't the experts who now claim that, draw our attention to that fact before it happened? Why did Paul Samuelson's "Economics" textbook, perhaps the most widely used text ever used, in the 1980's refer to the Soviet Style economy as a fairly decent way to go. Why the changes:
In general, It appears that those who were touting the Soviet Union before the fall have just moved to the "It fell of its own weight" theory after the fall.
As to the original question: Reagan did not attack the Arabs in the 1980's because the Soviet Union was still around. If he had invaded, the Soviets would have been forced to defend their proxies in the region, and we would have risked World War III. This almost happened during 1973 during the Yom Kippur War.
In fact, among analysts and especially military analysts, there was considerable favor for the so-called "fat Russian" theory, in which the disfunctional economy had rendered the state unable to function for all but a limited few. A miliatry example should suffice: while the priveledged position of the Officer Corps. among the Nomenclatura of the Soviet Union kept the Corps confortable ("Fat") and resistant to reform, while the basis was faced with broken supply lines, failed equipment maintenance, infrastructure collapse, and a total disfunction of pay systems and basic personnel services. In other words, a total inertia had set in in which the Officers did not want to reform, and the basis was so constrained by the hardships of daily life and a culture of subservience that they could not be agents in reform.
As someone who had the opportunity at first hand to examine the Soviet military in the GDR after the war, I can confirm this viewpoint. The Officers (and a young Vladimir Putin, incidentally, who served as an intelligence agent in the GDR at the time) enjoyed their plum assignments in the relatively well-off GDR, including hard currency and shopping priveledges in special GDR shops as well as in West Berlin, while the rank-and-file soldiers were reduced to subsistance gardening and taking part-time jobs or trading in markets in order to survive. An army cannot function when individual soldiers are reduced to selling anything they wore, carried, or could steal in public vegetable markets. The infrastructure that the united German state took over from Soviets in the East was not in ruins, and even the most optimistic estimates for readiness had risen to over twelve months time.
Архипелаг ГУЛаг has as much truth to it as the Da Vinci code. A lot of numbers have been released since then, that contradict most of the previous findings (including Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, etc.)
Hope you can read Russian :), if not then just google "Viktor Zemskov", take it from there.
People with actual experience of the USSR in the 1970s understood what a fantasy state it had become. Outsiders, Reagan and his advisers included, generally didn't. Reagan's admirers like to forget it now, but the Reaganites really did believe that a vast Christian counterrevolution against the atheist communists had been on the verge of happening every year since 1921 and only the fecklessness of the previous 10 presidents had prevented it from coming about.
The event that signaled the coming collapse of a rotten state structure in 1980 was not the election of Reagan but the bizarre reversal of 60 years of Soviet policy by sending the Red Army across the national border.
The defensive war against Germany and Japan had carried the Red Army far, but neither before nor after had Stalin nor any of his successors risked using the Red Army for aggressive campaigns.
Other than the suggestion that Brezhnev was senile, I don't know of any attempt to explain why the USSR government abandoned this key policy.
I beg to differ.
International Communism was and still is a truly abominable philosophy and governing method.
I am prone to quote Lincoln when confronted with the irritation of the English in removing some Confederate ambasssadors from a British ship
"One war at a time" is Lincoln's aphorism as he backtracked.
I hear from the socalled "cognicesnti" that a couple of sub-state collections of thugs, and three third rate dictatorships are capable of causing the equal of a Soviet American nuclear exchage as somewhat overstated.
In fact these groups are strategically separated and isolated. Syria and Iran have 10 American divisons deployed between them. That Army is already deployed, and not in Europe or America and unable to face either of these tiny gnats.
Do you think Syria would last as long as the thirty hours that Iraq's military did? Or can the IDF do it by themselves? Iran is a hollow shell seething with internal rebellion. The mullah's government would likely collapse fairly quickly too. Meanwhile each is isolated, cannot support each other, and can be defeated in detail.
As for North Korea, the significance of the UN strategic embargo resolution is unrecognized. It ends the NK only source of foreign exchange, now that counterfeiting has been terminated. The USN can now not only stop but now can confiscate NK arms exports; and its imports as well.
DPNK is a shell ready to topple.
Peace may well break out very quickly in but a few months or years.
Who saw the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1988?
Did you?
I then went back and read some history and realized that Bukharin had foretold that problem in 1923.
To be precise, neither Bukharin nor I could narrow it down as close as 1988. But see it coming?
On the other side, the Marxists have been predicting the collapse of international capitalism for 150 years now.
Everybody sees things coming. Fools see things that are not there.
But even if one considers his plate to be full in that regard, perhaps even he would have modified some positions regarding Iran and such were he to have the opportunity to do so now. That's swallowing the wind, though...
The Soviet war against Japan was "defensive"? I don't think so. If ever there were a country that did NOT want to attack the USSR, it was Japan in 1945.
I suppose you don't think that the Soviet invasions of Poland or Finland 1939 count as "aggressive campaigns" across the Soviet border? They, too, were "defensive wars" in your view?
What pap.
Last time I checked, China (which has like a billion people or something, you know - and that is alot) still existed. And let's see they have central governement consisting of unelected party loyalists, tightly control the media, centrally plan much of the economy, etc. Is that not communism?
Yes, they make our t-shirts and iPods, now. But our country will do business with any repressive regime as long as they serve our interests.
Wake up fool.
Of course, as I’ve pointed out in other comments, Reagan didn’t mind using racism for his personal political advantage (appealing to "state's rights" when the context was clear he meant state's rights to preserve the remnants of Jim Crow), so maybe two of his interests converged.
The "arms for hostages" connection offered two things: release of the U.S. citizens held captive by mysterious factions in Lebanon; and friendly contact with the Iranian military, which had a long history of interoperation with the U.S. At the time, the Iraq war forced the ayatollahs to work with and tolerate military professionals from the Shah's regime. The hope was that the U.S.-provided spare parts etc would empower these professionals and weaken the regime. The quantities were actually rather small, and Iran was being charged far over the "list price", too.