THE ROMANS never made it to Persia. Twenty centuries later, the Germans couldn't break through either. But by 1953, American agents managed to move directly to the heart of Iranian politics, placing Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the throne his father had fled in 1941. And once he disappeared behind the awesome symbols and deadly trappings of autocratic power--the Peacock Throne and the phantom jet--both the Shah and the United States lost sight of any Iran beyond the central court and the romantic exotica of ancient Persia.

And though the romance crumbled and the Shah now enjoys what promises to be an extended vacation, the American press has presented nothing but the exotic--the strange--in the opposition to a man both the U.S. government and press has tried to maintain. American press coverage throughout the current crisis has reflected western cultural biases, and a belief that the United States could and should mold the political affairs of another nation--the most persistent moral and pragmatic error in U.S. foreign policy development.

The cultural bias appeared in subtle ways throughout the news columns of magazines and dailies. Islam and its prescriptions proved most difficult for editors to swallow. Particularly during the fall, press reports in this country regularly juxtaposed the image of a progressive, modernizing Shah with intransigent religious fanatics whose opposition to the Shah was based on medieval social concepts. The Islamic religion is so clearly alien as to arouse the fear of press writer and reader alike. References to the veils worn by women and Ayetollah Khomeini's orthodox beliefs reinforce this vision of difference, and hence, subtly, inferiority. Newsweek, for example, noted that Khomeini appeared to be a "xenophobic, anti-American, anti-Semitic religious fanatic who would turn the clock back by centuries--and possibly even foment instability throughout the Middle East."

Some editorials made the American impression even more clear. The San Fransisco Chronicle, asking what kind of government Iran could possibly have lacking the Shah concluded that "it would be hard to convince us that any modern state as large and economically advanced as Iran could conceivably be ruled successfully or for long by the kind of fanatic priesthood that Khomeini symbolizes."

IN LINE with this dark vision of Iran's potential leadership, the American media wrote of the mass opposition to the Shah in loaded, pejorative terms. Americans read of mobs rampaging, and Newsweek reported that "thousands of hysterical Iranians" wept for their dead. In contrast, the Shah emerged was the force of reason, and the only force that the United States could conceivably support to block the rising tide of anarchy.

Again, it was the news columns that prepared the way for open editorial expressions of support for the Shah. The Associated Press blamed the crisis on the Shah's attempt to bring Iran's "feudalistic society into the modern (aka western) world." The New York Times, on November 6, committed one of the most egregious examples of slanted coverage when it wrote that "the Shah even invited (opposition leader) Mr. Sanjabi to the palace was a dramatic compromise for him. The founder of Mr. Sanjabi's party, Mohammed Mossadegh, almost ousted the Shah from power in 1953." The Times story reversed who ousted whom--in fact, the Shah regained the throne in 1953 when his CIA-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh government.

The benevolent compromiser was further described not only as a progressive who brought Iran into the 20th century, but as socially advanced. Newspaper and magazine accounts cited the Shah's record in relaxing censorship, halting torture and replacing political prisoners as evidence of his willingness to cooperate with the opposition, and reported that the abortive land reform efforts of the '60s marked both the Shah's enlightenment and formed the pretext for opposition to his regime.

FROM BELIEVING THAT the opposition derived from either anachronistic religious fanaticism or heathen communism and that the Shah was the last remaining bastion holding both those forces back from the oil fields, the American press and public opinion had only a very short leap to make in advocating all-out support for the Shah. The New York Times concluded that "political change is clearly overdue," but ignored the depth of opposition when it called for support of the Shah because his modernization program best suited the Times's vision of Iran's needs. The Christian Science Monitor went even further when it excused the Shah for establishing a military government on the grounds that the opposition's vehemence left a solution to the crisis (one that would be welcomed by the United States), in the hands of the Army.

The confident reports that the Shah would weather the crisis are gone now, and the American media is taking a bit more care when describing Iran's various power holders. But the American press was more than simply mistaken in its predictions; the distortion and misunderstanding of the nature of Iranian opposition forces reflected nationally held values and opinions that paved the way for a repetition of the United States's most familiar foreign policy fiasco. The Iran that the press and the U.S. government sought was one that would be westernized along the Shah's U.S. inspired model. At the root of Iranian protest were the twin grievances that Iran engendered--the oppression that the Shah required, and the challenge to cultural and nationalist ideals that westernization entailed. The press ignored those social grievances of opponents to the Pahlevi regime who cited vicious police state tactics, the dramatic concentration of wealth in the Shah's Iran as well as the royal family's own record of corrupt financial transactions. Further, the validity of the cultural and religious imperatives that the Shah's opponents accused him of ignoring could not be accepted by a press that saw in that cultural tradition only fanaticism or quaint impracticality.

As long as we saw only anarchy and cultural strangeness, our commitment to the Shah could not be questioned; he was the only game in town. Combine those blinders with a belief that the United States ought to do something to combat the indigenous forces of anarchy and superstition in foreign lands, and the result is a media urging the U.S. action to save the Shah somehow and a government fumbling to find some way of intervention that would accomplish this Herculean labor.

The pattern is familiar, or ought to be, for it follows that of earlier American adventures in Iran, Greece, Cuba, and most disasterously in Vietnam. The forces of evil differed from country to country, but the American response remained constant. Whenever American vision of how a nation ought to function was challenged, the U.S. responded with generally anti-democratic, repressive attempts to alter popular movements seeking to influence the political life on their own lands.

Fortunately, in this most recent crisis, the Carter administration resisted the temptation to intervene, recognizing the futility of overt action, and lacking the facilities, or the will for any covert operations to date. But government statements of support, matched by the editorial expressions of major papers across the country mounted an attempt to alter the will of the Iranian people. Heavy-handed gestures including the expansion of U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf area further alienated Iranians who had once been inspired by the Carter human rights stance. Even the relatively limited efforts by public and private U.S. organizations to impose a U.S. solution on Iranian disputes have now blocked most chances for the U.S. to work closely with any new Iranian government. Just as the overthrow of the CIA-backed colonels in Greece brought an anti-U.S. government to power there, a meddling, presumptuous association with this client has iradicably maimed the U.S. chances to have a positive influence in Iran.

BUT PRAGMATIC failures only hide the basic flaws in press coverage and national attitudes during foreign policy debates. Intervening in somebody else's internal politics is more than just stupid, impractical and ultimately rarely successful; it is wrong. In fact, pragmatic failures ultimately have their roots in the essentially immoral nature of any such intervention. In Iran, the frustrating, tragedy-engendering contradiction that helped spark the awesome wave of opposition to the Shah lies in the conflict between President Carter's apparent commitment to basic human rights (that had raised opposition hopes that the U.S. would pressure the Shah) and the administration's continued sale of weapons to the Iranian armed forces. When U.S. attempts to restrain the opposition's goals redoubled the anti-Americanism felt by the crowds of demonstrators, their hatred was that of moral outrage that the U.S. dared to think it had the right (though it clearly lacked the means) to intervene. Once the demonstrations reached full force, the single greatest force of anti-U.S. feeling was that feeling of moral betrayal by a nation with democratic tradition and an avowed concern for human rights.

UNITED STATES interventionists safaris have failed, and will continue to fail as long as America pursues policies that run counter to the will of the people in countries we seek to influence and do business with. The U.S. can--no more than any native grown dictator--succeed for long if success depends on armed conflict with the populace. And lacking the ability to murder our way to international success, more moderate attempts to buck popular political expressions can only alienate potential friends because of the basic anti-democratic, immoral tenor of such policies.

In press coverage of Iran, the question of whether the U.S. could directly intervene to save the Shah received significant consideration. Official actions were confused, but even Time magazine, often hostile to democratic administrations, conceded in its cover story on the entire "Cresent of Crisis," there was quite possibly very little that Carter could have done." But that article and most of the other press coverage retained, at least implicitly, the idea that the U.S. should intervene. The cultural blindness that led to press coverage that either ignored the cultural roots of the Iranian protest movement or to the belittling of it, resigned the U.S. to the task of leading the pagan out of the wilderness. But missionaries--cultural or religious--do not convince, they provoke.

Whether this bias is hidden as a superpower, cold war calculus in the fashion of the Time article, or marked out as some latter day white man's burden, it is a bias that the American press, and the American people have not yet overcome. The lessons of Vietnam are still as unlearnt as the lessons of Iran. And as long as we continue to see only one option--support of a westernized client--the press and the public buy the line that the U.S. can overcome the opposition that their clients' repression inevitably creates.

And until we recognize the right of independent people to determine their own governments, we must continue to pay the moral and geopolitical price of repeated United States foreign policy disasters.