PRESIDENT CARTER's decision to send an anti-terrorist commando group to free the hostages forcibly--his decision to invade Iran--climaxes a policy that has wilfully ignored American history in Iran and pandered to the worst emotions of the American public in an election year. To be sure, the mission was badly conceived and badly executed, even on a technical military level. If the helicopter had landed successfully in the desert, what would the soldiers have done in confronting a sprawling embassy compound in which the hostages are widely dispersed, and guarded by 150 armed Iranian militants? Harold Brown will not tell; we can only speculate that the plan involved a considerable amount of bloodshed, and that the safe return of the hostages was no more than tentative. Moreover, the operation can only further confuse our European allies, who just recently agreed to aid an American posture of restraint, and were not consulted till after the fact.

But the issue is not one of technique; this was not merely a "mistake," a "blunder," a "screw-up." The use of military force was unjustified and wrong. It was wrong because President Carter acted as he has always acted, with an ear to the polls and feeling the sting of a defeat in the Pennsylvania primary. It was wrong because eight American soldiers died in an unnecessary military action. It was wrong because it was conducted in complete secrecy, in defiance of the spirit of a democratic society, as embodied in the War Powers Act of 1973.

Mostly, it was wrong because American actions in Iran were guided, as they have always been, by an exceedingly narrow national interest dominated by what President Eisenhower used to call "the military-industrial complex," represented in this case by the major oil companies. The projected use of force was totally inappropriate because another option remains open: an admission of past evils and a repudiation of the Shah. Carter stands on international law--but where was international law in 1953, when a CIA-engineered coup put the Shah in power? What are the rights of the hostages to the rights of Iranians that were systematically, maliciously trampled on during the Shah's tenure, so much so that Amnesty International branded the Shah the world's worst offender of human rights? Force is only justified when nothing else will do; force will not be justified until America has redeemed its history.

Carter refuses to be honest with the Iranians, and honest to the American people, who remain ignorant not only of the details of this operation, but largely of America's complicity in the Shah's dictatorship. Guns can win votes--Gerald Ford's popularity skyrocketed after the Mayaguez incident, and John Kennedy's did also after the Bay of Pigs. But guns will not get the hostages back; they will not make America the friend of the nations that now invade our embassies; they will not make for a moral and honest foreign policy. And that is the real national interest of America.