Baltimore Sun, MD
Jan 30 2007
A broader worldview
Retired diplomat and Iran hostage embarks on course to expand Navy’s
cultural horizons
By Bradley Olson
sun reporter
Originally published January 30, 2007
The midshipman blurted out his question, interrupting a class
discussion about tolerance of other cultures in the early days of
Islam.
"When did this fanaticism start?" asked John Kennedy, a Naval Academy
senior. "Like when Iran’s president says the Holocaust never happened
or wants to nuke Israel and wipe it off the map?"
The 22-year-old senior could not have picked a better man to ask.
When Islamic revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Iran in
1979, John W. Limbert Jr. was there, a middle-ranking diplomat who,
unlike any of the CIA operatives in his company, spoke fluent
Persian. He and the 52 others taken hostage by the revolutionaries
were released Jan. 20, 1981, after more than 14 months in captivity.
Twenty-six years later, Limbert has come to the Naval Academy – where
he taught briefly as a foreign service officer after his release – to
help teach the language and culture of world hot spots. Academy
administrators hope his effort, coupled with interdisciplinary
centers that focus on various regions of the world, will create an
educational niche strong enough to rival the school’s renown in
engineering.
William Miller, the academy’s academic dean, said Limbert is a
"perfect role model and cultural guide for today’s midshipmen."
Miller noted the former diplomat’s long list of stops "on the leading
edge of U.S. foreign policy": professor, diplomat and hostage in
Iran; U.S. embassy worker in Sudan, Algeria, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates; U.S. ambassador to the Islamic Republic
of Mauritania; senior civilian in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, where
he helped restore the looted museum; and dean of the Foreign Language
Institute’s School of Language Studies.
"John’s the real deal," Miller said.
Limbert retired last April after 33 years in the Foreign Service and
was hired to lead the academy’s transformation effort last semester,
one of a handful of notable faculty members hired in the past year
that include Brannon Wheeler, a Middle East scholar who heads an
interdisciplinary center on the region; Atlantic Monthly
correspondent Robert Kaplan, now a visiting political science
professor; and William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
Following the Pentagon’s lead in recommitting resources to cultural
training, the Annapolis military college has expanded exchange
opportunities for midshipmen in more than a dozen countries, added
majors in Chinese and Arabic and has hired instructors to teach
Japanese, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.
To explain "force transformation," the military term for the academy
effort he’s leading, Limbert recalled some footage he saw on CNN
after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. U.S. troops had pushed their way to
Najaf, one of the holiest cities in Shia Islam, home to a shrine for
the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law, and encountered a crowd chanting
things the soldiers obviously did not understand.
"Some young lieutenant or captain had the smarts to figure out that
the crowd wasn’t there to attack or threaten his men, but to keep
them away from the holy shrine," Limbert said. "As soon as he
realized that, he ordered his men to put down their weapons and fall
back. That captain deserves some incredible decoration, because this
could have been a disastrous moment."
The midshipmen in his class about Iran say he seldom speaks about his
time as a hostage, and they are hesitant to ask, although some have
their hopes up that he will discuss it in a class next month. Still,
he answers many probing questions from students eager to understand a
country that President Bush, in his State of the Union address last
week, said "represses its people, pursues weapons of mass destruction
and supports terror."
Many of the pictures and mementos in his sparsely decorated office
depict those 14 months of captivity: the congressional resolution to
honor his safe return, a close-up of Lincoln’s face in the Washington
memorial, with a tear about to fall from the left eye, noting the
deaths of eight soldiers who lost their lives in a failed rescue
mission and a travel itinerary issued on one of the occasions they
were almost released, complete with a bureaucratic line that still
makes him chuckle: "Use of a foreign flag airline authorized from
Tehran."
Limbert has spoken frankly and astutely about his time as a hostage
on many occasions since, most recently in a new book by journalist
Mark Bowden. In Guests of the Ayatollah, Bowden writes that Limbert
often spoke to his guards during that time to alleviate boredom, and
was surprised by how the anti-Americanism that he had witnessed as a
Peace Corps volunteer and later professor there had finally become
directed at him as an individual.
The son of a U.S. Agency for International Development worker,
Limbert loved Iran as much as any American, Bowden writes, eventually
marrying an Iranian and having a son and daughter there.
And even now, with tensions between the two countries at a new high,
he is defensive about the land and its people, baffled about how such
an old civilization with traditions of art, tolerance and justice has
become synonymous with fanaticism and terrorism.
"The point is really this: Those events of 1979, although no one in
the class was alive when it happened, really shapes and explains a
lot of what U.S. officials say when they talk about Iran," said
Limbert, 63. "What I want them to know is that the Iranians did not
wake up yesterday and decide that they wanted to be a part of the
Axis of Evil in order to bedevil the U.S. and our friends.
"There’s a lot of history and a lot of events that have gone on, and
if these young people have to deal in the Middle East in their
careers, I want them to understand what went into this problem. If
they know why it is the way it is, what the fault lines are, what the
grievances are, it’s going to help them do their job a lot better."
That’s what Limbert was trying to do Thursday in his class,
instructing the Mids about the Badr Brigade, a prominent Iraqi Shiite
militia that’s supported by Iran, as well as how quickly Islam became
politicized after its founding, compared to Christianity.
At that moment, Midshipman Kennedy interrupted, needing to know the
roots of our current problems, needing to know "When did this
fanaticism start?"
Limbert paused, staring out into the class with small, dark-brown
eyes that look like black slits from far away, and calmly explained
that the question has no simple answer.
He noted other times in history when extremism gripped civilized
people, such as the killings of Armenians by Turks early in the last
century.
Fanaticism, he said, can break out in any society and culture at any
time.
"Human beings are human beings," he said.