The real reason for the Iran hostage crisis, 40 years later

Recommendable!

"Visiting Algiers on Nov. 1, 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski met Mehdi Bazargan, revolutionary Iran’s prime minister, at an Algerian independence day reception, and politely told Bazargan that the United States was open to any relationship the Islamic Republic wanted. A photographer snapped a photo of the two shaking hands. The day after newspapers published photographs of the Brzezinski-Bazargan handshake, protests rocked Iran, culminating in the sacking of the embassy, as conspiracy-addled Iranian students sought to prevent Bazargan from betraying a revolution built, in part, on anti-Americanism.

Advocates of rapprochement often describe diplomacy as a no-cost strategy. But embraced too enthusiastically, as Brzezinski did when he approached Bazargan, the costs can be high.

Forgotten in the fog of events, however, is the fact that the students seizing the embassy did not expect to remain for more than a day or two. What transformed the crisis into something that paralyzed America for more than a year and ultimately brought down the Carter presidency was Carter’s knee-jerk reluctance to utilize military force coupled with his National Security Council Iran aide’s loose lips. ... Carter, however, took military action completely off the table. Then Gary Sick [sic!], a National Security Council official, leaked word that there would be no military contingency plans. ... To this day, no Islamic Republic official, hard-line or so-called reformist, has apologized for shredding such basic norms of diplomacy as seizing the embassy — not even “Dialogue of Civilizations’” proponent Mohammad Khatami. Not John Kerry’s [one of the dumbest of all U.S. foreign secretaries. What does this say about President Obama? Volumes!] favorite interlocutor, Mohammad Javad Zarif."


The real reason for the Iran hostage crisis, 40 years later: On Nov. 4, 1979, radical Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, ultimately holding 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. I covered the incident in detail in Dancing with the Devil, a history of U.S. diplomacy with rogue regimes, utilizing not only American sources but Iranian ones as well. Bottom line, the reason why the hostage crisis occurred, and why it lasted so long was a tragedy of errors.