As the situation in the Mid-East continues to escalate, understanding that our focus should be to the future and how to resolve this crises, spending a moment or two to look back at how we really got here may help us to avoid making the some of the same mistakes.
According to the Jimmy Carter Library,
)) Between 1963 and 1979, the Shah (of Iran) spent billions of oil dollars on military weapons. The real price of military strength was the loss of popular support. Unable to sustain economic progress and unwilling to expand democratic freedoms, the Shah’s regime collapsed in revolution. On January 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran, never to return. ((
This led to the hostage crises that began on November 4, 1979, lasted 444 days and that, according to the library, was resolved because
)) President Carter committed himself to the safe return of the hostages while protecting America’s interests and prestige. He pursued a policy of restraint that put a higher value on the lives of the hostages than on American retaliatory power or protecting his own political future.The toll of patient diplomacy was great, but President Carter’s actions brought freedom for the hostages with America’s honor preserved. ((
This isn’t really about the hostage crises, but that’s not quite the way I remember it. I remember a president frozen with indecision, playing into the hands of terrorists by focusing most or all of his energies on this one issue while the Iranians scoffed at the impotence of a nation unwilling or unable to respond to an act of war (remember, the US Embassy is, by definition, American soil. Storming the embassy and taking hostages is an act of war). The closest President Carter came to military action in this one-sided war was the failed rescue attempt in the desert. Oh… and the hostages weren’t released until President Reagon was inaugurated. You can read a synopsis of the hostage crises at PBS.
So, let’s rewind a bit further, with the help of PBS, to 1977; a time when Iran was an ally of the United States and not the terrorist supporting state bent upon the destruction of the United States.
)) New Years Eve, 1977: President Carter toasted the Shah at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him “an island of stability” in the troubled Middle East. What the president also knew, but chose to ignore, was that the Shah was in serious trouble. As opposition to his government mounted, he had allowed his secret police, SAVAK, to crack down on dissenters, fueling still more resentment. Within weeks of Carter’s visit, a series of protests broke out in the religious city of Qom, denouncing the Shah’s regime as “anti-Islamic.” The popular movement against the Shah grew until January 16, 1979, when he fled to Egypt. Two weeks later, thousands of Muslims cheered Khomeini’s return to Iran after fourteen years in exile.
Carter seemed to have a hard time deciding whether to heed the advice of his aggressive national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wanted to encourage the Shah to brutally suppress the revolution, or that of his more cautious State Department, which suggested Carter reach out to opposition elements in order to smooth the transition to a new government. In the end he did neither, and suffered the consequences. ((
Seems our President Jimmy Carter (the very same who is so critical of the current adminstration) was a fountain of indecision, from the failure to act when our alliance with Iran was falling apart to his inneffective reaction to the hostage crisis (aka act of war).
So here we sit, nearly 30 years later, and Iran continues to not only be an enemy to the United States, but a real threat to world peace and perhaps the survival of nations. How much more difficult a situation are we in now, with an enemy sovereign nation on the brink of developing nuclear weaponry, then we were in 1977?
Today, any action we take against Iran would be AGAINST a sovereign nation, denounced by the UN and many of our allies, and might draw the entire region (and the rest of the world?) into a catastrophic war. In 1977, we would have been providing SUPPORT to an allied nation who, by the way, has lots of oil.
If we had provided the necessary support to the Shah of Iran in 1977, would he have been overthrown in 1979? Would hostages have been taken later in 1979? Would Iran now be one of the primary supporters of terrorists bent on destroying us? Would they be developing nuclear weapons that could reach well beyond their neighbors with the help of a dedicated terrorist network willing to strap a bomb on the waist of a child and send him into a crowded room in the name of Islam?
Mistakes were made before Jimmy Carter’s presidency; mistakes were made after too, and no one could predict how it would all turn out. But the lessons learned are important:
First, Iraq is now an ally. Perfect situation? No. But we are much better off on the inside than on the outside. Iraq provides the US a battlefield in the war on terror and we need to support the new governemnt there. Losing Iraq to terrorists, as we did with Iran, would be devestating.
Second, when you are fighting an enemy that does not value life, that does not play by the “rules”, that hates you and everything you represent, who has learned that they can manipulate a nation by taking hostages because we value every individual life, who sees this as a weakness that can be exploited for gain or to inflict pain and fear, who does not differentiate between military targets and innocent civilians, and who understands our internal politics and media well enough to know that playing field for us is uneven because no one will even bother to try to demand terrorists play by the rules while they continue to harp on how shameful we are by not providing Holiday Inn lodging for our prisoners …
When you are fighting an enemy that places victory above honor and rules, who will continue to fight as long as one terrorist is left standing, and who sees everyone who is not on their side as the enemy… there are no rules, there is no diplomacy, there is only victory or death.
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[...] President Ford showed tremendous political courage when he pardoned President Nixon, likely costing him the opportunity to be elected president two years later (and ultimately allowing Carter to be elected president, which ironically has a great deal to do with the situation we are in today, as discussed here and here). [...]