The way Eisenhower rightly slapped the UK/France/Israel down for invading an M.E. nation on a spurious pretext, we sort of assumed you had. 
There two different motives going on for the Brits and the Americans. The British were primarily concerned with keeping their cash cow of Iranian oil going. When Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, they approached the Truman Administration about overthrowing him and more firmly entrenching the Shah. Truman refused, citing his own personal desire to see colonialism gone. Given a perfect hand, Truman would have assisted the Iranians by helping them get by the British blockade and embargo and, in fact, did help them a little bit. But his hands were tied since he couldn’t risk completely alienating the British with the Soviet threat looming. So he did his best to walk that diplomatic tightrope by trying to be a neutral arbiter.
The Eisenhower administration, however, was completely different. Eisenhower brought in the Dulles boys. The Dulles boys had been against Mossadegh for several years at that point, believing that if Mossadegh was left in charge, Iran was ripe for a communist coup overthrowing Mossadegh. That would be a disaster because of Iran’s oil reserves. So, they concluded that they needed to overthrow Mossadegh first and install their own man before the communists did. So, when the British issued Eisenhower the same plan and offer that Truman refused, the Eisenhower administration snapped up the opportunity.
Then, the CIA trained the Shah in organized suppression of the opposition - including, in some cases, giving the Shah lists of people that were to be executed. The Shah’s secret police were trained in torture and intimidation tactics, just as would be repeated in South America years later.
The result of this was that every single legitimate avenue of opposition was systematically crushed. The only thing left was radical fundamentalist Islam. This was safe because of the (ironic) tradition of mosques being relative safe havens. The Shah couldn’t have gone through with a systematic suppression of the mosques without risking the uprising that would later come, so he resorted to exiling a few leaders, but that’s about it.
You can not buy it all you want. The US is hated all over the Middle East because, for the most part, the US has aided in the suppression of the people. Look at how much support has been given the Saudis to oppress their people. And how much aid the US gave Saddam Hussein before turning on him. The list goes on.
Had we supported Iran against Britain, then Iran would most likely be a moderate, secular democracy right now.
And Britain and Iran have closer relations because a) Britain wasn’t the principal supporter of the Shah, b) Britain didn’t have a hostage crisis. Otherwise, we would have an embassy there, too.
I do not believe that. The US supports dictators, but so does Bin Ladin and he has popular support. Bin Ladin was close to the Saudi Government for years before he was kicked out. He also cozied up to the government in Sudan which is currently committing genocide and he was close to the government in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Sudan are among the worst human rights/civil rights violaters on earth according to freedom house.
Besides many muslims supported Saddam in the Iraq invasion and Saddam was a horrible dictator. The fact that the US sometimes supports dictators alone does not explain why we are hated so much. Many countries support dictators in the middle east. And the US gave alot of aid to the Kurds to topple Saddam as well as giving him alot of aid directly. The US also gives alot of aid to Egypt and the Egyptians hate the US violently.
Its my belief that the US’s support for dictators is a reason to justify hate for the US in the middle east, but it is not the real reason. The real reasons are probably cultural and our support of dictators just adds to the hate that the cultural schizm created. Other countries that support dictators in the middle east like Russia or China do not suffer from as much hate as the US.
Your belief that Iran would be moderate doesn’t make sense to me. What about the fact that Irans neighbors are hotbeds of fanaticism? Afghanistan and Pakistan are fanatical countries and they never had a hostage crisis. The US helped screw Afghanistan up though, but so did the USSR.
Beat me to it!
You can do those things when you’re an Arab. Bin-Ladin gained initial fame for leading a rag-tag army against a large Soviet empire and winning some battles. Basically, someone who brought glory to the Arab people. He didn’t have nearly the cache that he does now that he went up against the Saudis.
Second, I’d be extremely surprised at how aware most Arabs are of the Sudanese and Afghani human rights abuses. Heck, the US has a free media, and look at how many people are aware of Saudi Arabia’s abuses. Now, considering that most Arabs have far less access to free and open media, I’m sure Freedom House doesn’t get a lot of air time.
Of course, the Arabs can see with their own eyes the oppression that the US supports.
Of course, but he was their dictator. The Arabs could have a relatively independent dictator that stands up to the US, or a dictator who is a US puppet, which do you think they’re going to support? Happens all the time.
But none have the same visibility and history in the Middle East over the past 50 years, aside from Britain, France and Russia. And Russia is no longer much of a factor in the Middle East, aside from the occasional moral support of Arab positions against the US. Britain and France have become more sympathetic to Arab greivances, so they get some leniency as well. But none of the three has the presence in the Middle East that the US does. Big presence leads to being the main target.
As for Egypt and all that aid. Not much of it gets through to the average Egyptian, unfortunately, due to the extremely repressive and corrupt government that’s in charge there. A government that’s mainly relying on US support to stay in power. See a pattern here?
Neither of them is as visible as the US. Moreover, neither lends as much support for Israel, which is seen as yet another example of Western imperialism and oppression of Muslims, rightly or wrongly.
These feelings didn’t just come out of the blue, you know.
What about them? Iraq was a secular state up until about a year ago. Afghanistan was, too, until the US supported religious extremists and then left them to take over the country. Pakistan’s religiosity has a different cause, stemming from how that country was created and the course it has taken with India.
I would have given Tehran 24 hours to release the hostages. If not, tehran would instantly have been made into a twin city to Hiroshima. How many hostages would others take after such a demonstration?
Frankly, the USA has very little choice in dealing with corrupt dictatorships abroad. Take Cuba…the country is one big mind control camp, and there are no basic rights. However, if we supoort Cuban democrats, we are accused of “interfering” in Cuba’s internal affairs. How about Saudi Arabia? The House of saud is corrupt, but it is the existing government of the country-what are we supposed to do? Condemn the Saudis for their terrible human rights records? Or Egypt: it is a one-party state witha president whose elected himself for life…we keep Mubarek in power…and are hated for uit (by the Egyptian democrats). However, if Mubarak’s dictatorship were to fall, it would most likely be replaced by a fundamentalist islamic dictatorship (and we all know how human-rights oriented THAT would be).
In short, the USA HAS to make deals wth the devil…on a daily basis.
Actually, we migh well emulate France: the French make their deals based on how it will benefit France…and let the devil take the hindmost! At least its an honest way of dealing with crooks.
Yeah, that’d show them. Never mind that you’d pretty much destroy the possibility of any overt or covert gain from the situation. Hostages: dead. Oil: unusable or destroyed. Diplomatic relations with any of the surrounding countries: shot to hell. Public support at home and abroad: converted to violent antipathy.
And given that one of the neighboring countries was the USSR, it’s entirely possible that Tehran wouldn’t have been the only city converted to radioactive dust.
Still think it would have been a good idea?
I wonder if there is a correlation between the 51% who voted for George W Bush and those whose motto is “just Nuke the bastards”.
Rune:
I’m assuming you mean they should have gone to war, correct? They did. The U.S. just outsourced the task to Iran’s psychotic neighbor to the west.
ShibbOleth:
Not at all. That’s why the U.S. didn’t really start helping Hussein’s aggressions until the hostages were safely back on U.S. soil.
In regards to your OP, I’d say the answer is quite simple. The U.S. should have turned the Shah over to the revolutionary government to face charges for the crimes he committed. To make sure the Iranians don’t try to pull any fast ones, they could have used and intermediary like France. Once the hostages were safely out of Iran, the Shah would be turned over. I still can’t understand why the Carter decided to protect the Shah at all costs.
Because it would have been viewed as giving in to terrorism and/or barbarism.
How would we have given the Shah back and gotten all the hostages? Hell, the Iranians were divided enough that the one thing that MIGHT have gotten them all to agree would be “We’ll ship you the Shah, and then you put the hostages on the same helicopter, and we’ll fly them home.”
Of course, another, more likely result of this would have been, “Now that we have the Shah, we’ve changed our minds. We will keep the hostages until you ship all his overseas assets to us, right here. In gold.” No sane President would have set himself up for that kind of nonsense.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to say what the “right” thing to do might have been. I have, however, often wondered what right NOW would be like if we’d simply written off the hostages as casualties of war, and simply blasted their major population centers with bombs, cruise missiles, and everything else we could find, killing a noteworthy fraction of the population, and taking care to utterly incinerate every trace of infrastructure…
…without ever sending an American soldier into the country…
…and then stopping.
Makes you wonder what Middle East/USA relations would be like right now, don’t it?
I think that if I was ‘in charge’ and had the authority and something like that happened I would contact the government, Iran in this case, and wish to know, in detail, what was being done to rescue the hostages and if they would accept help.
If they refused to rescue the hostages and refused to allow us to rescue them ourselves than a state of war would exist between our two countries.
I lived through this time, though I was young, and did not see and could not see now why the Iranian action was not considered an act of war. I think the cold war, America’s lack of confidence and being so close to Vietnam (timewise) contributed much to how the U.S. acted.
If it were to happen today there would be no doubt that it is an act of war. I think most countries would consider it an act of war today if it were to happen to them.
Master Wang-Ka:
Well that’s just utter nonsense. There was no terrorism or barbarism about it. And there were already several negotiations going on to secure their release. The problem was that the U.S. utterly refused to hand over the Shah. If I were to guess as to the reason, I’d say it was because the U.S. had several other sadistic bastards on their payroll and if they turned one over to the angry mobs, it would give the others the willys.
I already explained that. You could have used France as an intermediary. For example, the Shah would have been flown to France as well as the hostages. Once there, the French government would have overseen the exchange.
Has the concept of working a problem out been completely eradicated in America? Is everything now to be solved with “what if we just bomb the shit out of them?”
You probably should have stopped right after “I am not knowledgeable enough to know what the RIGHT thing would have been.” You didn’t need to provide an example of your deficiency.
But if you had bombed them, you would have faced a huge problem. Iran is the second largest exporter of oil in the world. That means your mindless bombing would have been stopped by other countries who didn’t like the idea of oil remaining at $80 a barrel (in today’s dollars). Secondly, Iran’s military at the time, regardless of allegiances, would have responded. And keep in mind that Iran’s military then was the strongest in the region.
While I agree with your points, on balance, let me quibble.
Given the hypothetical outbreak of hostilities, who might have stopped a US retaliatory strike? I’m not talking about France or the USSR throwing hissy fits at the U.N. or the issuing of toothless ultimata. I’m talking about countering force with force. When push comes to shove, no one would have militarily opposed a US military offensive. As for economic sanctions, who would have levied them–and have unified their bloc?
Second, regional power or no, Iran would have been steamrolled by the combined US military forces, if Carter had been stupid enough to have pursued that course of action. During the runup to the 1980 presidential election, Reagan certainly succeeded in framing the US as a weak, underpowered, unequipped shadow of a giant, but later analyses showed the military to be far stronger than this characterization.
FTR, the US probably took the right course of action. Carter’s option–the insertion of a tiny Special Forces rescue team–would have probably resulted in the deaths of most every hostage and probably pushed the two nations to the brink of war. I’m reasonably certain the lion’s share of congress would have voted, in the heat of the battle, to declare war against Iran, so hated were they at the time.
Five years ago, on the twentieth anniversary of the embassy takeover, NPR ran an interview with one of the then-students who took over the embassy.
Their original plan was to break in, scare the hell out of some people as a demonstration, and try to get away without being killed. Once they had taken control, however, they received word from the Ayatollah to hold the fort. This came as a surprise to them, and they really weren’t prepared or even too keen on the idea of holding anyone off for an extended period of time, but this was a direct order from the supreme religious leader of the land. They feared the consequences of disobeying it more than those of following it.
If there’s even a shred of truth to this, then I think the way we could have handled it differently then, as well as similar situations now, would have been to remember that, in the end, a terrorist is an individual, with an individual’s motivations that can be coerced. Far better, IMO, a solution based on that understanding would be than some bullshit notion that it’s all part of Satan’s great war against American Christians.
All of our foreign policy for the last half-century seems to come from an attempt to see our ignorance of the nature of our enemies as a position of strength.
Yet Carter did not get them back. I would argue it was the Reagan presidency, with the very real threat of an invasion and guns blazing, that caused the hostages to be released. Surely you don’t consider that it was an accident that they were released on Inauguration Day; surely you do not suggest that by coincidence, President Carter’s careful diplomatic efforts bore fruit on the last day of his presidency?
Not one minute ago I closed this thread wondering under my breath how we got 35 posts into this thread without the first mention of these simple facts.
I offer no opinion on whether Reagan’s clearly known positions were the primary influence for the release of the hostages, but it was well known that Reagen made it clear that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
So to answer the OP, we did do something different. We elected Ronald Reagan.
BTW, there is an interesting article in this month’s The Atlantic called “Among the Hostage Takers” (no link for the full article is available) that is a 25 year retrospective, including interviews with several of the original hostage takers.
Wasn’t The Reagan Admin involved in some sort of barter with Iran? Did this bartering have any effect on the fate of the hostages?
Were these different hostages?
My childhood memories are sort of vague.