Been reading newspapers from the time and I got questions that were answered by wikipedia:
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Why did it take so long to get to a solution when the solution was pretty obvious? Iran had four key demands: US not interfere in Iran anymore(easy), unfreeze frozen assets(complicated but doesn’t take 450 days), return the Shah’s wealth(impossible and no one knew how much he had), and apologize for past interference(easy, but not gonna happen). In the end, they settled for unfreezing of assets and the US had no problem pledging not to interfere in Iran. Seems to me that that should have taken a lot less than 450 days to agree to.
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In the last days, getting Iran it’s money proved to be very complicated. Why not just ask Congress to appropriate the funds, pay them, and then turn around and get reimbursed whenever banks can get together the funds however they did that in 1981?
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Would the failed US military mission to rescue the hostages been much more likely to succeed today? I read that the US military was still having trouble with recruitment targets and quality of recruits and equipment was being under maintained at the time. Was the disaster something that would have happened no matter what, or would today’s better trained and equipped military have succeeded? Bonus question: given Israel’s success at Entebbe, if we’d secretly asked them to do it for us, would they have been more likely to pull it off? Bonus question 2: did the US ask Israel for advice on long distance hostage rescues?
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What would be the likely result if a mass hostage taking by a sovereign Third World nation occurred today, let’s say Venezuela seized US embassy staff. I’d have to think there’d be an ultimatum followed by swift military action. Let’s leave Trump out of this since he’s an idiot and unstable and assume a normal President like Biden or Booker or Rubio having to deal with this problem in 2022 or something.