Who knows? Attack Iran and destroy it, and Saddam Hussein may never have become an important figure, and might not have invaded Kuwait, leading us to have bases in the middle east, causing Obama bin Laden to get upset and attack us, to which we justly responded, making GWB popularly elected the second time around. Deal with small problems now, or massively grander problems later (cough-don’t-pull-cough-our-troops-out-of-cough-Iraq).
Geoge Bush was not president?
Destroy it?
There would still have been 50,000,000 Iranians left, even if we knocked off a couple million.
In any case, if the US had invaded and left behind a shattered, nominally democratic Iran, you think Saddam would just have left them alone?
Your understanding is wrong. The embassy is not American soil.
Not to mention that, even if it were it would have been extremely stupid to start a war over such incident.
To the contrary, Saddam invaded merely on the premise of the revolution having temporarily wrecked the Iranian military. A prostrate Iran would have been far, far too tempting a target to ignore. He would have been a worse problem, earlier, IMHO.
Two things to remember, one of them already mentioned:
1.) The Iranian government did not seize the embassy. Rather it was loose cannon students, acting independently. The government subsequently approved of the move and took de facto control, but early on they had plausible deniability and could present themselves as mediators. The situation was entirely more muddled then than it appears in retrospect.
2.) Iran was far more internally united then than it is now. At that point the secular left still had a powerful voice in the government and was allied with the religious factions. Khomeini, a master populist, skillfully exploited this moment of unity. Revulsion and opposition to the Shah and his ( very well known ) backer, the U.S., was at an all time high. The Iranian people had very legitimate grievances against the U.S. government that went far beyond Islamic radicalism. An invasion would have faced a near-universally hostile populace in a very high temper.
Guys, I didn’t mean to sidetrack this. What I said was complete hyperbole meant to illustrate the point that perhaps “thank God Jimmy Carter was president” is lacking in forethought. I should think that the run-on sentence and lack of clarity where kind of indicitive of the lack of real reason behind the stream of consciousness displayed.
I also see that that I mispelt Osama’s name. Oops.
We WERE at war with Iran (for intents andpurposes)-the US Navy sank two Iranian destroyers, in the Persian Gulf.
From a logistical point of view an invasion would have come close to being impossibility in the absence of a country adjoining Iran allowing such a thing.
Following Iran’s mullah sanctioned casus belli of seizing hostages from the US Embassy a more practical response by the US would have been to impose an immediate and total blockade on all Iranian ports. That would include advising all international oil companies that entry to an Iranian port by any of their tankers after a certain date would result in their being prevented from leaving the Persian Gulf.
The full complement of the Iranian Embassy in the US should also have been interned and not allowed to fly home, as was allowed by the then US President, the imbecilic Jimmy Carter.
Such actions by the US would have quickly and peacefully resolved the issue.
We declared war on Iran the minute we overthrew an elected government and installed a murderous puppet dictator.
I believe the OP is asking why the US didn’t formally declare war on Iran. The US took many measures to try to force Iran to change it’s policy and actions, including invading the country with a commando group, but congress never passed a declaration of war. As to why, what good would it have done? A declaration of war would have just tangled up other nation’s relations with Iran. The US was doing everything it could think of to pressure Iran. Short of a large-scale invasion-and the US has shown it doesn’t need a declaration of war to do that-there wasn’t much else the US could do.
As Iraq showed, it would not have been an easy victory. And remember, back then the USSR was still capable of exerting significant military power. And they share a border with Iran. If they had provided weapons and sanctuary to Iranian forces (or if Iraq had), it would have been Vietnam all over again.
As a side note, I’ve had a long interest in Soviet/Russian-Iranian relations. If we’re thinking about alternative histories, the idea that the Soviets could have supported Iranian radicals in fighting the United States deserves a big grain of salt. The Soviet leadership was basically scared s—less about the fundamentalist movement in Iran, especially beginning in 1978.
As a rule of thumb, the Soviets were incredibly paranoid about anything happening on or near their borders. In fact, when the Soviet leadership started worrying about what was going on in Afghanistan, there was considerable concern that the fundamentalism in Iran was about to spill over into Afghanistan, and the Motherland would surely be the next step! It is pretty striking how much this line of thought resembled a domino theory for the region.
So we know now that the idea of the Soviet Union assisting the Iranians at that time, even against the United States, would be a very tough thing to actually do. (Of course, we have seen that the Soviet Union and Russia eventually reached a kind of “I won’t mess with you if you won’t mess with me, just don’t expect me to actually like you” sort of arrangement.)
However, I am not aware of the extent to which the US knew of the Soviet fear of the Iranian revolution at that time.
The Soviets strongly supported Saddam as a bulwark against Iran just as we did. Instability in oil supplies would have affected them just as much as us.
That’s why the Iraqi forces were using (Soviet) T-34 tanks and MiGs during the Gulf War.
T-72 tanks. The T-34 was a contempory with the Sherman during WWII.
Considering that there were around 50 million Muslims in the Soviet Union, any Islamic fundamentalism on its borders would naturally be worrying.
:smack:
There were apparently still a few T-34s left, though (wiki):
Ya but be fair Ralph, that was after the Iranians (rev guard) were dropping mines into the water and getting caught, not to mention firing the odd silkworm missile at passing ships.
Declan
Wouldn’t those actions pretty much have required a declaration of war first?
Iran was holding the entire US emabassy hostage.
Bad, bad Iranians. I do not condone such behavior but we need to put things into their context. The new regime had managed to overthrow America’s puppet regime of the Shah with much difficulty and after many years and America had been actively propping up the Shah until it could no longer hold him. Khomeini’s enmity towards America was made by America.