Carter and Reagan were in a dead heat in the 1980 election polls right up until five days before the election, whehn they finally held a debate, in which Reagan crushed him on a lot of isuues.
If the Iran situation was costing Carter the election it sure didn’t affect the public opinion polls. Despite how people remember it the 1980 election was a very closely contested one almost all the way; Reagan just blew it open in the ninth inning.
Ah, but I have doubts the Iranians would have klled the hostages in the event of an invasion – they would lose their bargaining chip, and set themselves up for war crimes charges.
I still dont understand how international law was so flagrantly violated without much consequence – what if say, Syria right now decides to kidnap our embassy personnel? Would the white house just do nothing? Could Syria just hold them for 360 days and then let them go, no hard feelings?
It seems hard to believe over a year passed with our diplomats held as POWs and the President didn’t do much except failed negotiations and a botched rescue attempt.
Sure it affected the public opinion polls. Reagan was essentially the second incarnation of Goldwater, and he got creamed in the election by LBJ in 1964.
An awful lot had to happen to make conservative Republicanism attractive again to voters - especially after the disaster of Watergate (ironic, since Nixon wasn’t particularly conservative). A successful Democrat would have left no room for Reagan to move.
Carter wasn’t a successful Democrat - and indeed many of the party’s positions in that era would have prevented his success unless he had completely abandoned them. Thus Reagan had an opening.
Operation Credible Sport. To conduct the second rescue attempt, a crash program was put into place to modify 3 C-130s to be able to land and take off from a soccer stadium(!) across from the US embassy. In order to allow take off and landing from such an absurdly small field, 28 rockets were attached to each plane,
One of the modified C-130s crashed on landing when one of the rockets accidentally fired, and the plan would ultimately have been a failure if carried out since the hostages had been spread throughout Tehran by this point, but it’s pretty impressive for having put together an off the wall plan and the planes to do it with on short notice.
There’s some good footage on youtube:
Saying “they wouldn’t have killed the hostages if we invaded” is not exactly convincing. Maybe they wouldn’t have killed them all at once, but they could easily have started killing them one by one, thus making their point while still maintaining their bargaining position.
Any action taken by Carter that would have resulted in the killing of even one hostage would have been even more politically disastrous. As it is, he got them out safely. That’s a success, not a failure.
Can you offer up a plausible alternative strategy to the negotiated release that you can guarantee would not have resulted in the deaths of more hostages?
And for the record, the negotiations succeeded, and the rescue mission wasn’t “botched,” it was just a Hail Mary shot that didn’t work. As it turns out it couldn’t have worked since the hostages were so scattered. NO special ops mission could have worked.
Thank you. I’ve been saying that for decades.
There were plenty of consequences for the Iranians. They got put on the American shit-list for 30 years and counting. That counts as some pretty long-lasting hard feelings. No trade, no embassy, no nothing. Other countries in the region get American-made weapons, financial aid, military advisors, and so on. Iran used to be on that gravy train under the Shah but the hostage crises ended any possibility of that.
Aside from dropping bombs on them, what more do you want? We’ve been sworn enemies of Iran for 30 years with no sign of stopping anytime soon. That’s not a very comfortable position for a small or mid-sized country to be in.
Your memory of the incident appears to be a bit foggy. The embassy personnel weren’t being held by Iranian government officials, security personnel or soldiers. They were being held by a bunch of college students with beards. It was no more a violation of international law in the sense you describe than if you get mugged while on holiday in Mexico.
The Iranian government weren’t behind it, they just didn’t do anything to stop or fix it.
Any time you’re looking at military options, you start with a map.
Here’s Syria - right on the Mediterranean. US carrier groups could go right up to the coast, and pretty much all of the country is within range of the aircraft, without any need for cooperation from the surrounding Muslim countries.
Here’s Iran - see how far inland Tehran is? and to get to the closest point on the Gulf coast, a US carrier group would have to go all the way up the Gulf, giving the Iranians ample warning that the US forces are coming, and to disperse the hostages. And then, as others have pointed out, Tehran would still be outside helicopter range, which foreclosed that as an option. So you needed some kind of fixed wing transport, which requires a landing strip…
And even if something like this happened in Syria, a group of about 60 people is not a classic military target. They can be dispersed to undisclosed locations and moved around very quickly. Sending in the Seals or something similar only works if you know where they are and can get there without any warning.
And if you’re looking at a fullscale military invasion - well, all other political and military considerations aside, the military is not designed to rescue a small group of people, or to capture a particular person. Remember that it took the US forces to December, 2003, to capture Saddam Hussein, even though they had been in effective military control of the country since shortly after the invasion.
So the comments upthread, “What would you suggest?” are not meant to be snarky. Trying to rescue hostages held with the tacit approval of the host country is a very difficult task, even if geography is on your side.
True, but the Iranian gov’t such as it was had an obligation to stop it as they had the previous February. I believe that it was, in fact, a violation of international law. Bowden says that he told the prime minister to “Go and kick them out” only to endorse the students actions on the radio before the PM got back to Teheran. The cabinet resigned over the whole issue.
Rob
I don’t think that’s correct. Iran was a signatory to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. As a “receiving state”, it was under an obligation under international law to protect the diplomats that other countries sent to it:
[my underlining throughout]
So, even if the Iranian government had no advance knowledge of the seizure of the Embassy (and frankly, that’s a pretty big “if”, in my opinion), once the seizure had occurred, the Iranian government was under an obligation under international law to protect the US mission and personnel. Its failure to do so was likely a breach of its obligations under the Vienna Convention.
That’s a fair point. Still, the main point stands, which is that it wasn’t “Iran” holding US hostages, just some Iranians.
First of all, negotiating isn’t doing nothing. Not all problems are best solved by the barrel of a gun, even if innocent lives are at stake. Especially if the solution you seem to be implying – an invasion of some sort, or perhaps a serious bombing campaign – either isn’t feasible (you can’t airdrop 20 heavy brigades into Iran) or isn’t going to work directly (bombing a military HQ somewhere wouldn’t free a single hostage).
Second, if you are advocating some kind of large scale military offensive against Iran, how many American lives are you willing to risk in order to free those hostages? Would it be worth 100 soldier’s lives to rescue those civilians? How about 500 or 1,000? At some point, one must consider not just the costs of negotiating, but also the possible/probable cost of war.
Third, you make it out like breaking international law is some grievous thing that must be settled like a southern gentleman challenging another to a duel because someone didn’t remove their hat at dinner. (And I place myself among the foremost defenders of international law on this message board!) International laws are broken all the freaking time, and a plan to make everyone pay for their crimes by using military force is just… deranged. It’s like what I would expect would happen if Dr. Strangelove were elected Secretary-General of the UN. I mean, geez, we break international laws now and then, and I’m NOT talking about what has happened during the Bush Administration.
Finally, the question has been asked and dodged a few times, but I’ll ask it again: what do you think should have been done?
Such as, for instance, overthrowing a democratically elected governments in 1953. That kind of thing tends to piss other countries off.
And by now we’ve learned that Muslims have long memories. They’re still pissed of about the Crusades, for Christ’s sake.
Actually, I’m not quite sure what provision of international law would have been broken in that case. Espionage isn’t nice, to be sure, but it isn’t regulated to the extent that armed conflict is. I’ll try to do some research, but if you have a citation, I’d love to see it.
Funny, I’ve never really considered this issue before.
Some Iranians who were supported by Khomeini. He didn’t know about it when it happened, but afterwards, if he had wanted to, he could have told them to let the hostages go. And ultimately, that’s what he did.
What, bombing the whole country flat ain’t special, any more?
I don’t think Reagan “crushed him on a lot of issues”. He said, “well, there you go again” in a charming way and Carter was finished.
Carter got the hostages out, albeit in the opening minutes of the Reagan administration, without a single one being killed. W would have gone in with guns blazing, gotten them all killed, and started a war and occupation that would make Iraq look like a walk in the park.
