The invasion of an Embassy and taking diplomatic personnel hostage for over year is more than just the run-of-the-mill treaty violation. It’s a causus belli, an act of war – don’t you understand that? My previous mention of international law simply allows a firm legal right for the US the right to declare war or take military action.
And invading an embassy (much less one of a nuclear armed superpower), and holding their diplomats as human hostages under threat of death that is NOT done all the time. In fact, I can’t think of other any time in modern history it has been done. As far as I know, even Stalin didn’t prevent the German Ambassador from leaving when Operation Barbarossa began. Nor FDR didn’t prevent the Japanese legation from leaving after Pearl Harbor. They were simply expelled.
And saying the Iranian government wasn’t responsible for the action of ‘students’ is absurd.
And the question what should have been done has not been dodged – I’m not the president, and it wasn’t my responsibility. It’s not just what is to be done about the hostage situation, but rather the entire presidential administration at the time. One cannot act weakly and allow a bad situation to develop, and then avoid the responsibility by claim “nothing we can do about it” because now you are in check.
To answer, if I were in charge, I would have never let the situation to develop in the first place. If it had, I would have taken direct action – I doubt the Ayatollah wanted cruise missiles hitting his palace. Note that the Iranians released the hostages the day Reagan was inaugurated . . . what a startling coincidence!
You are aware that there is no canonical list of what constitutes an act of war, right? Of course we know a belligerent action when we see it, but the idea that we are obligated to react to a provocation is nonsense. An act of war is anything a country wants it to be. I’d like to see the list that includes things like “takeover of an embassy” or “assassination of an archduke” or “raising taxes on tea” that obligates countries to invade.
While hostage taking is unusual, there’s lots and lots of instances of embassies being attacked, whether they be US embassies or others. They generally don’t lead to war. See for example the Chinese rock-throwing at the US Embassy in Beijing in 1999, the Serbian mob which attacked and set fire to the US Embassy in Belgrade just last year, the numerous and various bombings of Israeli embassies around the world (including London in 1994), the 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, the hostage taking at the Japanese embassy in Kuwait in 1974, and so on and so on. Heck, there’s even the time that people in the Libyan embassy in London shot and killed a policewoman in cold blood.
None of those embassy attacks precipitated war.
That’s a great policy. I’m thinking of running for president under the platform, “I’ll never let war or economic recession happen in the first place!”
The Algiers Accords which resulted in the release of the hostages was negotiated by Warren Christopher and signed on January 19, 1981. If you don’t know your history, at least you could look it up on Wikipedia.
What would be absurd is to say that the Iranian government ( or rather the theocratic faction thereof ) didn’t fairly quickly gain a degree of control over the situation. But as far as anyone has ever been able to be determine, the only go ahead from the “government” at the time was a wink and a nod from a cleric in Khomeini’s camp, who saw it as a way to pull the teeth of the leftist factions in the government ( and the target was very nearly the Soviet embassy instead ). This at a point when the government was still a broad coalition of factions, of which Khomeini’s was the strongest, but not yet all-powerful.
You have to understand that much of what unfolded was due to internal power struggles within the revolutionary government, at a point when everything was still in a state of flux.
How so? Something extreme like direct armed intervention to prop up the Shah? Or just evacuate the embassy completely after the first takeover?
I think the first would have a been a very bad mistake. The second may actually have been prudent, but I think you could make a case either way.
I think you may be seriously overestimating the impact such would have had on the Iranian government. I’d note that they didn’t prove terribly amenable to negotiations with Iraq after being attacked by them. Not until after eight years of war first, anyway.
Beyond that you had a situation where the hostages were being held by a bunch of hair-trigger young fanatics, as opposed to Iranian troops. You may have been signing the death warrants of at least some, if not all of the hostages. The Iranian government ultimately did call the shots in a sense, but they still didn’t have physical custody of them per se.
Not to say Carter couldn’t have acted more forcefully from the get go and probably should of. But immediately lobbing missiles and declaring war over this issue, given the very confused situation on the ground at the time, seems like an overreaction from where I sit.
Carter’s press people allowed the US news media to turn the whole thing into a circus…evey night, the news announced “this is day XXX of the hastage crisis”. The stupid dope (Carter) didn’t realize he was playing into the ayatollah’s hands. Earlier, Abolhassan Bani -Sadr negotiated (at great risk to himself) a deal tha would have placed the hostages in the custody of the Iranian Army. Then an army doctor would have announced their poor physicalcondition, and recommended repatriation (they would have been flown out via Switzerland). But Carter’s idiots screwed up this deal-they broadcast it around the world, and the ayatollahs dumped it.
And there was absolutely no political will in the United States at the time for another land war in Asia. We had just watched the helicopters evacuate the embassy in Saigon a few years ago. There was a broad realization that military force couldn’t solve all problems.
We realized that rather than being our allies, the Iranian people were very anti-American. Any invasion would have been a bloodbath. Sure, we could have bombed Iran. Whoopee. What would that have accomplished? It wouldn’t have freed the hostages. So we bomb Iran, the militants kill the hostages, and then what? We keep on bombing? What for?
If you have a goal, and military action won’t allow you to accomplish that goal, then why would you consider military action? It’s possible to redefine your goal from “Free the hostages” to “show the world that we’re tough guys”, but you just might end up demonstating the opposite, just like in Vietnam. The Vietnam war didn’t show the world that we were tough guys, it showed the world that we’d give up if the price was too high.
Allowed? Allowed? Jeebus christ, you think the president – any president – has control or even influence on how the press covers a story like this? Get a grip.
The only prediction I can make is that a hostage situation involving the Soviet embassy would have been resolved quickly - the Soviets did not screw around with this sort of thing. They demonstrated that just a few years later:
Cite. The article sanitizes the story considerably - the common story told is that Hamas got packages with sliced off genitals in them. In any case, no more Soviet hostages, and it isn’t a stretch to believe that the KGB would have done the same in Tehran.
So we should have done the same thing? Start kidnapping random Iranian hostages and cutting off their body parts until the Ayatollah came to his senses?
Actually I think it is a stretch. A country with oil, a common border, some shared revolutionary history ( the first Soviet outside the USSR was in Iran ) and some friendlies ( leftist factions ) just come to power in a coup where a American-supported monarch had been deposed, is very different from a terrorist organization.
Not sure how it would have played out and the Russians may well have been more aggressive than Carter. But I think we can rule out genital or finger slicing, or for that matter an immediate declaration of war. At the time the Soviets stood to potentially gain much from the revolution in geopolitical terms, however disappointed they must have been in the long run.
Well, having read about the operation, and despite my sympathies for Carter and the individuals involved, I do think some poor decisions were made.
Primarily two decisions:
The decision to use only two helicopters more than the minimum necessary, despite the service record of those helicopters showing frequent breakdowns in normal operation and the known operating environment full of dangerous haboob sandstorms which are very hard on machinery. As soon as two choppers had breakdowns or even warning lights, it was mission over, even without the accidents.
The decision to fly very low, inside the haboob sandstorm, to avoid hypothetical Iranian radar operators. I guess I don’t know for sure, but I’ve never heard anything about the Iranians detecting the mission even after the abort. The Iranians operating the radars would have been new, after the change of governments, and even a detection might not have triggered a recognition of what was going on and subsequent armed response. It just seems fatally flawed to fly into almost certainly destructive sandstorms to avoid a potential detection by amateurs from an anti-technology political movement.
Although not a “decision,” the abandonment of classified papers detailing the identities of our agents inside Iran was indefensible. Destroying the paperwork before leaving is a universally understood rule of this kind of thing.
So I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to call it “botched.” Military professionals make mistakes too.
How on earth did you get that from what I wrote? I was just speculating on what the Soviets would likely do. And I think they would use harsh tactics. Even if they negotiated later, they would have wanted to do so from a position of strength, and that in no way would have been invalidated by their actions.
Besides, the Soviets did not kidnap random people in Beirut - they captured people close to the Hamas leadership.
Speaking of the Soviets, it’s also worth noting that the Cold War was still going strong at the time, and that starting a hot war at Russia’s doorstep was a very dangerous thing to contemplate (much less using nukes, as many Joe the Plumber types wanted to do at the time).
Frankly, the Soviets would have been in a better position to do something about it, militarily speaking. Geographically they are much closer to Teheran, the population wasn’t overwhelmingly anti-Soviet, they probably had more intelligence assets in Iran and the political costs of a few dead hostages would have meant little to them.
I think we only disagree on whether it would be a KGB or Red Army matter, but certainly the Soviets would not have tolerated a hostage crisis lasting more than a year.
It’s also worth noting that the Soviet Union had a much different relationship with Islamists than the US, especially in the 1970s. First of all, the Soviets were no friend of Israel. One would think that would make just a bit of difference when Islamic extremists would think about how to deal with the US as compared to the USSR, what with us being the Great Satan and all.
Second, just one month after the Iranians took the hostages, the Soviets acted forcefully to the threat of Islamic radicals who were gaining a foothold in a neighboring country. In order to “prevent” something bad from happening “in the first place,” as someone has so eloquently put it, Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul on Dec 4, 1979. And we know how well that ended up.
So, perhaps saber-rattling and invasion isn’t always the best way to deal with those pesky Islamic radicals.
The Soviets were invited six months before the invasion. What’s more, the first thing they did when they traipsed into Afghanistan was have the Spetsnaz put a couple of bullets in Hafezullah Amin’s head. Now, when someone invites you into their country, it is generally a rude thing to do to immediately assassinate the guy who invited you in. Ultimately, the idea that all the Soviets did was render assistance to a neighbor who asked them to come is just pure commie propaganda.
There’s a great book, published about ten years ago, that has the actual minutes of the discussions of the Central Committee of the Soviet Politburo regarding whether or not to invade Afghanistan. Coming to the aid of embattled Afghan leaders had zippy to do with it. IIRC, it was mentioned as a great “cover” for the invasion. I don’t frequently use such language, but again, that argument really is commie propaganda. It really, truly was a Soviet invasion.
So, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on the pretense that they were answering a call for aid from the Afghan government, it was “commie propaganda”.
When we invaded Iraq on the premise that we were looking for NBC stockpiles that weren’t there, was that “capitalistie propaganda”?
I tend to think that Bush genuinely believed that there were WMD in Iraq, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Bush really thought that invading Iraq was a reasonable response to 9/11, so I would prefer it be called “idiot propaganda.”