Effects of Iranian Hostage Crisis

For most Americans, the story begins in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis, when a group of revolutionary university students took over the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and held 52 American diplomats, intelligence officers and Marines hostage for 444 days. But for most Iranians, and to fully understand the repercussions of this aforementioned event, the story begins almost three decades prior, in 1953. This was the year that the United States overthrew the recently established democracy in Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.

He had become very popular in the country for having the ambition to finally take advantage of the wealth that Iran needed to grow by nationalizing his country’s oil supply, which was for the previous 50 years under the control of the British Petroleum company. By proving that Mossadegh’s regime was relying on the communist party of Iran for power, and in turn not wanting to lose Iran as an ally in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, England was able to persuade the U. S. to assist in engineering a coup d’etat against the new Iranian democracy and return Iran to its previous Pahlavi dynasty.

Through what was named “Operation Ajax”, the CIA and MI6 reinstalled the Shah and instituted a pro-U. S. dictatorship of Iran that was willing to comply to Western interests in regards to the vast oil supply that the “British and American corporations had controlled the bulk of almost since their discovery” 1. After 1953, Iran returned to its old ways, with a Shah regime that was fully backed by the powers of the U. S. and Britain and Iran’s oil was once again flowing under the control of foreign nations.

Over the next 25 years, the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, ruled his autocracy with arrogance and opulence, as he received millions of dollars in foreign aid in return for 80 percent of Iran’s oil reserves going to the Americans and the British. 2 Overall, the Shah eventually put Iran in a huge economic hole. In addition, the secular dictator was trying to suppress the Muslims in a country that was over 90% Islam.

By 1979, the political situation in Iran was at its breaking point. The Shah declared martial law and banned demonstrations throughout Iran, which resulted in a national protest and a huge strike that shut down the Iranian economy. Soon over two million people flooded a public square in Tehran, demanding to remove the Shah from government. It didn’t take long before popular revolution caused the removal of the Shah, and in July of 1979, he was exiled to Egypt.

The revolutionaries turned to Muslim radical Ruhollah Khomeini (or Ayatollah Khomeini), and subsequently, Khomeini installed a militant Islamist government in its place, marking the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. The people of Iran were convinced that once again, similar to 1953, the US had plans to overthrow their government, but the Iranians had different ideas this time. And (as previously mentioned) on November 4, 1979, the student revolutionaries climbed the walls of the U. S. Embassy and took hostage 66 Americans intent on showing not only the U. S. , but the world, that political change was coming to Iran.

All they wanted, in return for the hostages’ freedom, was a public apology from the U. S. for its past actions in Iran, to return the exiled Shah to Iran (who had fled to the U. S. for cancer treatment), and a promise from the U. S. to respect Iran’s sovereignty by to staying out of its affairs in the future. The 444 days that followed, when President Jimmy Carter could not, by any means, get the hostages back to the U. S. , are now known as the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

Eventually, after nearly 15 months, on the same day (in fact, only minutes after) President Ronald Reagan was sworn into office, the hostages were finally released from the Embassy in Tehran and were put on a plane back to the United States. To the Iranians, it ended the long successful period of what was just a first step in the Iranian Revolution, something that is still lingering on today. However, at that time to the American people the crisis invoked a feeling of national inferiority; for one of the first times, the US had been manipulated by a foreign country and could do nothing about it.

However, the Iranian Hostage Crisis proved to be more than just an embarrassment for the country. It’s evident 33 years later that the Iranian Hostage Crisis had other significant effects on the political environment of the United States, including the negative influence on the 1980 presidential election, complete destruction of diplomatic US- Iran relations, and the establishment of a precedent for foreign, anti-American terrorism as an effective strategy against the US. It’s debatable whether President Jimmy Carter would have won the election of 1980 if the Iranian Hostage Crisis never happened.

However, even the most profound of historians know that the conflict with Iran did indeed spark the beginning of the Ronald Reagan era and put Jimmy Carter in company with only a select number of presidents to not be re-elected to a second term. President Carter’s inability to resolve the problem made him look like a weak and ineffectual leader. Perhaps the most demonstrative example of the president’s inadequacy was an ill-advised executive decision that he made in April of 1980, the same year of the election. With lagging and inauspicious diplomacy talks ongoing with Iran, Carter grew frustrated.

Not backed by his most important advisors, the president made the call to launch an unpromising military operation to rescue the hostages, called Operation Eagle Claw. The mission was obvious: to send in a highly skilled rescue team to recover the hostages from the embassy compound. However, a severe desert sandstorm on the day of the mission caused several helicopters to malfunction, including one that veered into a large transport plane during takeoff. 3 Eight American servicemen were killed and the operation was immediately aborted.

Understandably, the mission viewed as completely unsuccessful by the American people. In addition, the constant media coverage of the hostage crisis in the U. S. served as a demoralizing backdrop for the 1980 presidential race. Every night news stations broadcasted how long the hostages had been held, pointing out how incompetent Carter was as a president. 4 On Election Day, one year and two days after the hostage crisis began, Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide, receiving the highest number of electoral votes ever won by a non-incumbent presidential candidate (489 out of 538).

Whether it was the fault of the U. S. or Iran, the undeniable truth is that despite over 30 years passing since the end of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the bad blood that this debacle stirred up continues to poison America’s diplomatic dealings with Iran. For most Americans, the story of U. S. -Iran relations begins and ends with the hostage crisis, however, devastating as the hostage crisis was, few could have imagined that its effects would be so long-lasting. U. S. - Iran relations are as hostile today as they were when the hostages were freed on January 20, 1981. “No other two countries have been at each other’s throats so intensely for so long.”

First of all, tangible evidence that most concretely embodies this rift in diplomacy is the fact that the US Embassy in Iran hasn’t been occupied since 1979, and is instead labeled with a sign on the gates of the Embassy proclaiming, “Death to America”. 7 But even pertaining to the most relevant issue with Iran today, the enigma that is Iran’s disputed nuclear program, the relationship is still only hostile. The West says Iran has focuses on weapons development, but Iran denies this, saying the program is for peaceful purposes.

In 1979, President Carter stopped U. S. oil imports from Iran, froze all Iranian assets in U. S. banks, and, with the exception of humanitarian goods, the U. S. ceased all trade with Iran. 9 The U. S. has, once again, threatened Iran with economic sanctions such as cutting off American-based oil refineries in Iran and putting an embargo on all companies based in Iran. 10 It didn’t work at that time (didn’t force Iran to release the hostages) and it’s not working now. As it stands today, amidst perhaps the most trying times between these two countries since the crisis, until compromise is achieved relations between the U. S. and Iran are unlikely to improve.

Similarly, until both sides can get over the events that happened over three decades ago, the Iranian Hostage Crisis will remain as the defining moment of the relationship between the two countries. Not including warfare, the Iranian Hostage Crisis was one of, if not the first act of pure terrorism against the United States; inevitably, the conflict showed the world that terrorism had at least some effectiveness against a world superpower which had been generally superior in most recent history.

As President Carter stated, the hostages in Iran were “victims of terrorism and anarchy”. 11 Unfortunately, with President Carter being the guinea pig, his methods for countering Iran’s terrorism were ineffective and made him look like an inept leader, as previously noted. But his failure in office to “not yield to blackmail”12, as he himself claimed, not only showed his lack of experience in these matters but at the same time gave hope to the anti-U. S. parts of the world that terrorism can be effective tool.

This newfound weapon was quickly spreading in the aftermath of the crisis, as shortly thereafter Iran’s most extremist Muslims made terrorism a major part of their foreign policy and deployed Revolutionary Guards to spread the ideas of the Islamic Revolution around the Middle East. 13 These guards “helped to create, arm and train Hezbollah (“Party of God”) which kidnapped another 15 American hostages in the 1980s”. 14 Now for the United States the threat was becoming more concentrated in the Middle East as a whole and not just Iran.

Terrorism slowly became ever so prominent as time went on. The U. S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the initial basement bombings of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, and obviously the attack on the Twin Towers, also in New York City in 2001, were all based on Middle Eastern philosophies and regimes. 15 The Iranian Hostage Crisis in Iran conveyed the inability of the United States to dictate world affairs, and in turn made the U. S. look weak on the world stage.

Iran was not completely wrong for wanting the U. S. to leave it alone, as even today our country has a habit of acting as the world’s police. When America stuck its nose into Iran’s business the resulting effects were negative, but it seems as though we haven’t learned from this experience in 1979. Since the Iran Hostage Crisis it has been evident that this nation has to collaborate and compromise with other countries, rather than control them. If the United States can truly make this change from dominance to cooperation still remains to be seen, for if the country and its leaders cannot, more acts of aggression and terrorism seem imminent.