by Geoff Vasil
Monday will be day 365 of the Iranian hostage crisis. On October 7, 2023, Iranian forces took over 250 Americans, Israelis, French and Thais hostage in Gaza, brutally raping, burning, shooting and murdering another 1,200 people. Around 50 were released on humanitarian grounds and it is believed that of the 101 remaining at least half are now dead.
Day 365 is approaching the 444 days of captivity of the 53 American hostages Islamic Republic revolutionaries in Iran held at the former American embassy complex in Teheran which began in November of 1979.
On April 24, 1980, then president Jimmy Carter sent a hostage-rescue team to Iran to bring them home. The operation during that election year in the United States was a failure, but proponents of the Carter campaign for a second term later made allegations it was sabotaged from within, namely by colonel Oliver North and then-pilot Bob Gates, who later became the head of the CIA. Those allegations were never proven sufficiently.
What did happen, though, is that the leaders of the Iranian Islamic revolution upended talks with the Carter administration and announced in October of 1980 they would not release the hostages until after the November election for president in the United States. Carter’s team had hoped to strike a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini in order to gain American votes for a second term.
Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey, also later a head of CIA, called this the “October surprise,” and some credited the Ayatollah’s announcement with winning Reagan the presidency.
Ronald Reagan in his first term famously said “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” but of course his administration did negotiate with terrorists, and did so extensively. Especially with the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Reagan’s team used the Iranian revolution to arm anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua while arming the mullahs in Teheran using back-channel American intelligence arms and drugs smuggling networks. Despite the murky and tenuous aspects of the Iran/Contra operation, Reagan was pursuing what he believed to be American interests.
In October of 1983 Islamist forces, including future leaders of Hezbollah in Lebanon, blew up a barracks in Beirut housing US Marines who were part of an international force including French troops to protect Israel during the endless Lebanon civil war. The IDF and foreign partners created a 40-kilometer buffer zone at Lebanon’s southern border with Israel to keep anti-Israeli forces and terrorists away from settlements in Galilee. Reagan’s defense secretary Caspar Weinberger quashed US plans for retaliation for the loss of the lives of 241 American soldiers, claiming it wasn’t clear Iran and Hezbollah were behind the attack, although it was clear.
Eventually–within about a year–the multinational forces in Beirut withdrew, leaving the Lebanese factions to fight it out among themselves and raze the former cosmopolitan jewel of the Near East, Beirut, to the ground.
What neither president Jimmy Carter nor president Ronald Reagan ever did was to ignore the taking of hostages and terrorist acts against Israel by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The American people especially but also the whole of the West took these crimes and aggressions extremely seriously and as often as not responded militarily.
What Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing now is instructing Israel to strike back but just a little bit, only symbolically, not to harm the wheat, the rye or the oil. Why is Biden opposed to Israel destroying Iran’s nuclear program? Because Biden’s boss Obama made a nuclear treaty with Iran insuring their right to exploit the peaceful uses of atomic power in exchange for promises not to build an atomic bomb. Trump rescinded this treaty almost immediately, but diehard Democrat coup master and former presidential candidate John Kerry flew on his private jet to Teheran to reassure the mullahs Trump’s cancellation meant nothing and the treaty was still on. Kerry did this in contradiction to US foreign policy when he was no longer secretary of state in order to undermine US foreign policy. It is tantamount to treasonous behavior.
There isn’t a large danger destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities would even cause much radiation to leak. These complexes are so far underground if they were destroyed they would remain buried. A better option for Israel might be to destroy the centrifuges and seize the nuclear materials in a ground or underground operation and thus deny the enemy the possibility of recovering fissionable radioactive elements.
Whatever the final outcome, Biden isn’t worried about pollution or escalation from striking the nuclear program. There is no possibility of escalation, there is a factual deescalation of the possibility of nuclear war. Is Biden pretending some other nuclear power would come to Iran’s defense? Who? Pakistan? Russia? Of course not. Not to avenge the loss of a “civilian nuclear program.”
The opinions expressed here are purely those of the author and in no way reflect those of the Lithuanian Jewish Community or any other person or organization.