Review: Guests of the Ayatollah
July 26, 2007
Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam
[rating:5/5]
This is a long book, but well worth finishing. An in-depth account of the Iran Hostage Crisis, an understanding of which seems very valuable in today’s climate. Bowden takes you into the minds of the hostages:
Two of the other marines, Billy Gallegos and Rocky Sickmann, played similar games. Gallegos rigged a slingshot out of rubber bands, and he and Stickmann opened their window slightly one night after lights out and shot Geritol tablets at a guard standing outside next to the building’s back wall. When the first pill pinged off a car nearby, the guard jumped. When the next pill hit, convinced he was under attack, he shot off his weapon. Soon there was a small crowd of guards, weapons up, shouting into their radios. Eventually the guards burst into the chancery and searched all the rooms, but the marines had long since closed their window, disassembled the slingshot, and crept back under the covers on their mattresses.
And covers the feelings of the time, in America:
America’s long lack of a military response to Iran’s provocations prompted a popular joke; in which President Carter was visited by the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt, who wondered what was going on in the world.
“The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan,” Carter says.
“Are you retaliating with conventional forces or with nuclear weapons?” Roosevelt askks.
“Uh, neither one,” says Carter. “We’re boycotting the Olympics in Moscow.”
But most interesting to me was getting to know the people who stormed the embassy. Mere students who found themselves on the world stage. Completely naive and ridiculous, with no apparent knowledge of the world outside Iran.
Wound up now, Cooke described the fear he had seen in the eyes of visa applicants who had lined up by the thousands before the embassy seizure to apply for visas to escape Iran. “These were people trying to escape,” he said.
“Tell me there’s a long line outside of the Iranian embassy in Washington of blacks and Indians or Hispanics and whatever, seeking to try to escape the United States in order to come to Iran, you know, for their protection. Well, by God, there was a line half a mile long outside of my embassy the day we opened, of people who were just that. Religious and ethnic minorities trying to escape your government. Real oppression. Firing squads, executions.
As one hostage said to his captors:
“One of the things that I didn’t learn was what you were trying to accomplish,” he said. “You were the first social revolution in history that didn’t have to compromise from the very first moment for lack of money. When you took over, you had all the money you needed to make Iran back into part of the fertile crescent. If you wanted to do reforestation, if you wanted to reinstitute the underground irrigation systems you once had…anything at all. Anything was possible because you had the money, and you threw that away.”
Ebtekar argued that all revolution required a period of cleansing, of wiping away corrupt influences, such as Iran’s ties to the United States.
“All I’ve got to say is that nothing we could have done to you in our wildest dreams is half as bad as what you’ve done to yourselves,” Morefield said. “Your children and your grandchildren are going to curse your name.”
Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam
[rating:5/5]
Related Posts
- 1,373 miles into the heart of Afghanistan
- The Desert One Debacle
- The Iran Plans
- Bringing it all back home
- links for 2007-08-16
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