Iran Hostages Essay: Learning Lessons from an Obsession

Lessons drawn from unique circumstances are usually wrong, but in the case of Iran the impulse to understand what has happened to the U.S. in the past 14½ months may offer the only way out of a blind rage. Blindness has been a metaphor throughout. The U.S. was blind not to see the extent and temper of the Iranian revolution against the Shah; blind fanatics seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran; the Ayatullah Khomeini's blind sense of vengeance sanctioned the seizure; and the hostages suffered their own blindness, held in solitary and the dark. All year long, photographs of American heads in blindfolds became icons of the crime. Now the U.S. itself is like those blindfolded prisoners as they unwrap their bindings and get used to the light: Where are we? Where have we been?

Hell is the place we have been, though the Iranian version was pure Sartre; no air and no exit. Yet the fact is that the U.S. lost a great deal because of the hostage crisis. It lost eight men, and that was the worst. It also showed itself and the rest of the world that its defense and foreign policies could be confounded by a street gang. It demonstrated that it was willing to work a deal with kidnapers; that its military and covert forces were faulty and impotent; that its political intelligence was porous. Beyond these, it lost clarity in its foreign policy when clarity was needed most.

The hostage crisis was America's obsession. Jimmy Carter called it his particular obsession more than once, and the country wholeheartedly adopted it. Television and newspapers helped mightily, Walter Cronkite's nightly countdown becoming a show of its own. The country could not let go. For most of the 14½ months everyone held to the hostages and were held by them simultaneously, like a disease of the blood. There was little energy for anything but the disease. Perhaps the greatest loss the U.S. endured was a loss of bearings —a fever dream filled with shattered helicopters and the faces of strangers, red with hate, straining to pop into the living room.

Could it have been handled better tactically? Perhaps. The French, for example, have felt all along that the U.S. made an irrevocable mistake in doing business with the Iranians, rather than treating them as one would any band of terrorists. "They [the U.S.] should have drawn an X on the 52 hostages and given them up for dead," argues Pierre Lellouche, a political strategist at France's Institute for International Relations. It makes for good theory, but Americans would never have accepted it.