Angry Attacks on America

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The fleet will take no offensive action so long as all the hostages remain alive. But Administration officials suggest that if even one hostage is killed, attacks on Iranian targets would begin speedily. The first assault might well be an air strike aimed at destroying the 77 F-14 jets and Phoenix missiles sold to Iran by the U.S. when the Shah was in power. The rationale:

such an attack on the air bases at Isfahan and Shiraz would not only serve as a show of force against the Khomeini regime, it would also remove any possibility of the jets and missiles eventually falling into Soviet hands—and there would be few Iranian civilian casualties.

Far from inducing restraint, however, the dispatch of the fleet triggered the worst verbal attacks yet. The demonstrators occupying the embassy boasted that they had wired explosives in all the rooms where the hostages were being held.

"Within an instant after hearing the first word of a suspicious movement" by the American ships, they said, they would blow up the embassy and kill all the hostages. Khomeini, on television, added: "I have no doubt that they would."

The military threat happened to coincide with the start of Muharram, a monthlong sacred period for Iran's dominant Shi'ite Muslims, which this year begins the Islamic 15th century. Last year it also marked the start of mass demonstrations that eventually brought down the Shah, and thus it has acquired a revolutionary tinge. Excited by that combination, roaring crowds numbering in the tens of thousands surrounded the embassy. Their frenzy was so great that even the youths occupying the embassy urged the mob through loudspeakers to calm down. Dozens of people fainted in the crush and were passed unconscious over the heads of the throng to waiting ambulances. A number of demonstrators wore the kafan, the Islamic burial shroud, to proclaim their willingness to become martyrs. One group carried a large cardboard effigy of Carter, depicting him as Satan, with fangs, and a scythe dripping blood.

Frustrated in its efforts to win the hostages' release, the U.S. continued its diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran as an outlaw state. Initially Carter was described by an aide as "disgusted but not surprised" by the failure of U.S. allies to condemn Iran publicly. But last week the Foreign Ministers of the nine nations of the European Community denounced the threat to try the hostages and appealed to Khomeini to free them. The French government did too, belatedly, after a public opinion poll disclosed that 64% of the respondents approved Carter's refusal to hand the Shah over to the Khomeini regime. Indeed, half the French people questioned are now sorry that their government granted political asylum to the Ayatullah last year.

Even the Soviets provided some support. Shortly after National Security Adviser Brzezinski called in Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin for coffee, sandwiches and some blunt words, the Soviet radio station that titles itself the National Voice of Iran broadcast a plea that the hostages be freed as a humanitarian move.