Nation: The Marines Are Ruled Out

The frustration was almost palpable. There was the U.S., long a superpower, being nakedly blackmailed last week by a mob of fanatical Iranian students. The whole world, so it seemed, was witnessing Washington's humiliation as the Carter Administration desperately struggled to find an acceptable solution.

What could Washington do? Diplomacy did not seem to be getting very far, nor were appeals—via many channels —to the Iranian students to be reasonable. It was no wonder that an increasing number of Americans, in private conversations and in thousands of calls and telegrams to their elected representatives, began raising an old, familiar cry: send in the Marines. Or at least, they exclaimed, do something tough, such as dispatching warships to the Persian Gulf or dropping paratroopers into the embassy grounds.

Why can't the U.S., they asked, act as boldly as did Israel in July 1976, when its commandos rescued Israeli hostages at Uganda's Entebbe Airport?

Indeed, such a move by the U.S. would scarcely be without precedent. A handful of Marines, for example, were landed in Tripoli in 1801 to punish the Barbary pirates, and a century later some 2,500 American servicemen were rushed to China to help put down the Boxers who had been attacking diplomatic missions in Peking. It was in part to protect American lives that Dwight Eisenhower dispatched Marines to Lebanon in 1958, and Lyndon Johnson sent them to the Dominican Republic in 1965. In Washington's most recent use of force, Gerald Ford ordered U.S. units to retake the merchant ship Mayaguez, which had been seized by Cambodia's new Communist regime in May 1975.

Would it thus not be natural, if the Americans continued to be held hostage, for Washington to dispatch commandos to rescue them? TIME put this question to nearly two dozen experts in and out of Government. Their near unanimous negative conclusion was summed up by Elmo Zumwalt Jr., the former Chief of Naval Operations: "I think it's pretty much out of the question." Added Robert Cushman Jr., the retired Marine Corps Commandant: "You could kill a lot of Iranians, but you wouldn't save the Americans."

As in most military actions of this kind, surprise is essential. But in a case like Iran's, it would be very difficult to achieve. Without surprise, hostages could be killed once their captors discovered that a rescue was under way. One major problem last week was that no U.S. combat units were near Iran. The 51,000-ton carrier Midway, with its 75 warplanes, was about 2,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean, and the closest Marine Amphibious Force was in the Mediterranean.

While the Army's 82nd Airborne Division is trained for quick deployment to global hotspots, its base at Fort Bragg, N.C., is 6,500 miles from Tehran. It probably would not be possible to keep secret the dispatching of even a few of its elite units. Said a senior Pentagon official: "You alert the 82nd, and within minutes someone would call his mama to tell her that he was going. Then the news would be out."