On Nov. 4, 1979, radical Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, ultimately holding 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. I covered the incident in detail in Dancing with the Devil, a history of U.S. diplomacy with rogue regimes, utilizing not only American sources but Iranian ones as well. Bottom line, the reason why the hostage crisis occurred, and why it lasted so long was a tragedy of errors.
Too often, the Islamic Revolution and the embassy seizure are conflated in the American mind, but the reality is they occurred more than nine months apart. It is essential to understand why Iranian radicals attacked the embassy in November 1979 rather than the previous February when revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned and ended the shah’s rule.
The immediate spark presaging the revolution was an ill-timed handshake.
Visiting Algiers on Nov. 1, 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski met Mehdi Bazargan, revolutionary Iran’s prime minister, at an Algerian independence day reception, and politely told Bazargan that the United States was open to any relationship the Islamic Republic wanted. A photographer snapped a photo of the two shaking hands. The day after newspapers published photographs of the Brzezinski-Bazargan handshake, protests rocked Iran, culminating in the sacking of the embassy, as conspiracy-addled Iranian students sought to prevent Bazargan from betraying a revolution built, in part, on anti-Americanism.
Advocates of rapprochement often describe diplomacy as a no-cost strategy. But embraced too enthusiastically, as Brzezinski did when he approached Bazargan, the costs can be high.
Forgotten in the fog of events, however, is the fact that the students seizing the embassy did not expect to remain for more than a day or two. What transformed the crisis into something that paralyzed America for more than a year and ultimately brought down the Carter presidency was Carter’s knee-jerk reluctance to utilize military force coupled with his National Security Council Iran aide’s loose lips.
Avoiding military action might have been wise. Iran was a huge country, the U.S. was initially unprepared for any military action, and saving the hostages’ lives was paramount. Carter, however, took military action completely off the table. Then Gary Sick, a National Security Council official, leaked word that there would be no military contingency plans. When Iranian hostage-takers saw they would pay no immediate price for their actions, they stuck their heels in and rapidly expanded their demands.
The rest is history. No one wants endless wars, but removing the threat of military force in response to outrage does not promote reconciliation; rather, it retrenches enmity.
To this day, no Islamic Republic official, hard-line or so-called reformist, has apologized for shredding such basic norms of diplomacy as seizing the embassy — not even “Dialogue of Civilizations’” proponent Mohammad Khatami. Not John Kerry’s favorite interlocutor, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
While the Iranian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., remains vacant but well-cared for, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continues to occupy the American property in Tehran, transforming it into a base of operations and a museum for anti-American propaganda.
Perhaps it is time for liberals and European diplomats who lament the fact that U.S.-Iran relations seemingly continue to deteriorate to stop blaming Washington. Instead, whatever the bilateral litany of grievances both capitals can cite, the fact that Iran not only attacked America’s embassy but also continues to occupy it suggests that its antipathy to international norms and the framework of diplomacy remain unreformed.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
