Iranian Hostage Crisis

The Iranian hostage crisis began 4 November 1979 when Iranian students and members of the Revolutionary Guards (Iran's elite forces) violently took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and captured seventy-one U.S. diplomats and support staff. The Iranians retained fifty-two people as hostages, violating internationally recognized immunities and ignoring U.N. resolutions. A military mission to rescue the hostages was aborted in April 1980. The crisis culminated with President Jimmy Carter's electoral defeat that November.

The foreign and domestic context of the crisis merit detailing because the context dictated in many dimensions its outcome. Indeed, personal leadership played a minor role amid overwhelming historical trends. The roots of the embassy takeover were planted in an internal struggle for power in the ruling circles of Muslim fundamentalists preceding local elections. The regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had taken over Iran merely nine months earlier. Although control of the immense political and economic resources of Iran was an Iranian affair, the consequences were felt in the United States.

The initial demand of the embassy attackers was the arrest and extradition of the ousted shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to allow a public trial for the human rights violations of his regime. The shah was dying of cancer in the United States, which had granted him permission to come to New York City for medical treatment. He had arrived in the United States in October. The Carter administration refused to extradite the shah, suspecting that he would be given a show trial and then executed. The Iranian government controlled the negotiations while persistently claiming that the activists in the embassy compound would decide the fate of the hostages.

The Iranian government endorsed this act to challenge the superpower status of the United States. President Carter, a Democrat from Georgia who won election in 1976 without any significant foreign policy experience, was particularly vulnerable. He already faced accusations from the right that his nonviolent approach to the role of the United States in the world betrayed long-term allies and that his focus on human rights exhibited weakness rather than strategic power. Carter also suffered from his failure to resolve the severe economic and energy problems that had begun in the early 1970s. His perceived mishandling of the Iranian assault on the embassy tapped into a reservoir of criticism and mistrust that had a devastating effect on the Carter presidency, sabotaging his reelection in 1980.

Carter resisted calls to use U.S. force to prevent the fall of friendly regimes. These regimes included those of the Iranian shah in the winter of 1979, Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza, and the democratic regime of Eric Gairy in Grenada in the following summer, months before the hostage crisis began. Although it is doubtful that such use of force would [Page 755]have salvaged these regimes, Carter claimed to have deduced from the failure of the Vietnam War the limits of military and economic force, on the one hand, and the power of moral leadership devoid of materialistic and hegemonic interests, on the other. He was also trying to counter his nation's reputation for orchestrating military coups and installing puppet regimes abroad, especially in Latin America.

Iranian students outside the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran, which they had taken over and in which they held 66 hostages.

Setboun/Corbis; used with permission.

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