Eagle Claw: America’s Attempt To Rescue Its Embassy Hostages from Iran in 1980

Based on a map from Mapsland.com

American and Iranian readers over age fifty will recall vividly the Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November, 4, 1979. The revolutionary Islamist regime took dozens of diplomatic staff hostage. The supposed demand for their return was that the United States should hand over the deposed Shah Reza Pahlavi for a show trial and summary execution. This was after U.S. President Jimmy Carter had allowed the overthrown Iranian monarch into the United States to receive cancer treatment. When Carter did not cave in to this barbaric demand, the Iranian regime made endless propaganda hay out of the embassy and the hostages, whom it paraded blindfolded before television cameras.

Americans were enraged. I was all of ten years old at the time, but I remember the disgust I felt, seeing IRANIANS NOT WELCOME signs go up on local businesses where I lived, as if Iranians fleeing the ruthless new regime for the freedom of America were to blame for Khomeini’s crimes. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to imagine a casus belli more clearly backed by international law for America (“We should turn Iran into a parking lot!” Americans used to say at the time). President Carter, however, was not looking for a war and tried negotiations instead, which predictably failed. In April 1980, he authorized a military mission, led by a newly created elite U.S. unit called the Delta Force, to rescue the hostages, whose number was down to 53 following the Khomeini regime’s release of its female and Black captives, another masterful little stroke of propaganda. This went forward on the night of April 24, but failed catastrophically at a designated refueling site in the Iranian desert, hundreds of miles from Tehran. Eight U.S. military men were killed (five from the Air Force and three Marines), five other troops were seriously hurt, and eight aircraft were lost, along with any chance Carter had for re-election that year. The hostages would not go free until the January 20, 1981, when Carter’s victorious election opponent, Ronald Reagan, assumed the presidency.

Air and Space Forces Magazine gives a detailed account of the mission, including a blow-by-blow analysis of the military operational failures. Two things immediately struck me in this fine article by Otto Kreisher. The first is a quote from Carter’s memoir: “I told everyone that it was time for us to bring our hostages home; their safety and our national honor were at stake.” The second thing is the outline of what the U.S. military planned to do if the mission reached Tehran:

The next night, Delta would be driven to the embassy in vehicles obtained by the agents. A team of Rangers would go to rescue the three Americans held in the foreign ministry. As the ground units were freeing the hostages, the helicopters would fly from their hiding spot to the embassy and the foreign ministry. Three Air Force AC-130 gunships would arrive overhead to protect the rescue force from any Iranian counterattack and to destroy the jet fighters at the Tehran airport.

The population of Tehran was then just over 5 million (it is now some 9.4 million, with another 7.4 million crowded into the greater metropolitan area, according to Wikipedia). Even with a nighttime mission, it is impossible to imagine Eagle Claw succeeding without a lot of civilian dead, especially given that so many Tehranis were fired up with revolutionary zeal and willing to fight the hated Americans with their bare hands. (It was “students” who actually stormed the embassy in November 1979, remember.) Americans would have been in no mood to listen to Khomeini’s outrage, and somehow I do not think the UN would have had much stomach to “investigate,” let alone condemn America for invented crimes against humanity, as the world body is doing to Israel for rescuing its civilian hostages.

As for Jimmy Carter, I don’t have the stomach to beat up too much on a dying man, much less a president who shines brighter and brighter in retrospect for his thankless attempt to be honest with the American people, a man who has spent the decades since then trying to help uplift the poor and promote democracy in his country and around the world. What a contrast with his successors, all of whom seem intent on making fortunes on the paid lecture circuit, Saint Barack Obama very much included.

But since Carter is held up as a moral exemplar and has seen fit to lecture Israel on its sins, I don’t think it is unfair to point out that as president, he did not flinch from ordering a military mission that would have led to a large number of deaths among the enemy’s civilian population, had it succeeded. Nor do I think he was at all wrong to do so, which leads me back to the tragic truth I outlined once before in this space: that while it is possible to rule justly, it is not possible to rule innocently, a rather obvious truth that has evoked pretend horror in every national leader for the half a millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli laid it out. Yet “innocence” is the very demand that the nations of today’s world make of Israel in the midst of its war for survival against Khomeini’s vile heirs in Iran, acting through their “proxies” in Gaza and Lebanon.

Incidentally, governments around the world and the international media alike are ignoring the other front in that war, Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon. Israel’s Galilee region has suffered relentless rocket attacks from Iran’s puppet Hezbollah since October 7, attacks so intense that Israeli border towns have been evacuated for months, their residents now refugees in their own country along with those who fled the Hamas invaders in Israel’s south. You never hear about that refugee problem, but you will hear about it when the Israel Defense Force finally fights back in force against Hezbollah, whereupon we will be saturated with reports of poor helpless Lebanese bewailing their fate at the hands of those Israeli devils.

A Clawful of Other Matters

Here are some brief comments on other recent events that have not fit into my recent, longer posts:

The QAnon-Free-Free-Palestine Convergence: Around 2018, pro-Trump whack jobs even more delusional than the rest of his followers latched onto anonymous Internet posts by someone calling himself “Q” and pretending to be a U.S. government insider, who claimed that President Mango Maniac was fighting a covert war against a network of powerful pedophiles who controlled the government itself, the Democratic Party, etc. First Trump and then the rest of the MAGA politicians found this delusion exceptionally useful, and most ordinary Republican voters now profess to believe at least some elements of it.

The hysteria around pedophilia has roots in the American “Satanic panic” that began in the 1980s and saw many individuals accused in court and even convicted and sentenced to long prison terms on what amounted to a late twentieth-century version of the “spectral evidence” used to burn accused witches centuries before. See conservative Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz’s exceptional 2004 book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. But the pedophilia hysteria also has roots in growing societal awareness that sexual abuse of children is in sober fact horrifyingly common, and that respected figures of authority including religious leaders, politicians, and entertainers have all been caught doing it. In American society, at least, the charge of “pedophilia” has therefore become a shorthand for transcendent and unforgivable evil.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that the free-free-Palestines have jumped aboard this grotesque bandwagon, allegedly assaulting Chabad Rabbi Dovid Gurevich on the UCLA campus while screaming the epithet “pedophile” at him. The accusation promptly turned in up my own hate mail right here on Medium, attributed to Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, by one Antoun Ananias, who represents himself as (and may well be, for all I care) a Palestinian and a London-based university professor with a doctorate. Ananias quotes Sinwar as saying, “Our argument has never been with Jews. Our argument is with the European rapists and paedophile [sic] who abuse and dishonour our women and children in our [sic] prison.” Dr. Ananias’s rant also included such accusations as “the Jews… made several key deals with the Nazis which betrayed their own to mass death,” so by his own lights, I suppose, he is a bigger antisemite, or at least a more open one, than Sinwar. I blocked Ananias, but if you enjoy this sort of thing, you can find much more of it in his Medium writings, which site management can be counted on never to take action against.

Broad swaths of American society both “right” and “left” are now utterly lost in a maze of conspiracy thinking, of which Jew hatred is just one significant kind, and it is hard to see how the country can pull itself out of the social, cultural, and political death spiral that leads to. This mentality has already ruined several generations of most of the world’s Arab and Muslim societies, and as the German experience after World War I shows, Western societies are not immune to it, either.

The Hamas-Al Jazeera-International Media Axis: In the aftermath of the Israel Defense Forces’ liberation of four Israeli hostages, it quickly emerged that the three male hostages had been held captive in the family home of one Abdallah Aljamal, a “journalist” for the Palestine Chronicle and on at least one occasion, a columnist for Al-Jazeera, which promptly began screeching that it didn’t know him from a Gaza tunnel shaft, and if anyone said otherwise, they would sue. Israel attracted much condemnation from the Free-free-press wing of Free-free-Palestine when it shut Al Jazeera down last month in the territories it controlled, and it will be interesting to see if any of these self-righteous folk will climb off their high horse now and eat their words. Don’t hold your breath.

The adversarial relationship between most of the international media and Israel dates back at least to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and now amounts to a dismal sort of “common sense” among reporters and editors around the world. For background, see this excellent piece that Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman, who used to be an AP reporter, wrote some ten years ago, during the last Israel-Hamas war.

One aspect of the Aljamal Affair that has gone unnoticed is that his home was on the first floor of a multi-story building in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Stop and think about that a moment. Most refugee camps are full of improvised tents and lean-tos, not multi-story buildings. Many residents of Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, etc. may indeed still live like that, but many decades have gone by since the wars in 1948 and 1967 first displaced them or their forebears. So the presence of multi-story buildings is yet more evidence of the way that the Arab and Muslim nations, the UN bureaucracy, and the U.S. and other Western countries have institutionalized the “Palestinian refugee problem,” ensuring that these aggrieved permanent refugees will continue to serve as cannon fodder in the endless war against the Jewish state.

The March of Betrayal: American Jews who know the history of the civil rights and labor movements are not yet completely numb to the stabs in our backs from those quarters. To my mind, one of the most nauseating such betrayals happened last week, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for an arms boycott against Israel. One of that venerable organization’s founders was the American Jew Henry Moskowitz, born in Romania in 1879, who was also known for his work for the Joint Distribution Committee, which was a lifeline for European Jews, and the ORT vocational schools, which still comprise a thriving network in Israel. He was also among many other things a leader of former President Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party of 1912, which represented quite a different sort of progressivism than today’s. Moskowitz died in 1936, twelve years before Israel declared its independence, but today’s faux progressives would doubtless damn him as a racist Zionist.

On the union side, you have the United Auto Workers and various teachers’ unions around the country lining up against Israel, just to name a few. The history of the American labor movement is hard to imagine without the proud contributions of American Jews going back to the nineteenth century. You have to wonder when this anti-Israel, antisemitic mob mentality will finally end.

“We Don’t Want Your Holy War!” The up-and-coming singer Sheva Elliot, who is based in the Los Angeles area, is heavily influenced by such Seventies rock legends as Fleetwood Mac and has a penchant for dressing in Seventies-style throwback fashions. Her politics are proudly Left, but since October 7 she has been outspoken in her condemnation of the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish frenzy among progressives.

Check out her new single, “Holy War.”

Oh, we don’t want your holy war
We’ve seen these ruins so many times before…
You can try but you can bet that we’ll never disappear
You can bathe in our blood but we’ll never walk in chains
’Cause you work for the devil, but we sing in God’s name…
Oh we don’t want your holy war
But we’ll fight to the last like we’ve always done before…

This, I submit, is the spirit in which the Israelis and Jews worldwide fight. And Sheva’s sultry voice and lovely music are pretty great, too.

Democracy Will Bring the Zealots Low: Finally, two recent elections give cause for hope that sensible people will finally rise up and call a halt to the current era’s worldwide madness of “populism,” xenophobia, antisemitism, and the cherry-picking of the very worst aspects of religion. The first was in South Africa, where the African National Congress lost the majority it had enjoyed since the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. For the moment, President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC are still able to cling to power despite garnering a measly 40% of the vote.

Even in principle, 30 years is much too long for any one political party to hold onto power, and the ANC has not exactly covered itself in glory since Nelson Mandela left the scene, from Thabo Mbeki’s crackpot AIDS treatments to the rape accusations against Jacob Zuma. Fundamentally, of course, the problem is that the party has done nothing to lift up its impoverished Black constituents, tame out-of-control crime, or even provide a reliable power supply. Since October 7, Ramaphosa and his cadres seem to have gotten it into their heads that they could distract the voters from all these failures by taking the lead in trying to delegitimize Israel as a genocidal state. That they did this even while Ramaphosa was slapping the back of one of Sudan’s actually genocidal warlords, “General” Mohamed Dagalo of the Sudanese “Rapid Support Forces,” did not even give them pause, but perhaps their dismal election returns will sober them up. One can only hope, because whatever went through the minds of “township” dwellers when they cast their votes, the ANC’s attempt to whip up feverish Jew hatred in the European Christian and Muslim traditions does not seem to have worked on them.

The other election of note was in India, where the “Hindu supremacist” government of Narendra Modi took a hit, again without losing power. I was immensely cheered to read a report in the Washington Post, in which an ordinary man named Nikita Chaturvedi mocked Modi’s attempt to whip up religious bigotry around an item of wedding jewelry precious to Hindus: “I am a devout Hindu who follows all customs and rituals laid down in my religion. But I don’t need any political party to save my religion. I am wearing my mangalsutra. Mr. Modi cannot take it away.”

Let all the devout American Christians who follow Trump, all the devout Palestinian Muslims seduced by Hamas, and all the devout Israeli Jews seduced by Netanyahu and his even worse cabinet members take note.