During August 2005, American newspapers and television screens were unexpectedly filled with images of 1979. The scene of the U.S. embassy in Iran being taken over by radical students, effigies of Uncle Sam being burned, and angry mobs desecrating the American flag seemed the order of the day. The latest crisis in U.S.â??Iranian relations was sparked by five former American hostages who identified the newly elected Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as one of their captors. The Iranian denials did not diminish the anger of the hostages and their demands for justice and recompense. The revival of the dramas of 1979 reveals that the hostage crisis is hardly a stale historic episode; its images and emotions continue to shape the collective conscious of the American public. For a generation of Americans, the hostage crisis remains an open wound, transforming Iran into an unsavory state unfit for rehabilitation.
Sunday, November 4, 1979, began as any other day in revolutionary Tehran, with protests engulfing the streets of the capital. But then he ostensible purpose of the hostage taking was the studentsâ?? alarm that the Shahâ??s admission to the United States for medical treatment was an attempt by Washington to orchestrate a coup against Iranâ??s nascent revolution. Initially, all the parties involved assumed the crisis would be short-lived. The students themselves hoped to deliver what they called a propaganda of deed, and then return to their universities; the Carter administration, accustomed to Iranian transgressions, sensed yet another momentary crisis soon to be resolved; and the officials of Iranâ??s provisional government seemed more annoyed than exulted by the studentsâ?? militancy. Yet the embassy takeover would soon be entangled in Iranâ??s vicious factional politics, prolonging the incarceration of the hapless diplomats.
The memories of 1953 should not be discounted in understanding the hostage crisis. In November 1979, the Iranian revolution was truly under threat: its contending factions were battling each other, ethnic minorities in Kurdistan and Khuzestan were agitating for autonomy, and the imperial army was still largely intact. From the perspective of Iranians, whose country had been subject of persistent foreign intervention for much of the twentieth century, it was not unreasonable to perceive that the United States and its allies were conspiring against the new regime. Was it irrational to believe that the embassy that plotted the 1953 coup was not concocting a similar scheme in 1979?
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