1979 warning

Our war with Islam-based terrorism began with that "student" takeover of a U.S. embassy 27 years ago.

Many a competent analyst believes the current and expanding United States war against terrorism with its Islamic base began in 1979 with an alleged “student” takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. People with short memories are inclined to consider 9-11-01 an official declaration of war. It all began long before that.

Author Mark Bowden is featured in a recent Time Magazine and calls the embassy debacle “the first battle in America’s war against militant Islam.” He gives detailed support to that notion in “Guests of the Ayatollah,” a 680-page Atlantic Monthly Press volume.

The author of “Black Hawk Down,” about the deadly 1993 U.S. military mission in Mogadishu, Bowden explains that the embassy takeover was not merely a symbolic blow against the United States but a power play in the clash between radical Islamists and more moderate elements in the Iranian revolution. Student groups considered any harmony with Washington “supping with the devil.” Clerics backed them fiercely. Time reviewer Richard Lacayo writes that “what the embassy takeover promised them was a chance to rekindle a revolution, goad the Great Satan into waving his pitchfork at Iran and force the moderates to renounce the U.S. and all its wicked devices.”

The original plan, according to Bowden, was to seize the embassy for a few days and use it as a platform to broadcast Iranian grievances against America. Washington long had supported the hated shah, and when he was admitted to America for cancer treatment, new fury resulted.

As matters deteriorated, the Iranians with the blessing of the Ayatollah Khomeini held 52 Americans for 444 days, constantly insisting that the embassy where they were captured had been “a cockpit of intrigue and espionage.”

Despite the “students'” conspiracy theories, the embassy had few CIA people, most of them new, frightened, inexperienced and ineffective. The longer the seizure group got official support from the Ayatollah and his people, the fiercer the resentments grew between the Islamists and Americans.

As Time reviewer Lacayo says: “Is it any surprise that all these years later the hostage-taking is an episode that refuses to subside into mere history? The mullahs who exploited it to consolidate their power still rule. The hatreds it set loose still poison relations between the U.S. and Iran. Some events won’t lie down and play dead.”

It all has been building, if sometimes in slow motion, since then; 9-11 and its consequences were only the latest terrorist explosions. Now there is the Iraq war and Iran remains front page news because of its alleged nuclear weapons policies. The United States again is being enhanced as the Great Satan, not only for Iranians but clearly for the vast majority of a hostile, jealous and resentful Islamic world.

What we are engaged in is a war of minds and bodies that began festering in 1979 and which has begun to explode in all manner of deadly new ancillary ways. This is a conflict which has been involving us with dire consequences for the past 27 years.