History is about context.

Events like the hostage taking don’t happen in a vacuum.

Bowden failed to mention that the U.S./ Britain staged coup in 1954 against the Iranian Premier and because of that many Americans won’t understand that our country likes to dictate what democracy means to other nations and suffers blow back.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/

You dope !

Electing this dysfunctional dunce from Georgia was the worst mistake Americans made in the last half of the last century.

By doing nothing, he embolded the Islamists to spread the virus across the world.

History has shown us that had the British and French stepped on Hitler when remilitarized the Rhineland and violated the treaty of Versailles, World War II could have been prevented.

Since he was dumped from office, jimmy has spent that time criticising the country he screwed and crtiticising the leaders who have had to clean up the mess he started.

His crowning achievement is sharing a peace prize with a terrorist.

Loooozar !

portrayed the hostage-takers, and Tehran, in a more sympathetic light.

And if there is nothing to be sympathetic or positive about, why then, make something up! We don't want to offend anyone, do we?

To the Iranians, it was a triumphant invasion of a "den of spies." The students maintained that they had not kidnapped a diplomatic mission so much as arrested a hive of scheming foreign subversives.

.. and of course, this was true. The students were right on the mark. Many of these 'innocent' hostages were up to their necks in covert activity designed to turn Iran back into the servile beast it was under the US-installed Shah.

Trying to 'understand Iran' without looking at the history of self-serving Western intervention there is totally disingenuous.

Both Laura Secor and (apparently) Mark Bowden adhere to certain self-serving conventions in retelling the Iranian hostage crisis. The first convention is to minimize as much as possible the sadistic violence and omnipresent represssion of the Shah's regime, in particular the US-trained SAVAK, when it is no exaggeration to say that the Shah was every bit as cruel as our other regional ally, Saddam. (Unless you think using a deli meat slicer on detainees' fingers--to pick but one small example--is just having a bit of a lark.) So much easier to demonize the Revolutionaries and their own indefensible abuses from a moral high horse, no?

The second convention is to always, always, always suggest that the hostage-takers were deluded paranoiacs with a cartoon vision of the US' role in their country's (and the region's) affairs, which is why no US account of the crisis is complete without a snarky reference to their characterization of the embasssy as a "nest of spies." In fact, the embassy was a nest of spies: the hostage takers proved that by painstakingly reconstructing hundreds of shredded documents during the 444-day takeover and publishing them to the world. These documents showed close collaboration between SAVAK and the US, as well as with Israel. In case you wondered why you don't know about this book, it's because it's suppressed in the US on grounds that it contains "classified documents". (For those interested, an extended account appears in Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilization".)

Secor tut tuts Bowden's superficial parallels between then and now, but herself fails to note one actual one, namely the continued determination by the United States to dominate the region's oil supplies while whitewashing the crimes it commits in so doing. And so history repeats, well past tragedy and farce, into uncharted areas framed by our chronic self-delusion.

I demand we not only give nuclear weapons to Iran, but also detonate some of our own on American soil. Now where's my damn cookie? Honestly - did all of you learn history from Sesame Street with the conviction that whatever is 'mean' is wrong?

7, including mine, which really doesn't count.

But, even Bonds doesn't hit a home run every time.

Just to add a bit more context to the story:

1) After the shah fell, the CIA gave a lengthy list of secular democrats and progressives to the ayatollah's regime. They were summarily executed. This is covered in the book "Witness" by Mansur Rafizadeh. He was a liason/dual agent for SAVAK and the CIA.

2) The US govt's relationship with the Shah is well summed-up by the following passage:

From the New York Times, 1/7/79:

"Ex-analyst says CIA rejected warning on Shah"

by Seymour Hersh

---------

A former Iran analyst for the central intelligence agency said yesterday that his reports characterizing Shah Pahlevi as thirsty for power and a megalomaniac were repeatedly rejected by the agency as being contrary to official US policy.

Jesse Leaf said in an interview that for five years he had been the chief CIA analyst on Iran before resigning from the agency in 1973.... A spokesman for the CIA confirmed that Mr. Leaf had been an employee there but said, "We will not discuss former employees."

Mr. Leaf also said in the interview that he and his colleagues knew of the torture of Iraninan dissenters by Savak, the Iranian secret police set up during the late 1950's by the Shah with help from the CIA. [1] Furthermore, Mr. Leaf said, a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in the Savak on torture techniques, although Mr. Leaf said that to his knowledge no americans did any of the torturing. The CIA's torture seminars, Mr. Leaf said, "were based on German torture techniques from World War II."

The Shah himself was "one of our sources" of information, Mr. Leaf said. "He was a regular contact for a case officer."

Mr. Leaf said that because of the CIA's complacency about the Shah, no one considered protesting about the Savak's use of torture. "Why should we protest? We were on their side, remember?" [2]

Although the Iranian use of torture was widely known inside the agency, Mr. Leaf said, he knew of no americans who admitted that they witnessed such treatment. "I do remember seeing and being told of people who were there seeing the rooms and being told of torture. And I know that the torture rooms were toured and it was all paid for by the the USA."

Mr. Leaf said he decided to resign from the CIA after receiving an adverse fitness report in 1973. His basic complaint, he said, was that "policy pretty much determines reporting rather than the other way around."

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[1] Actually, the CIA pretty much designed and implemented Savak from the ground up, with some minor help from british and israeli intelligence, according to Mansur Rafizadeh.

[2] I think it's interesting the way the issue of who advocated torture to whom was turned around in this paragraph. It seems unlikely the US would complain about Savak's use of nazi torture after having taught it to them!