America Held Hostage: The Carter Variations

No, sorry, this is not a TL. It is however a pair of questions set that might inspire somebody, somewhere, I hope. Would be interesting. Or at least inspire some interesting discussions.

Inspired a little by this, which is a hell of a neat little POD if it gets developed further.

To business:

1) On February 25, 1977, Idi "Yes I Am That Crazy" Amin responded to vocal public criticism from the new Carter administration. The criticism, which centered especially on the assassination of the well-loved Anglican bishop Janani Luwum, was the most direct and vocal shot across the Ugandan dictator's bow to date, even including Ford administration rumblings after the Entebbe affair in July of '76. As a consequence, Amin forbade Americans in the country from leaving, and indeed demanded that they come to "meet" him at Entebbe (it wasn't the capital, but Entebbe had the international airport and one of Amin's two official presidential residences, often sublet to his secret police as a torture chamber.) Most of these were missionaries who had lived in Ugandan communities for some time; in addition American tourists, a handful though they were, were rounded up by Ugandan police. In total it amounted to between two hundred and two hundred forty US citizens (a few of the missionaries were courageously hidden by Ugandan friends and parishioners.) The Carter administration grumbled about it. Amin, over the course of the next six days, behaved in his usual rapid-cycling-bipolar sort of way, lurching between angry accusations that five thousand US Marines offshore (there weren't) were about to invade and promising the detained Americans were his bestest besties and he only wanted to bestow awards and congratulations on them. After six rather nervous days, and a sense in the media that this was teetering on the edge of, if not actually plunging into, crisis, Amin relented and the Americans could go about their business.

What if that wasn't so? It is not too hard, although the actual event(s) should have a richness of detail to them, to come up with some reason why Amin spiraled off into holding the Americans captive with a clear sense of purpose. There would be lots of angry denunciations and some real risk that low-level operatives might get ahead of themselves. On one hand it's just a tinpot nutjob getting ahead of himself (IOTL the good offices of several African and European diplomats were enough to convince him, mad but canny as he was, this was not a good ploy.) On the other, he could get carried away with his own grandiosity on his hand, and on the other the media loves them a crisis, especially when you have a nice narrative like "untested, idealistic hayseed present confronts the nasty wider world." It's not a huge POD, but it could've had a much more substantial effect than it did. (I suspect it would've been a good bit nastier if Ford had been reelected -- Kissinger was really in a bad mood wrt Africa in his last year at State but that's a subject for another thread.)

2) Bigger than that: February of 1979, and recalling the first thread I ever posted round here. For one full, frightening week between Feb. 10th and Feb. 18th the flow of Americans out of revolutionary Iran was shut down with the closure of Mehrabad International Airport. There had been something like fifty thousand government and private corporate personnel in country working in various ways with the Shah's regime. They had fled in the same numbers as Iran went south from November '78 on, but at that point there were still five or six thousand US citizens in Iran, the vast majority in Tehran, and the vast majority of those holed up at several high-end hotels in the center of the city while revolutionary factions settled scores by gunfire in the streets. The hotels were "guarded" by komitehs of armed young radicals (the Iranian Army's armories had been plundered just before, which meant a profusion of firearms in hands itching to use them), who set up machine gun nests on the roofs and wandered the lobbies extorting food and personal possessions. There were also, still, over a hundred Americans at the US embassy and the remains of ARMISH-MAAG, the once-massive military assistance headquarters co-located with the embassy: those ARMISH-MAAG folk had loads of classified info in their heads. Power was lying in the streets, the capital was in chaos with a thin veneer of provisional government on top provided by Mehdi Bazargan. Khomeini and the clique around him had tremendous leverage in reshaping what many outside observers had hoped would be a liberalizing revolution, and even more dangerously they had less control of their "followers" down on the ground than they would like to have. The air was heady with blood and possibility. The trip from a temporary inconvenience at Mehrabad and shakedowns by armed young thugs to a hostage problem that would beggar Washington's imagination was disturbingly short. Indeed there have been suggestions over the years that, at this point, with the Iranian Army in a state of collapse, intermediaries communicated with Lt. Gen. Philip Gast (the last ARMISH-MAAG boss) that the US had better keep its nose out of revolutionary business unless it wanted that result. Again, there is plenty of room for a POD of miscalculation.

How would either of these problems (choose one or treat both separately, I don't see both happening in the same TL), both of which hit at very different moments in the Carter administration, both as an organic entity (a decision-making community of officials and politicians) and in relation to the American public and media, have played out.
 
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