While the Iranian revolution may still happen, the sequence of events that led to the hostage crisis may go differently.
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Six years after Vietnam? No. At the most, you could see retaliatory air strikes against Iranian military and governmental facilities, and even that's a stretch - it would needlessly endanger the lives of the hostages.Ford would have had a considerablly different set of advisors in foreign policy. I've not time to open the books @ refresh my memory, but Z Brezenski & several others made some bad calls at critical junctures. Ford had a much deeper background in foreign policy & certainly would have avoided one or two of the series of problems that led to the edge of a Iranian/US war