Operation Eagle Claw

[Dreadpool]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw

On April 24th, 1980, Operation Eagle Claw was mounted in order to rescue the hostages taken when The Iranians took over the U.S Embassy. As we all know, it failed miserably.

Two alternate outcomes suggest themselves here:

1) Eagle Claw succeeds and the hostages are rescued; Khomeni rages about the violation of Iran's territorial sovereignty bust there is precisely fuck-all he can do about it. A likely result is that Carter rides the resulting wave of popularity defeats Reagan and wins re-election.

2) Eagle Claw fails just as it did originally. This time, the Iranians take out their anger at the U.S by executing some or all of the hostages.

Discuss...

 

[Orcbuster]

Latter may fully well mean all-out war or more or less direct combat participation with iraq in the Iran-Iraq with air force providing direct support and so forth.

 

[Dreadpool]

Latter may fully well mean all-out war or more or less direct combat participation with iraq in the Iran-Iraq with air force providing direct support and so forth.

Murdering the embassy hostages would give President Carter the kind of casus belli that the most hawkish Republicans can only dream about.

How far would the U.S go in prosecuting the war?

I think it goes without saying that the Iran-Iraq War as we knew it gets butterflied...

 

[Alanith]

If it succeeds... well there's as you mentioned fuck all the Iranians can do about it other then scream about the violation of their sovereignty... to which to me at least the natural response is "Well then you should have guaranteed the safety and sanctity of the US Embassy." His only real alternative is to start a terrorism campaign against US assets... which is probably going to result in war in short order.

If it fails and hostages start getting executed.... hoooo boooy... A short war followed by a long, drawn out insurgency.

 

[Dreadpool]

If it fails and hostages start getting executed.... hoooo boooy... A short war followed by a long, drawn out insurgency.

Murdering the hostages would piss off the United States in 1980 just as much as 9/11 pissed off the USA in 2001...

 

[Dave Howery]

this scenario was my first exposure to alternate history back in 1982... in the form of a mini-wargame "Raid on Iran" by Steve Jackson Games. Much about the game was a pure guess, as the layout of the embassy and the interior rooms was classified, the exact makeup of the US forces was classified, etc....

 

[Jukra]

Murdering the hostages would piss off the United States in 1980 just as much as 9/11 pissed off the USA in 2001...

And what happened after Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 which killed far more Americans than there were hostages?

 

[Dave Howery]

And what happened after Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 which killed far more Americans than there were hostages?

a bit different there... the Marines were soldiers in a war zone (although the lines in that war were far from clear); the hostages were civilians...

 

[Jukra]

a bit different there... the Marines were soldiers in a war zone (although the lines in that war were far from clear); the hostages were civilians...

But surely diplomats in a far away country are not comparable to thousands of civilians on US soil, like Dreadpool compared? I think comparison with US Marines in Beirut is closer.

 

[Dave Howery]

But surely diplomats in a far away country are not comparable to thousands of civilians on US soil, like Dreadpool compared? I think comparison with US Marines in Beirut is closer.

the Beirut situation was kinda odd... the Republicans weren't really happy about having US forces there in the first place, and the planning for the Grenada operation was underway... Beirut was a tragedy, but just not worthy of a response at the time. Grenada was by far the more important thing on their plate...

 

[David T]

One thing that is often neglected in "what if Operation Eagle Claw had succeeded" discussions is that the time of the attmpted rescue mission, there were still Americans who were walking around free in Iran. If Eagle Claw had succeeded, Iran could simply make them the new hostages.

Cyrus Vance pointed that out in objecting to the proposed rescue mission:

"I reminded the group that even if the rescue mission did free some of the embassy staff, the Iranians could simply take more hostages from among the American journalists still in Tehran. We would then be worse off than before, and the whole region would be severely inflamed by our action." http://books.google.com/books?id=RH5SZHYfMI4C&pg=PA82

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the leading advocate within the administration of a rescue mission, did pay some attention to this possibility. He argued "that we should consider taking prisoners back with us, so that we would have bargaining leverage in the event that the Iranians seized other Americans as hostages..." http://books.google.com/books?id=RH5SZHYfMI4C&pg=PA86

In any event, IMO even if the helicopters function perfectly, Eagle Claw is going to lead to a lot of US corpses, Delta and hostage, during the extraction at the stadium. Because of the tendency of US voters to rally behind the president at a time of crisis, it may nevertheless lead to a temporary boost in Carter's ratings, but no, it won't allow him to beat Reagan--the election after all is several months way and by that time the glow would be off the "victory" and people would be asking how Carter allowed the US to get into the hostage crisis to begin with, as well as devoting their attention to such issues as double digit inflation [1], rising unemployment, [2] the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (and how the Carter administration's response via the grain embargo hurt US farmers) etc. The notion that Carter lost only because there still were hostages on Election Day seems implausible to me. (For one thing, people forget how low Carter's job approval ratings were before the hostage crisis gave them a temporary boost. https://content.gallup.com/origin/g...roduction/Cms/POLL/bn1a9jq9g0qlldcnggvpea.png For another, the Democrats are still going to have a severe unity problem, thanks to Edward Kennedy's challenge to Carter's renomination.)

[1] http://www.multpl.com/inflation/table

[2] It rose from 5.9 to 7.5 percent between November 1979 and November 1980. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/UNRATE.txt