@DStecks,
Very good to see you coming home to this TL. It's got massive potential (and was a lot of fun last time in your hands, even if we have to sacrifice things like the Rogue Warrior/Putin buddy-cop scenario or Montel Williams' alternate life this time around *sighs*)
The chaos of an occupation-gone-wrong is a story-thread in its own right, as someone observed up-thread there were some Embassy personnel not on-site at the time, and beyond that there were still something like 300 Americans, a number of them part of news crews, in Tehran at the time of the takeover. Theirs is a little told story and this sort of scenario offers a perfect opportunity not only to give them a different TL in which they have to try and survive, but also a chance to have their real-life experiences highlighted and exposed to a broader audience (always nice when alternate history can do that sort of thing.)
Then there's the question of what happens to everyone else? We know the Soviet Embassy was a potential target from the debate among OTL's takeover planners, and that the British High Commission was a perennial sore spot. (Also, for a vantage point, the Canadians offer good source material from the relatively recent book -- last few years --
Our Man in Tehran about their consular personnel's experience 1978-80.) How far does "get the Americans!" spiral in the balkanized factional crazy of late 1979 Tehran? Do you have a Boxer Rebellion reimagined by M.C. Escher, or a state of confusion (plus lynch mobs after Yankee infidels) played upon by various outside factions?
Another great source given the direction you want to go is David Crist's excellent book
The Twilight War which covers the late 1970s up to about 2012 in the US-Iranian conflict. The first three or four chapters are rich with stuff for you and
authentically fucking scary. Just wait till you get to the bit about the mountain passes. The rest of those chapters are lovely source material too (there's a State Department employee in there who passed for a member of the angry mobs during the February Revolution who might be well imagined as a "player character" in this scenario, for example.) Also if I remember there's an oldish thread on here about WI the Soviets broadened their Central Asian ambitions and invaded that includes material from a Russian who may just have wanted attention post-1989 but might (might) have been a reliable source about just such planning wargamed from the theatre command nearest the Iranian border.
As for Preacher Pat, the whole time I've spent reading the delightful almost-dystopia (except that the massive level of GOP sad is a pleasure to read) of Slippery When Wet, it's given me cause to think about Jesus Walks and that foundational question about 1980 politicking, what happens if Reagan bows out/is forced out? This is around the time when IOTL Robertson kicked up his 700 Club presence a notch beyond speaking to the already-converted, specifically
because he couched the crises of 1979-80 in apocalyptic terms. On one hand, sans Reagan, you could have folks like Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich descend on Robertson as a Robert Redford-in-
The Candidate figure for the New Right, since he doesn't already have an equivalent of Reagan's California mafia for an inner political circle. At the same time, an establishment-Republican nominee might have to look to a strong, insurgent Robertson candidacy for his running mate to shore up the party's right. And what if something happened to
that nominee?...
The other fun thing about that scenario is, if one already has Pat out there doing his eschatological thang, it can contrast ironically with the reality that a major American pummeling of Iran really could push things close to World War III...
Sidebar: also worth noting, from several sources, the assault on the US Embassy in Islamabad a few weeks after OTL's Tehran embassy seizure, an attack (the Islamabad one) triggered by presumptions that the US was somehow tied to the ultra-Wahabbi seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The Americans who locked themselves in the secure Chancery on-site, while the rest of the embassy was
burned to the ground -- some sixty-odd US personnel of various descriptions -- were less than an hour from running out of oxygen when the Pakistani authorities finally secured the site and gave them the opportunity to get out safely. The lowered oxygen levels were in fact blamed for finishing off a badly wounded Marine guard who had lost a great deal of blood. So even leaving aside some kind of mass lynching, just dragging US personnel out into the street to hang or shoot them, there are several ways one could kill most or all of the people in the Tehran embassy that amount, in practice, to "fog of war" casualties (especially asphyxiation by fire or forced enclosure.) Then you've got a mystery to go along with the chaos: whodunit (ie what particular group)? For what reasons (on purpose? by horrific accident? to discredit another faction?) ? Will that have any influence on how the US reacts, or how it later views its own choices in reacting, or influence other major players wrt Iran (Moscow, Iraq, Pakistan, the Saudis, etc.) ?
So, yeah, do
definitely get back to this. And bring the Billy Beer...
