WI: President Carter Attacks Iran During Hostage Crisis

No, but had plenty that make the joke weather forecast I heard at that time for Tehran

Very Sunny with temperatures reaching 10,000 degrees

The U.S. was never going to launch a nuclear weapon against Iran even if they took all the hostages in front of cameras and slowly beheaded each of them.

You think the U.S. was ever going to "nuke" a country in the Middle East (that shared a border with the U.S.S.R. no less) over a few dozen people?
 

jahenders

Banned
Nope, the US wouldn't have had to put one 'boot on the ground'. Iran didn't want war, they didn't even want to be bombed and the real threat of it would have gotten them released. This isn't ISIS we are talking about, this isn't even 2003 Saddam.

The Mullahs released the hostages immediately after Reagan got into office because he would have bombed them if they didn't and they knew it. As Jimmy said he could have wiped out Iran's oil facilities from the air and was given plans to do so by the Pentagon, but choose peace.

The problem is that was a false choice, because Iran was bluffing as they always do as shown by the second you had a President in office who they actually worried would bomb them.

This episode cost the democrats the Presidency for 12 years.

Exactly -- the idea of getting in a quagmire is a false choice unless we choose it. He could have simply blasted a bunch of important targets from the air until they released the hostages or (if they harmed the hostages) produced the head of the Ayatollah on a pike.

Similarly, when we invaded Iraq, we could simply have gone in, kicked butt, took names, deposed Saddam and his buddies, and then left saying, "Now try to form some kind of decent country and leave us alone or we'll be back and we'll REALLY be pissed." Instead, we bought into the "if you break it, you fix it" mindset. Sure, if we'd just walked away, Iraq would likely descend into chaos and possibly civil war. However, since they did that anyway, we could have let them do so without spending $1T or many lives.
 

jahenders

Banned
The U.S. was never going to launch a nuclear weapon against Iran even if they took all the hostages in front of cameras and slowly beheaded each of them.

You think the U.S. was ever going to "nuke" a country in the Middle East (that shared a border with the U.S.S.R. no less) over a few dozen people?

Probably not, though tactical nukes would be a possibility. In any case, we could show them what unfettered strategic bombing looks like -- every major government building gone, every major bridge and dam, every military base, every nuclear-related facility, every electric generation facility, every port, and every ship in their waters.
 
Probably not, though tactical nukes would be a possibility. In any case, we could show them what unfettered strategic bombing looks like -- every major government building gone, every major bridge and dam, every military base, every nuclear-related facility, every electric generation facility, every port, and every ship in their waters.

The death toll of innocents from that kind of action would have at least been in the thousands. Not only is such flagrant disregard for innocent life wildly out of character for Carter, but it's a severe violation of the international law concept of proportionality. To murder thousands simply because your raging war boner makes you too damned macho to negotiate for the release of a few dozen is pretty much a war crime.
 

nbcman

Donor
Probably not, though tactical nukes would be a possibility. In any case, we could show them what unfettered strategic bombing looks like -- every major government building gone, every major bridge and dam, every military base, every nuclear-related facility, every electric generation facility, every port, and every ship in their waters.

From what airbase or airbases would this 'unfettered strategic bombing' take place from. Other than Diego Garcia (which was not expanded to accept B-52 bombers until after the Hostage Crisis), the strategic bombing options in 1979 are probably limited to carrier based aircraft and long range flights with aerial refueling.

EDIT: Additional bases could be procured in the area but they would require expansion plus 'aid packages' to some of the regimes such as in Somalia or the Persian Gulf minor states. To do that takes months of time and hundreds of millions to billions of USD. I heavily doubt that Turkey would allow the US to stage from their airbases due to the risk of Soviet involvement in the conflict.
 
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Remember that in 1980, the U.S. military was not exactly designed for large scale intervention in the Persian Gulf region.

Our entire focus for massive overseas military deployments can basically be summarized as "West Germany" and "South Korea".
 
Remember that in 1980, the U.S. military was not exactly designed for large scale intervention in the Persian Gulf region.

Our entire focus for massive overseas military deployments can basically be summarized as "West Germany" and "South Korea".

US Sixth Fleet in the Med wasn't.
Deployed forces increased after DeGaulle had his tantrum and left NATO command, and asked NATO Forces to leave French bases
 
As @creighton and @DValdron said, in different degrees, from the revolutionary "ultras" perspective (Khomeini and the folks tied to his patronage) it was almost entirely about Carter and toppling his administration (proving that Iranian action could alter major outcomes in the US, like a change of presidents, was for the Iranian "street" a massive demonstration of power.) And indeed the more zealous parts of Reagan's administration including the Gipper himself had a deeply skewed view of both the character of the revolutionary regime and what was theoretically possible once Tehran "woke up" to the dangers of the Soviets. David Crist's excellent The Twilight War (about the US-Iranian conflict/relationship since the late 70s) points out that the Iran-Contra-ites, when on the ground for their fateful meetings in Tehran, sincerely believed they were engineering a "Nixon goes to China" moment in the Cold War that would turn the Middle East decisively against the Soviets and Soviet proxies. It's what happens when you become the hero of your own comic book, rather than paying attention to the data inputs of the larger world. Now, in fairness, there were adults in the room (the room being the Reagan administration) like Cap Weinberger, but they were given very little leeway and, in his case, actively shoved out (in favor of old CIA officer and Poppy Bush crony Carlucci) after the scheme blew up.

Back to the OP:

This is an area of some interest and background to me (used to know and correspond with Rod Lenahan, the intel officer of JTF 1-79, and with the Carter Library, and have an old friend on the inside of the Foreign Relations of the United States series out of the State Dept.) Some posters here have hit on some of the realities of the time. The emergency plan (there was, as there often is with hostage crises of any scope and scale, both a deliberate plan in RICEBOWL that became better known after its failure as EAGLE CLAW, and a "go" plan for sudden emergencies) was to hit the Embassy and also to drop a task force from the 82nd (probably a DRF -- Division Ready Force, the augmented battalion task forces that, numbered 1 through 9, make up the division's readiness cycle) on a nearby airfield. My suspicion, though it was never confirmed by Rod or anyone else, is the airfield was Doshan Teppeh, formerly the HQ/training field for the Imperial Air Force and in disrepair since Feb '79, rather than Mehrabad International, because Doshan Teppeh was smaller (easier to control) and closer (about a mile and a half over less massive roadways) to the embassy. They would seize the field and roll out a convoy to link with the Embassy, then withdraw under fairly massive air cover since it would take multiple C-141 flights to pull everyone back out. In his book on the subject, and in conversation with me, Rod referred to it as "a recipe for war," at least a small one. But we should understand that was the "hostages are dying or we have impeccable intel that they will be executed on date X a couple days away" plan, not a considered mission.

To @NoOneFamous, that was indeed part of the mix. There was JTF 1-79 working on what become RICEBOWL (EAGLE CLAW was attached so last-minute in a fit of bravado it's more a postmortem name than one that looks forward through the process from November '79 to April '80), and there was also an Operations Planning Group working on intimidation/retaliation options. AC-130 attacks on Kharg, a primary OPG planning outcome, and possibly on the airbase where Iran had nearly all their F-14s -- the most formidable weapon for their national defense or aggressive action -- were way up the list. The week before Thanksgiving '79 Carter issued an informal demarche to the Iranians that spelled out, between the lines, that if hostages were harmed, first Kharg and then (if more were harmed) the Abadan fields themselves would go up in smoke. This essentially stabilized the dynamics of the crisis into the form they took for the rest of the ordeal. So there were some very real explorations and intimations of force that we know of directly. There's another which I think was perhaps the crucial moment of the entire crisis but I'll get to that in a second post.

@nbcman,

This was actually the inflection point in the development of Diego Garcia. It went from a "nice to have and we'll develop it at some point" under Nixon in agreement with the Brits kicking out the Chagos Islands native population, to a direct asset. We did, in fact, base on a rotating basis a squadron of B-52s there out of Guam in order to reinforce Carter's "suggestion" to Iran as of late November. There's a wonderful photo of one buzzing one of the deployed carriers (possibly Nimitz) *below the deckline* just to show off. The US military was a deeply mixed bag at the end of the Seventies, particularly the largest service the Army (which was that way in part because of Abe Abram's idiotic maskirovka/jobs-for-the-officers decision to have more divisions in the structure than the force could adequately man, made in '74 before his untimely death.) But that shouldn't obscure us to the fact that there were individual elements of the services that were, like what's under a Scotsman's kilt, in perfect working order. The SAC squadrons and, broadly speaking (the details get muddier below decks, and some problems like with Kitty Hawk's career-long poor maintenance record were infrastructure rather than manpower-based) the carriers were among those that were in that category, which is one reason for the great reliance on them during the hostage crisis.
 
Right: that critical meeting? The week before Thanksgiving, November of '79. Carter called a full meeting, at Camp David I believe (I'm writing off the cuff here and that's what sticks in my head) to assess the crisis and the options available to the United States. Carter himself, who handled everything about the crisis other than his personal obsessive concern about the individual hostages (the whole "stuck in the White House" thing) better than just about anything else in his presidency including calling it in advance when he was finally pushed to accept the shah (the earnest Baptist had earlier said "fuck the Shah!" to his aides after Reza's inept fall from power), wanted a campaign of escalating pressure to end the crisis, up to and including the best decision on force anyone could have made in retrospect, mining the only two export locations for Iran's oil, Kharg and Bandar-e-Abbas. He was essentially talked out of it by a combination of aides who wanted to avoid escalation, like Cy Vance, and crucially the hawkish Zbigniew Brzezhinski.

Why, you ask, did Zbig side with the relative doves when the old Navy officer Carter wanted to throw him up some blockades and drop a few mines? Because action on that scale would disrupt the grand project of Zbig's career: bleeding the Soviets white with oil prices driven down by Saudi collusion (the second big step, after Poppy Bush's time at CIA, in our seemingly inextricable relationship with the House of Saud, before that we preferred the Pahlavis) and "their own Vietnam" in Afghanistan which he had been working towards since at least '78. If you *really* pissed off Iran by, say, strangling their oil exports and tanking their economy until they released the hostages, that might make them cozy up to the Soviets (like most other people Zbig didn't understand the internal dynamics of the Revolution.) And his whole plan was based not only on pulling the Soviets in with a cycle of decision-making not unlike our own approach to Vietnam in the 50s-early 60s, but geographically by surrounding it with states (including Iran) either neutral towards or actively friendly to anti-Soviet guerillas. Zbig was all in favor of a showy, "surgical", "American Entebbe" like the RICEBOWL plan because its scale was unlikely to do more than embarrass and embitter the mullahs. But Carter's original preference for choking off their oil exports -- almost certainly the best way to get the hostages out without bloodshed or the eventual cave in the Algiers Accords -- was of sufficient scale that he (Zbig) feared he might lose part of his geographic cordon sanitaire around Afghanistan. And to him it was vastly more important. Too bad for his boss.
 
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Over time -- and this is leaving out nearly all the important structural factors and non-US players in the process -- I've come to the conclusion that the four Americans *most* at fault in the US side of handling the hostage crisis are these:

1) Henry Kissinger Is there a foreign-policy disaster of the late 20th century that cannot, in some way, be traced to Henry making bad choices? He's the single most overrated Cabinet official in possibly ever. In this case there are three and you're not expecting the second one. First, he, together with Nixon and ex-CIA boss Richard Helms (who became ambassador to Iran) were the three US officials most responsible for the geometric escalation in America's relationship with Iran, whose massive inflection really occurred between 1972 and 1977. The massive escalation of aid money, foreign military sales, ramping up of government and civilian contractors operating in Iran to support that gravy train (Ross Perot and EDS were, in some ways, relatively small fish in the pond though they had some very important tasks), and increasing strategic dependence on Iran, even more than on the Saudis, for Gulf/oil-states stability, came in that period. If you check Foreign Relations of the United States' Nixon/Ford-series volume Oil Crisis 1974-80 Kissinger even intimates the idea of developing a plan for Iran to threaten invasion of Saudi Arabia and possibly Qatar in order to intimidate the Saudis back into line. That's how deep it went.

Second, and this is perhaps the surprise, is Henry's nearly unhinged, our-national-wang-is-shrinking response to the Mayaguez crisis. No one in Ford's administration (Ford, also an old Navy man who had some fits of good sense during the crisis that were steamrolled by Kissinger's wild-eyed urgency to kick someone's ass somewhere) had such a hard-on for charging in as he did. So the US went in blind to Koh Tang, with not much intel and none of it disseminated to the assault force (on that front RICEBOWL actually did a better job) and walked into an ambush. As a direct consequence the 21st Special Operations Squadron and its special-operations-configured CH-53s were shot to pieces, and the rump remainder of the squadron was transferred to become glorified cargo carriers in West Germany. Had they not been sent on that mission (the Marine Corps' official history of the end of Vietnam, which has Mayaguez as its last chapter, is particularly scathing about the official decision-making), the ten intact airframes the morning of that fateful day would probably have been sent to Hurlburt Field and joined the rump of the 1st Special Operations Wing. Four and a half years later, those CH-53s would have looked and quacked from the outside (not the inside) like the Marine models and not looked out of place on a carrier. They would've had huge advantages in maintenance standards and aircrew skills that might have made a material difference in RICEBOWL's outcome.

The third thing, of course, was taking in the Shah. For that there was no bigger cheerleader than Kissinger: we had huge levels of secrets (esp spying on Soviet signals infrastructure and missile tests from Iran), personnel, and sunk costs invested in Iran. That last, sunk costs, led to the other biggest cheerleader, Henry's old buddy David Rockefeller, whose Chase Manhattan bank had about $5 billion tied up one way or another in the Shah and wanted him safe and sound to help guarantee return on those funds. When he finally relented on his opposition to accepting the Shah, Carter bluntly told his cabinet they were all going to look very foolish when someone took over the Tehran embassy and demanded the Shah's return. He was entirely right.

2) Charlie Beckwith The foundation of Delta resembles in one analogous way another trailblazing 1970s phenomenon, Star Wars. Both were gifted ideas right for the moment, and both had as their Achilles heel the ideas guy who came up with them in the first place (also, neither was as unique as their retrospective origin stories made out but that's another post in another thread.) But despite the outstanding work by people like Dick Meadows (as a civilian contractor), Lewis "Bucky" Burruss, Pete Schoomaker (eventually Chief of Staff of the Army) and some of the senior NCOs, Delta in its early days never quite had a Larry Kasdan or Gilbert Taylor (or Marcia Lucas) to mitigate and work around the worst ideas and decisions of the original creator. That came, but after RICEBOWL not before. Indeed at the beginning Delta might have stayed in the Special Forces infrastructure and become exactly what Beckwith said he wanted -- an "American SAS" -- as Special Forces' direct-action component, doing not only BLUE LIGHT counterterrorism but also GREEN LIGHT "atomic demolitions" in a big war and some of what the shadier Intelligence Support Activity did later on. But he was so damned determined to show off his own genius and have "his own horses" that he did not -- also having an incendiary temper and only playing well with those who knew how to manage it didn't help. The result was a "Charlie's Private Army" that had two fatal flaws come RICEBOWL. The first was that in itself -- he and his new command reported directly to the National Command Authority without any of the crucial logistical supports embedded (although he grudgingly learned to work with Air Force special ops) that it would need to operate anywhere in hostile territory. The other followed from that: his original Mogadishu-defined (an op on friendly turf done by a gendarmerie equivalent of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team) model for conducting CT/hostage rescue operations was *not about operating in hostile territory*. The earlier, jerry-rigged system under REDCOM that trained up the Rangers and a BLUE LIGHT element (code for the mission set not a unit, though the provisional unit adopted it) was all about operating in hostile territory. Beckwith largely ignored that component in the early going, particularly with regard to hostage rescue itself. This was a disastrous misapprehension. It also meant that his tiny, exquisitely selected and trained, original Delta force was simply too valuable to lose once RICEBOWL started going wrong in the field.

3) Zbigniew Brzezhinski We've been over some of this in my previous comment. But Zbig had a genuine, chess-game strategic vision and he was as single minded about it as a Pole trying to screw over the Russians could possibly be. He would bleed Moscow white and then, as he had written presciently in books as an academic, the nationalism still under the surface of the Eastern Bloc would reassert itself and shatter the Soviet strategic domain. Nothing, not the fifty-three Americans (sixty-six at the start) stuck in Tehran, nor in the end his boss's presidency, was so singularly important to him as that larger cause. It's like a real-life American version of Le Carre, with many of the same human costs in pursuit of a "higher" goal.

4) David Jones Carter's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a bureaucrat's bureaucrat. In a very different cause -- the stability and good name of institutions vital to nuclear deterrence and the Cold War -- he had the same kind of single-mindedness as Brzezhinski. His relentless concentration on operational secrecy, which did not in the end keep down the size of JTF 1-79 or its operational components which ballooned up past 1000 people, cut the planning task force off from a variety of people and sources who could have materially contributed to the mission. His zero-defect approach, which ended up with the byzantine entry and exit plans, avoided taking one or two huge risks (like with Entebbe or the Bin Laden raid) in favor of dozens of small ones which ended up increasing the likelihood of the outcome that actually happened. He was also determined to avoid any entangling complexities like operating from other countries rather than off a carrier already devoted to other aspects of the mission (and not given, say, to looking after maintenance on some minesweeping helicopters that were taking up space): in the end the US was able perfectly well to operate from Oman's Masirah Island and if that had been part of the process from November rather than March an entirely different entry plan might have developed. Likewise if he'd been willing to piss off the Turks and his own native service (Air Force) bureaucracy by using the "white hat" refuelable Airborne Rescue & Recovery Service HH-53s to, say, fly out of RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus ... there are a whole range of more creative and potentially effective plans (including a parachute-launched raid with ARRS recovery -- again take one or two big risks but keep it simple) that Jones massacred out of hand in the early November planning process. His goal was to avoid public disaster and it's exactly what he helped ensure. The ancient Greeks would nod knowingly.


* I should clarify: by "Mogadishu" I don't mean the whole "Black Hawk Down" business. I mean the 1977 rescue of a Lufthansa jet (one of the first to get all hostages out alive) by GSG-9, led by one of the true pioneers of offensive counterterrorism and the very model of an *actually* good German, Ulrich Wegener.
 
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Wasn't one of the fundamental problems with Operation Eagle Claw (Iranians hostages rescue mission) was that as the first real combat action of the Carter Admin. and the first one for that matter since the end of the Vietnam War, ALL FOUR of the services it was felt should participate in it, which of course was done.
 
Wasn't one of the fundamental problems with Operation Eagle Claw (Iranians hostages rescue mission) was that as the first real combat action of the Carter Admin. and the first one for that matter since the end of the Vietnam War, ALL FOUR of the services it was felt should participate in it, which of course was done.

Yes, and what a recipie for disaster that was. So much so that its now generally studied as an example of how not to carry out a Special Forces operation.
 
The death toll of innocents from that kind of action would have at least been in the thousands. Not only is such flagrant disregard for innocent life wildly out of character for Carter, but it's a severe violation of the international law concept of proportionality. To murder thousands simply because your raging war boner makes you too damned macho to negotiate for the release of a few dozen is pretty much a war crime.


Actually what he described was NOT "unfettered" as he only mentioned military and government targets.

So, it's not "proportional". So who cares and what can they do about it?

It's not an Actual INterenational Law, I take it?
 
Actually what he described was NOT "unfettered" as he only mentioned military and government targets.

So, it's not "proportional". So who cares and what can they do about it?

It's not an Actual INterenational Law, I take it?

"Unfettered"? Don't see that anywhere in my quote, was that for someone else?

Who cares? Who cared about the Holodomor and what could they do about it?

And yes, it is an "actual" international law:

https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_cha_chapter4_rule14
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
Rescue mission going hot? Assuming they get (most of) the people out: Carter beats Reagan.

Dropping the 82nd Airborne on Tehran? That gets messier…
Was the US Military capable of doing something like that in 1979-80?

The drug issues and disciplinary failures in the military at the time were astounding, and there was serious concern about the US becoming qualitatively a burden on NATO as the all volunteer force was a disaster at first.

Now, Carter did help begin the programs that got the military back on track, but even by Grenada in '83, there were noticeable problems in the military, and interservice cooperation, which would be necessary for such a strike, was a clusterfuck.

The military really didn't recover from the post-Vietnam situation it found itself in until Reagan's big defense buildup kicked in.
 
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