Revisiting the Iranian Hostage Crisis

Abstract

O 4 November 1979, a group of radical Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in a surge of idealistic zeal. Demanding the extradition of their former leader, the Shah of Iran, the students held 52 U.S. citizens hostage for the next 444 days. Writing over 25 years later, Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden examines the crisis in his latest book, Guests of the Ayatollah. Bowden has accomplished a rare feat—an astutely observed and sympathetic page-turner infused with a keen eye for both detail and the global context. He draws political conclusions from the hostages’ stories, as well as those of the relevant players within the U.S. government, about the driving forces behind U.S.-Iranian antagonism. This technique is effective at times but unconvincing at others. His careful rendering of psychological, emotional, and even trivial details sometimes fails to match up to his sweeping judgments. Nevertheless, Bowden has made a valuable contribution to the study of Iranian history, U.S.Iran relations, and what he calls “America’s war with militant Islam.” Bowden’s removed style—succinct descriptions and unadorned prose—reveals his past career as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Atlantic Monthly. Like many journalists, his personal opinions are rarely far from the surface. In Guests of the Ayatollah, he demonstrates that he has transitioned from a cut-and-dry reporter to a politically persuasive commentator. He devotes the final chapters of the book—after the hostages have gone home and Iran has plunged fully into the depths of the Islamic revolution—to elucidating his own conclusions about the incident and the larger ‘war’ of which it was a part. He suggests that the students who performed the attack were naive pawns of the radical mullahs and the religious hierarchy’s campaign to institutionalize radical Islam. Bowden bases his conclusion that most of the Iranian population would rather live in a free and pro-Western society on anecdotal evidence, such as that presented in the final sentence of the book. There he quotes a guard standing in front of the “adolescent memorial display” at what was once the U.S. Embassy in Tehran shouting with a ‘thumbs up,’ “Okay for George W. Bush!”1 SAIS Review vol. XXIII, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2003)