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Tragedies from the Iran hostage crisis
Tragedies from the Iran hostage crisis
The effect of the Iran hostage crisis
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In 1952 during the Cold War, Iran was under the rule of their prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize the country's oil industry. Iran had been a large producer of oil and its industry, controlled by Britain and America, was thriving. Britain and American corporations were not in favor of Mohammad Mossadegh’s newly developed oil policies, so they made a secret plan to overthrow him. They were successfully able to overthrow Muhammad Mossadegh, and in 1953 a new government was developed and controlled by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran's new leader. The US has supported the Shah For twenty-six years and he became a central alley between the US and Iran. The Shah received military and political support from the US, and …show more content…
Carter was unable to stop or help the hostage crisis which made him look very weak to the Americans. He did not want the US to fight back against the Iranian militants because all the hostages lives were at stake. Because he was portrayed as weak, his national and international standing dropped dramatically during the crisis. While Carter’s Presidential stance was becoming fragile, he was also being challenged for the Presidential nomination by Senator Kennedy. This made Carter very worried because his presidential position was now at stake. He finally decided that it was time to take action since nothing was getting better for the people in the US, especially the hostages. The attempt to save the hostages failed and eight US soldiers had been killed during the mission. After the failed rescue attempt, the hostages had been separated and moved from each other so it would be more difficult to rescue them. This angered the US and made them hostile towards Carter because they believed that this was all his fault. During the election that took place right before the crisis had ended, Ronald Reagan was elected President. Because of Carter's failure to free the hostages, he was seen as weak and was not re elected for President. The militant Islamic students who were holding the Americans captive agreed that they would release the …show more content…
When President Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah into the US, conflict had been established between former allies during the Cold War; The US and Iran. A crisis was produced where 66 hostages were taken and held captive. Jimmy carter's inability to prevent the crisis from stopping weakened his presidential position significantly. This crisis overall debilitated Carter's presidential position because he froze Iran's assets, broke US relations with Iran, changed his election strategy and sent militants on a rescue mission that failed and killed eight of them. As a result of this crisis, Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidate position was promoted, while Jimmy Carter's was
This completely changed the perception of the United States within Iran. Many Iranians believed that “American influence and power made a mockery of their national autonomy and desecrated their religious beliefs” (Farber, 37). The real struggle came once the Shah sought asylum in the U.S. Iran believed this to be a betrayal and demanded the Shah be released to the revolutionaries. Due to the fact that the United States did not refuse the Shah, the revolutionaries took the embassy in Tehran and all of the people that worked there hostage. One of the hostages wrote back to his parents during the crisis “‘We will not be set free until shah is released and the longer we stay here like this the better is a chance for something terrible to happen’” (Farber, 156). The siege was led by Iranian students who supported the revolution and the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader that the revolution had selected to take the place of the
Kinzer tells us that the Iranians celebrated their nationalism in taking control of their oil, but their success was a shock to the British multinational companies in Iran. They did not like the idea of Iran nationalization, so they plan a coup to overthrow the Prime Minister Mossadegh. But this plan failed and the British were disarmed and sent back to their country closing down their embassy in Iran. The British tried to present their case to the United State in a way that the United State would intervene. So they presented a case that Mossaghe is not only nationalizing the Iranians oil, he is also leading Iran into communism. This case stirred the American action and they feared if they assassinate Mossaghe, his seat will be open and communist ...
In All The Shah’s Men there seems to be a very strong hatred for all foreign powers, including the United States, taken by the citizens of Iran. I believe that this ultimately occurred because of the impatience of certain government officials in Washington D.C., and also in Great Britain. If only there could have been better communication between countries, I feel that there would have been a solution reached. The stubbornness of the British for the most part, led to many lives being lost, and a feeling of perpetual disgust being shown towards the United States for their involvement. Although the British were our allies and we did have an extreme fear of communism taking over the free world, this coup was disorganized, forced along too quickly, and put forth without any guidance or strong evidence, which in the end proved to completely defy what the United States was trying to impose on the world, and what Mossadegh was trying to give his people; freedom and democracy.
The United States poured millions of dollars into Iran’s economy and the Shah’s armed forces, overlooking the rampant corruption in government and well-organized opposition. By early 1979, the Ayatollah had murdered the Shah and taken back power of the government. A group of students who took the American embassy hostage on November 4th, 1979, turned the embassy over to the religious leaders. Carter knew he must take action in order to regain the American embassy and the hostages, but with all of the military cutbacks, the rescue attempt was a complete failure and embarrassment. It took the United States 444 days to rescue the hostages.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a senior writer at U.S. News and World, published her article, "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism," in 2004. She uses the article to briefly overview the scandal as a whole before diving into what can trigger sadistic behavior. The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal took place in 2004, wherein American troops humiliated and tortured Iraqi detainees (Szegedy-Maszak 75). The main objective of Szegedy-Maszak’s article is to investigate the causation behind sadistic behavior, exclusively in the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. She effectively does so by gathering information and research from professional psychologists and professors of psychology, specifically Herbert Kelman and Robert Okin (Szegedy-Maszak 76). She finds
Commentators whipped both Carter's arrangements to give up control of the Panama Canal and his reaction to Soviet animosity in Afghanistan by hauling out of the Olympics and completion the offer of wheat to the Russians. His acknowledgment of socialist China, which developed Nixon's China approach, and his arrangement of new arms control concurrences with the Soviets, were both condemned by moderates in the Republican Party. Yet, the most genuine emergency of Carter's administration included Iran. At the point when the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power there, the U.S. offered haven to the sickly Shah, irritated the new Iranian government, which then urged understudy aggressors to storm the American consulate and assume control fifty Americans prisoner. Carter's inadequate treatment of the tremendously broadcast prisoner emergency, and the shocking fizzled endeavor to protect them in 1980, destined his administration, despite the fact that he arranged their discharge instantly before leaving office.
The Iran-Contra Affair involved the United States, Iran, and Lebanon. The affair coincided with the Iranian hostage crisis, which promoted the United States’ actions in sending weapons to Iran. The Reagan administration decided to trade arms for hostages in hopes of successfully retrieving American hostages from Iran. Iran was at the time under the power of Ayatollah Khomeini, who had put his full support behind the hostage crisis and believed there was nothing that the United States could do to Iran. America’s only chance of rescuing the hostages was to put their support behind Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, which involved the shipment of weapons to Iran f...
The account is told from Robert F. Kennedy's point of view. Kennedy was a key player in the decisions made during the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy believed that the United States should try and resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis peacefully and that the United States needed to try and avoid resolving to violent measures. Kennedy took over for his brother, the President, on many occasions. He led important meetings and tried to negotiate an understanding with the other cabinet members who were involved.
The 1970's was a difficult time period in American history filled with chaos, domestic and international crises, and very poor presidential leadership. Richard Nixon was president during the early years of the seventies and he was far from popular in the eyes of the American people. With inflation rapidly rising, Nixon soon became unfavorable, and with the controversy surrounding his actions concerning the Watergate Crisis, he was impeached and forced to resign. His Vice President, Gerald R. Ford, soon took his place in the White House. However, Ford was unable to handle the crippling events taking place in the United States; his approval dropped drastically within months, and like Nixon he lost support of the American people. When the 1976 presidential election came around, the American people needed a new hero whom they could trust and who could pull the nation out of its current state of misery. To fill this position, American chose to elect James Earl Carter, Jr., Governor from Georgia. Jimmy Carter began his presidency in the bright glow of public support built on his promise of bringing honesty and morality back to politics; but unable to successfully deal with conflicts beyond his control concerning domestic and foreign affairs, his term as President ended behind a dark cloud of public disapproval.
In 1976 Jimmy Carter, a small peanut farmer from Georgia was elected the President of the United Sates. Carter had limited experience in the National Political Arena. He used his inexperience to his advantage and promised to restore honesty and morality to the government. After the corruption that the United States had seen within the previous administrations of Nixon and Ford, Carter was welcomed with open arms. During his presidency Carter was faced with a plethora of domestic and foreign issues. At home, economic problems dominated causing massive unemployment and inflation. Oil shortages also presented a challenge. Domestically, Carter’s policies were a failure, with no success in alleviating the economy or the oil crisis. In the Middle East as series of conflicts between Egypt and Israel resulted in peace talks and with the Presidents’ mediation they were successful. However, Carter was not completely successful abroad. In Iran Carter was ineffective in procuring a quick solution and as a result lost public support. While Carter was successful in dealing with the Israeli-Arab conflict, he was disastrous in his domestic economic policy and his other foreign diplomatic endeavors; ultimately his successes paled in comparison to his failures.
Reagan had said he would never deal with supporters of terrorists, which he considered Iran's leaders to be. But he and his advisers believed Iran could get the hostages released. Members of the Administration arranged for the CIA to secretly purchase arms from the Department of Defense. Private individuals bought the arms from the CIA and sold them to Iran in return for its promises of help in the hostage release. But the sales led to the release of only three hostages, and three more Americans were taken hostage during the same period.
There were many problems in which Carter had been blamed for, especially the Iran hostage crisis which proved to be very humiliating. He failed to deal with any of these situations. Either as hesitant or ineffective is how many Americans viewed Carter. He also had attacked Reagan as a dangerous radical after he defeated Tom Kennedy for the nomination. For his part Reagan, the charismatic ex-Governor of California, repeatedly made fun of Carter's powerlessness , and won a landside victory that carried the United States Senate for the first time in 28 years. Reagan's victory marked the beginning of the "Reagan Revolution."
It caused the Energy Crisis which in turn caused the Recession of 1979. The Iran Hostage Crisis also had political consequences for President Carter. It was a major factor that contributed to him losing the election of 1980 to Ronald Reagan. Additionally, this crisis led to many instances of racial discrimination toward Iranian-Americans and Iranian immigrants. Even after the Hostage Crisis was resolved, the bad blood between the two countries continued; the United States helped Iraq in the war against Iran, and the Iranians backed a second hostage situation in Lebanon.
In the 1970’s Iran, under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a very centralized military state that maintained a close relationship with the USA. The Shah was notoriously out of touch with working class Iranians as he implemented many controversial economic policies against small business owners that he suspected involved profiteering. Also unrestricted economic expansions in Iran lead to huge government expenditure that became a serious problem when oil prices dropped in the mid 1970’s. This caused many huge government construction projects to halt and the economy to stall after many years of massive profit. Following this was high rates of inflation that affected Iranians buying power and living standards. (Afary, 2012) Under the Shah, political participation was not widely available for all Iranians and it was common for political opposition to be met with harassment, illegal detention, and even torture. These measures were implemented by the Iranian secret police knows as ‘SAVAK’. This totalitarian regime combined with the increasing modernisation of the country paved the way for revolution.
Although the Iranian Revolution was caused by combination of political and religious motivations and ideas, the desires of the people supporting the movement were more dominantly religious ideas that were wished to be imposed in society and in a new government. The Shah, or king, of Iran at the time was Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who had developed relations with nations in “western” world, specifically with the United States. The United States supported the White Revolution, which was a series of social reformations the Shah made to remove Islamic v...