A Good Read

Just finished reading a book on the Iran Hostage crisis - "Guests of the Ayatullah" by Mark Bowden. An excellent read.

Apart from the suffering of the hostages, what comes across in the book, is the fact these hostages where nothing but pawns in the bigger picture. They were used as bait by Khomeini and his cronies to get a control on power in Iran. Here they not only used the hostages but also the students who took the hostages. In a sense the students were hostages in their own country.

The other thing that comes across is how helpless the Carter Administration was. Carter lost his re-election bid because of the hostage crisis. The media and the opposition kept hounding him for inaction but no-one offered any credible solution. When he dared to take the risk of sending in a rescue mission fraught with risks up the wazoo... and failed; he was taken to task for it as well. After reading the book I felt the Carter administration was unfairly judged for their role in the Iran hostage crisis. As a matter of fact, you come away thinking they demonstrated extremely good judgement in the way it was handled.

24hr news cycles had just begun at the time. The medias desire to feed the news put enormous amounts of pressure on the administration. It gave the students a medium to make their revolution larger than it deserved credit for. This 24hr news cycles continue to this day. There seems to be a desire to discuss and report every minuscule dramatic event happening in the world. But no conclusions are derived... no lessons learned. The news channels use catchy phrases to describe the news ... "War on Terror!" is such an ambiguous phrase and is liberally applied to everything.

Then they move on to the next big thing.... We will never solve this terrorism issue until we stay on the subject and identify the underlying causes and give enough time to our policy makers to debate the issue and come up with appropriate solutions which will inevitably be much longer term implementation plans that will not suit the 24hr news cycles......