Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Iran was central in my own political awakening. While I recall earlier events back at least to the 1972 Presidential election, my memories up to the signing of the 1978 Camp David Accords was spotty.
However, in 1979, I became emotionally involved in news events for the very first time. I read the Meriden (CT) Morning Record and Journal newspaper’s front page and editorial section every weekday. Like many Americans, I was aghast at the ABC nightly news beginning with “Day X of America Held Hostage”. Along with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran Hostage Crisis awakened me to the urgencies of a wider reality.
My family had stoked my interest in history, and so I knew even then about our struggles as a nation in the Revolution, the Civil War, the Westward Expansion, World War I, World War II, and in Korea and Vietnam. I could not then fathom how this third world dictatorship was able to get away with the protracted abuse of American citizens and brazenly threaten the peace of the world.
I have since studied the West’s withdrawal from the world, de-colonialism, the rise of Islamic nationalism, the effects of the Left’s actions against the Vietnam War, and many of the other trends that make Carter’s ineffectiveness explicable. However, I maintain my conviction that such appeasement is deadly.
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi had been undermined by the Carter Administration, because he was somewhat authoritarian in his methods. So, the moralistic Jimmy Carter prevented the Shah and his allies from decisively acting to disrupt his enemies’ plans. In 1978, Carter’s sanctimony allowed the Shah to fall.
The Pahlavi Dynasty was replaced by the world’s first totalitarian Islamist regime. Today’s PAVA and Morality Police make the Shah’s SAVAK secret police seem both gentle and amateurish by comparison. As in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia/Kampuchea, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and Nicaragua a sometimes thuggish Ancient Regime was replaced by much more efficient revolutionary brutality.
A year later, on November 4, 1979 the Iranian Islamic Republic sent so-called independent “students” into the United States Embassy in Tehran to capture everyone there. Instead of restoring law and order, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s government provided the terrorists with all that they needed.
For 444 days, America was held hostage by an Iranian regime who strove to extort concessions from the US, Israel, and the West in exchange for the safe return of 52 hostages. The Carter Administration’s policy was to meet terrorist aggression with pusillanimous “diplomacy”.
After half-a-year, Carter belatedly authorized the use of force to rescue our imprisoned countrymen. A humiliating debacle at “Desert One” resulted, where US helicopters and planes collided, killing several servicemen, and giving away any surprise. This failure, which looked like rank incompetence, was a direct result of Carter’s insistence on reducing defense spending in the previous three years. Desultory negotiations persisted through the remainder of his term.
Carter’s lost reelection bid in 1980 was in part a consequence of his weakness towards Iran. President-Elect Ronald Reagan then promised to unleash the full force of America’s military against the “savages” who held our hostages. Every last hostage was flown out of Iranian airspace within an hour of Reagan taking the Presidential Oath of Office.
Most Americans considered the Iranian crisis to have ended, and we went on with our lives. However, the Islamist regime was not defeated. It had chosen to end the crisis on its terms. It saw itself, and was seen by many, as having defiantly triumphed over the “Great Satan”, the United States of America.
Iran fought a decade-long war with the Arab Socialist Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In this war, the ancient tensions between Persian and Arab ethnicities and Sunni and Shiite Islam played out. The Islamist Iranian regime simultaneously tightened its control over the Iranian people while becoming the most prominent exporter of terrorism worldwide. For 47 years, Iran has destabilized the societies of all of its regional neighbors in hopes of expanding its power.
Thanks to the Soviets, Red Chinese, North Koreans, and Pakistanis, the Iranian Islamists have been long striving to develop nuclear weapons and the systems to deliver them. Israeli and American efforts have stymied these plans for well over forty years.
A theocracy with a medieval millenarian mindset is grasping for the doomsday weapons produced by the most modern physics; weapons that they could never have developed on their own. This is a terminal combination.
Former U.S. Embassy hostage-taker and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly threatened Israel with God’s purging holy fire. The Iranian Ayatollahs, who control the government of the Islamic Republic, have indicated their belief that the Twelfth Iman (their Shiite Islamic Messiah) now walks the Earth.
Their eagerness to burn away the current world in a Day of Haq/Judgment Day renders the Iranian regime uniquely unsuited to possess nuclear weapons. They have repeatedly indicated their zeal to use such weapons to initiate the cleansing of the world in preparation for God’s newly purified utopia.
Under no circumstances should these medieval fanatics be permitted to possess atomic weapons. If they acquire them, they will surely use them. If he has not as yet done so by the date of this column’s publication, President Trump should employ American bunker buster super-bombs to utterly destroy Iran’s remaining nuclear production facilities. Either through the Israeli Defense Forces or directly, we must act to avoid a preventable Armageddon.
