Nov. 4, Gregory Brew, postdoctoral fellow at SMU’s Center for Presidential History, for a piece detailing the historical failure of U.S. policy toward Iran. Published in the Washington Post’s “Made By History” section on the 40th Anniversary of the U.S. Embassy seizure in Tehran Nov. 4, 1979: https://wapo.st/2Ng7peD
On Nov. 4, 1979, hundreds of Iranian students surrounded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The crowd brushed past the Marine guard, stormed the Embassy and took dozens of U.S. diplomats hostage.
The ensuing crisis lasted 444 days, playing out on televisions and morphing into a national trauma. Even 40 years later, the Iran hostage crisis remains for many Americans the most indelible memory of Iran — what Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution has called the “foundation for American understanding,” a chaotic act illustrating the “fundamental irrationality” of Iran’s revolutionary leadership.
But the crisis, like Iran’s revolution, did not emerge from a vacuum. Moreover, the Iranian irrationality emphasized in subsequent American interpretations, including those reproduced in Hollywood to near-universal critical acclaim, is the legacy of a much older tradition in U.S.-Iranian relations. . .
Continue reading “What the United States keeps getting wrong in Iran”