Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said Monday he had no regrets about his handling of the Iran hostage crisis more than 30 years ago, saying he didn't attack the country as his advisers proposed because thousands of people would have died.
Islamic militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, and seized its occupants. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
And this is just a sad commentary on who we trusted to lead us and defend us:
Carter said one proposed option was a military strike on Iran, but he chose to stick with negotiations to prevent bloodshed and bring the hostages home safely.
"My main advisers insisted that I should attack Iran," he said. "I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry. But I felt in the process it was likely the hostages' lives would be lost, and I didn't want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn't attack."
Iran resorts to war against us (embassy territory is US territory under internationl law) and the president wanted to stick to diplomacy. Yeah, that worked out well. One of the alumni of that crisis now crows about Iran's nuclear ambitions:
Ahmadinejad said the West would have to come to terms with Iran's nuclear progress, Iran's state broadcaster quoted the president as saying on his website. ...
"Enemies have politicised the nuclear issue using all of their abilities to try to make the Iranian nation surrender, but they have been defeated," Ahmadinejad said.
Back to our other alumni of that crisis, is President Carter seriously saying that the only military option involved 20,000 dead Iranians? (Presumably dead civilian Iranians) Really?
That's just BS. Maybe a full scale invasion of Iran leading to American troops in Tehran, but that was hardly the only option presented to him.
And the hypocricy of his purported concern for innocent Iranian civilians doesn't square with Operation Eagle Claw, which President Carter ordered. We were going to plant a small foce in downtown Tehran to rescue our people. Only an imbecile could believe that this option would not have required the utter destruction of blocks of buildings around the embassy grounds to prevent a large mob of Iranians or mullah security forces from charging in to stop the rescue. Thousands of Iranian civilians would have died if we hadn't aborted the mission under the mission that our president did authorize. So it is a bit farcical for him to play the tortured humanitarian.
And we may yet come to appreciate that even 20,000 dead Iranians in 1980 would have beat the death toll that mullahs with atomic bombs will inflict.
