1.) Deerminator - 11/17/2015

Kicked the crap out of Iotolla Kollmani back in the day?

Would there be all this terrorism stuff?

2.) Swamp Fox - 11/17/2015

I voted yes. While I think it might have been good to kick ass, I don't think it was going to happen, Number One, and I don't think it would have changed anything in the big picture.


It might have had a small temporary deterrent effect, but I think the genie was out of the bottle long before the hostages were taken. In the 70's, Daffy Gaddafi was already promoting terrorism from Libya, and Islamists were predicting global domination, if not jihad, at the U.N.* The rise of militant Islam in modern times goes all the way back to the 1920's or 30's.

So Iran--or more to the point--Islamist militancy was going to be trouble hostage crisis or no, punishing response or not.

I also think Carter and the U.S. didn't have the stomach for a military response at the time, to be realistic. Even if we had had someone a lot more hard-shelled than Carter in the Presidency, the U.S. was still head-in-the-toilet with a Vietnam hangover. Even Reagan bugged out after the Beirut bombing several years later. The Soviets also still loomed large in the Middle East at the time of the hostage crisis, making gloomy prospects for a muscular response even darker.

But if none of that were the case? If we HAD kicked the crap out of the Iranian mullahs back then? No change, I'm afraid. The cockroaches were already out of the nest, and whatever an ass-kicking would have looked like back then wouldn't have stopped what we have today, I don't think. Nothing short of replacing the mullahs would have had an effect on their pot-stirring, and even if they weren't there, there have been plenty of other non-Iranian bad actors to take up the slack.

We had a shot at backing the potentially revolutionary Green Movement in Iran a few years ago (2009 or 10, or thereabouts) and basically did nothing despite pleas for our support. While congratulating themselves that sanctions had brought Iran to the negotiating table, Team Obama proactively scrapped those sanctions to discuss how we could help Iran further its nuclear program on the mullahs' terms. This week, Obama and Clinton insist they are "on the right course" in dealing with militant Islam (without being able to say the words) in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So I hate to say it, but nothing's going to change until we change it.





* I found this quote while looking for bin Laden's exact words about the weak and the strong horses. I wasn't paying attention to the U.N. in 1974, but I wonder if anyone was:

"One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.----Former president of Algeria, Houari Boumédienne (Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharouba), April 10, 1974 speech to the United Nations


“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” --OBL

3.) Wild Bob - 11/18/2015

Radical is radical IMO...the Middle East has been in a constant state of fighting and turmoil since the beginning of time and will be long after us.