By Alan Caruba
On November 4, 1979, some Iranian “students” took 53 American diplomats hostage. This iconic act broke every international law ever set to page or parchment.
As this is written thirty years later, the Iranians are holding three American tourists who wandered across a border between Iraq and allegedly into Iran’s Kurdistan province. They were seized in August.
Taking hostages is what the Iranian government does. Even Iranian-born, naturalized Americans, visiting their family members are subject to arrest and detainment.
We do things differently in America. If you sneak in across our border, you qualify for a driver’s license, food stamps, and free medical care. Can’t speak English? That’s okay, we will print everything in Spanish for you. If two border guards should, in the course of their duty, shoot you in the butt, it is they who get sent to prison.
It took 444 days to get our diplomats returned.
The United States has, rather understandably, not reestablished diplomatic relations with the ayatollahs and mullahs in Tehran and they have been very happy to keep telling their people that the U.S. is the “Great Satan” and to encourage them to shout “Death to America” at every opportunity. It’s become a state-sponsored ritual there as in “I now pronounce you man and wife, and death to America.”
Let me exempt the Iranian “people” from the Iranian thugs running the nation under the guidance of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or his vile toady, Mamoud Ahmadinejad. You can always tell the difference because the people are the ones in the streets protesting, being shot dead, arrested, imprisoned, and never heard from again.
I tell you this because, if you haven’t heard, the mad mullahs have been pursuing their dream of homemade nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them ever since those “students” long ago scampered onto the grounds of our embassy.
They are very close to having both and they think the Americans, the Europeans, and the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are idiots and all of them have provided amply evidence that they are. The IAEA has never ever found any weapons making facilities that they didn’t think could be converted to peaceful purposes or just ignored entirely.
There is a reason why the Israelis are getting ready to bomb the hell out of the Iranian nuclear facilities. The obvious one is that the mad mullahs have never made any attempt to disguise the fact that they intend to destroy Israel.
Quite coincidentally, on November 3th, the Israeli navy commandeered the Antigua-flagged arms ship which carried 300 containers, 40 of which contained hundreds of Iranian arms bound for use by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Most of it was ammo, grenades, 122-km Katyusha rockets, mortar shells and anti-tank missiles. Experts estimated it would have kept Hezbollah fighting for a month or more. The arms originated in Iran.
The other reason the Israelis will do our job is because the United States, rarely a reliable ally under the best of circumstances, know that we have a President who doesn’t like them or should we just say, prefers his fellow Muslims to them.
Obama has never understood the utter duplicity of the Iranians and overestimated his ability to deal with them. They, conversely, have concluded he was weak and could be easily misled and deterred.
Dore Gold, a former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, has written “The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West.” He points out that, “Given that the Islamic Republic was the first to systematically employ suicide bombing attacks in the present era, it could very well be immune to deterrence and the threat of full scale retaliation should it employ nuclear weapons.”
It is the ultimate game of “chicken” and the U.S. is already showing a big yellow streak as President Obama contemplates whether to put more troops into Afghanistan or leave enough to achieve nothing in particular except to get more of our troops killed.
In basic terms, the mullahs do not fear us because we have given them no reason to, whereas the Israelis have a track record, having destroyed a nuclear facility in Iraq in the 1980s and more recently in Syria.
On the anniversary of the taking of American hostages, America looked scared. The best the President could muster was a photo opportunity saluting the returning dead.
The Israelis will attack Iran because they must and President Obama will denounce them when they do because he can.
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