I recently returned to Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America’s War With Militant Islam. Supporting one front in the war of memoray against forgetting, it’s an invaluable book. In this morning’s Wall Street Journal Free Expression newsletter, Matthew Hennessey recalls that “It All Started With the Hostages.” He writes:
No one who lived through it, no matter how young, could ever forget—or forgive.
For that reason, I have no problem with what transpired this weekend. I welcome it. The mullahs who run Iran are murderous thugs. They kill women for showing their hair. They throw people in jail for dancing. They execute homosexuals. Death to America is their official foreign policy. They want Salman Rushdie’s head on a platter. The world is a better place without them.
I realize that’s crazy talk to anyone born in the 1990s or the 2000s. If you learned your foreign policy in a post-9/11 Ivy League classroom, or from some based online bugmold with a newsletter, that sounds like the reckless neocon warmongering that put us into a quagmire in Iraq.But I was born in the 1970s. I remember the shocking barbarism of the fatwa against Mr. Rushdie. I remember the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism of the 1980s, the 1994 suicide attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. I remember Terry Anderson and Terry Waite. I remember that al Qaeda members, including Osama bin Laden’s son, were given sanctuary in Iran after 9/11.
The livestreamers will say this war is about oil. The Substackers will say it started with Mosaddegh. To them, this is an academic debate, something they heard about on a podcast once.
Any American over 50 knows who started it. The claim that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism is more than words. It strikes deep. The Islamic Republic has waged war on the West and Western values for half a century. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies keeps a handy tally of Tehran’s long and bloody résumé. Check it out sometime.
Check it out now: Insight Iranian and Iranian-Backed Attacks Against Americans (1979-Present), by Tzvi Kahn.
