The world watches American presidents and our enemies are quick to see weakness and will always take advantage of any perceived opening a weak president presents. There is no better example than Iran. Under the Carter administration the Shah of Iran (a moderate who had recognized Israel) was forced to allow the Ayatollah Khomeini to return from exile. This return of Khomeini to Iran was the spark needed to begin the Iranian Revolution and the establishment of a Islamic state with Khomeini as its leader. Shortly after Khomeini's rise to power we had the take over of the American embassy by Islamic radicals on Nov. 4, 1979. A weak American president did nothing and the Soviet Union seeing his weakness invaded Afghanistan some two months after the embassy take over. The hostage crisis continued until the first day of the Reagan administration Jan. 20, 1981. Carter was an utter failure with his foreign and domestic policies and the world was watching. And now we come to Obama who is following in the steps of a failed American president and repeating the same mistakes and the Iranians know this and are taking full advantage of this fool we have in office. But possibly even worse is that other enemies are watching and preparing something unexpected, as was the Soviet attack on Afghanistan, something that will come as a result of the new President Carter who is better known as Barack Hussein Obama. Another weakling who is inviting the bullies of the world to try us.Thirty years ago today, November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian “students” shouting “death to America” stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Iran and took 66 Americans hostage. Though fourteen of the hostages were soon freed, the remaining 52 were held for 444 days. For the American people, it was our introduction to militant Islam. For the Carter administration, intent on “engaging” the regime that replaced Shah Reza Pahlavi, it was a disaster.
The embassy seizure took place just nine months after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France and declared himself “Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution.” Though some of those who participated in the takeover subsequently claimed they planned nothing more than a “sit in” like those on U.S. college campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests, the Ayatollah’s most radical followers were soon in control of events.
On Christmas day, less than 2 months after the hostages were seized in Tehran, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. President Carter, wracked by intelligence failures and indecision, said he was “shocked and surprised” and boycotted the Olympics.
Over the course of the next year, while the Carter administration dithered, Khomeini and his council of militant clerics created all of the instruments of state control common to revolutionary regimes, but with an Islamic twist. He purged the military and the Iranian civil service, created a massive internal secret police network, a “block warden” system to spy on neighbors, took control of print and broadcast media, rounded up opponents and tried them in “special courts” under Sharia law.
By the spring of 1980, when President Carter ordered our deeply under-funded U.S. military to rescue the hostages held in Tehran, Khomeini was convinced that he was on a divine mission to “purify Islam” and re-establish a “Caliphate” in the “Lands of the Prophet.” When Operation Eagle Claw failed catastrophically on the night of April 24-25 with the loss of 8 American lives – and without the Iranians firing a shot – the Ayatollah claimed it was because Allah was guarding “The Islamic State” and protecting it “from infidels.” He also began predicting an apocalyptic battle against the U.S. and Israel which would destroy “The Great Satan,” and “the Zionist entity.”
Though the hostages were released on January 20, 1981 -- on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s inaugural -- Tehran’s wave of terror didn’t stop. By 1982, despite being engaged in a bloody war with Iraq, the Ayatollah’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had created a proxy force in Lebanon – Hezbollah. Over the course of the next five years Hezbollah terrorists armed, trained and paid for by Tehran hijacked, kidnapped, bombed and killed more Americans than any terror organization on the planet until the attacks of 9/11/01. read more from FOX by Oliver North
