Lessons drawn from unique circumstances are usually wrong, but in the case of Iran the impulse to understand what has happened to the U.S. in the past 14½ months may offer the only way out of a blind rage. Blindness has been a metaphor throughout. The U.S. was blind not to see the extent and temper of the Iranian revolution against the Shah; blind fanatics seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran; the Ayatullah Khomeini's blind sense of vengeance sanctioned the seizure; and the hostages suffered their own blindness, held in solitary and the dark. All year long, photographs of American heads...
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