The 1979 student takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was Sept. 11 in slow motion. Over 15 endless months, 52 American hostages were imprisoned, interrogated and humiliated by the radical Islamic students who seized the embassy compound. Back home, night after night, a lugubrious Walter Cronkite played the role of national town crier, counting off the days of captivity. Is it any surprise that all these years later the hostage taking is an episode that refuses to subside into mere history? The mullahs who exploited it to consolidate their power still rule. The hatreds it set loose still poison relations between the U.S. and Iran. Some events won't lie down and play dead.
So when Mark Bowden calls the embassy drama "the first battle in America's war against militant Islam," that sounds about right. Guests of the Ayatollah (Atlantic Monthly Press; 680 pages) is his detailed and bleakly compelling account of what the hostages endured during the siege and of the anguish it produced in the U.S. The author of Black Hawk Down, about the 1993 U.S. military mission in Mogadishu that went lethally wrong, Bowden knows something about American misadventures in the wider world. He may not be a policy analyst, but he writes about events in a way that gives a clear picture of both high-level decision making and the price paid by people on the ground. Maybe that's something more policy analysts should try.
The embassy takeover was not just a symbolic blow against the U.S. but also a power play in the struggle between radical Islamists and more moderate elements within the Iranian revolution, who were already reaching out to the U.S. To the Islamic students, any rapprochement with Washington was supping with the devil. What the embassy takeover promised them was a chance to rekindle the revolution, goad the Great Satan into waving his pitchfork at Iran and force the moderates to renounce the U.S. and all its wicked devices.
The original plan had been to seize the embassy for just a few days and use it as a platform to broadcast Iranian grievances against the U.S. Those mostly stemmed from Washington's longtime support of the Shah, who had been placed on the Peacock Throne in 1953, after a CIA-instigated coup deposed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize Iran's oil industry. As Bowden points out, by the time of the Iranian revolution, most Americans had forgotten all about the coup. Most Iranians had not. When the White House allowed the exiled Shah to enter the U.S. to seek treatment for liver cancer, the stage was set for a new outbreak of fury that the religious radicals could manage to their advantage.