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Operation Eagle Claw

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America's war in the greater Middle East began over 30 years ago

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no shots fired

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Americans didn't engage their adversaries

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but 8 American soldiers died

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location called Desert One

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200 miles south east of Tehran

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the purpose was to free several Americans

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mission ended in failure

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bad planning

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defective equipment

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poor coordination

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what drew the United States into the war for the greater Middle East

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1968 Tet Offensive

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made it plain that the vietnam war was not going to end happily

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1968 Lyndon Johnson announced he was not going to run for reelection

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threw the political scene into turmoil

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1968 April: assassin murdered Dr. Martin Luther King

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angry African Americans rioted

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cities burned, a not uncommon occurrance in the 1960s

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1968 June: Robert Kennedy assassinated while campaigning for presidency

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1968 August: Democractic Convention

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sustained violence on a large scale

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downtown Chicago became something like a war zone

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the country seemed in many ways as if it was coming apart

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although from or president vantage point, 1979 was not the year that everything changed, but the point of origin of a great upheaval

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attempting to cope with or control that upheaval became the central them of US policy with mostly negative consequences

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1979 Iran revolution

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the Shah, long time US ally overthrown

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radical Islamist regime getting power in Tehran

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militants overrun teh US Embassy

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take several American diplomats hostage

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1979 July Soviet invasion in Afganistan

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triggers widespread resistance by militants intent on clearing Afghan territory of foreign occupiers

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1979 in Iraq

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Saddam Hussein

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ambitions matched only by his capacity for brutality, becomes president

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1979 Saudia Arabia

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radicals seize control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca

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becomes the scene of bloody firefights

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1979 Pakistan, General

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General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq embarks on campaign to transform country into a thoroughly Islamist state

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1979 Jimmy Carter midway through presidential term

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had inherited a mess from Ford, the only unelected president

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country was recovering from 1960s, the Watergate scandal, and the fall of Saigon

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Carter appeared not well suited or prepared for presidency

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Naval Academy graduate

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served as nuclear submariner

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returned to Georgia where he ran the family peanut farm

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in election, someone with a pronounced sense of religiousity

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promised to clean up Washington and put things back in order

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promised to promote human rights and eliminate nuclear weapons

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achieved limited success on these fronts

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but the economy proved his undoing

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economy was in staglation: low growth and high inflation

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by summer of 1979, unemployment was 7%, inflation was 11%, prime lending rate was 15% and heading upward

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overthrow of the Shah triggered the oil shock

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America became aware that it had become dependent on energy coming from Saudi Arabia and Iran

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1979 hostage crisis

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so the Iran hostage crisis occurred in a context of a larger crisis

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foreign countries that controlled the energy that fueled the American way of life

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could no longer claim to be genuinely independent