At this point a dramatic shift in the Middle East thrust Carter into the spotlight as never before. On November 4, 1979, about 400 armed Muslim militants broke into the American embassy compound in Tehran, Iran, and took everyone within the walls captive.
The seizure had roots that ran far back in Iranian history. During World War II, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and later the United States occupied Iran and forced its pro-German shah into exile, replacing him with his twenty-two-year-old son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. But in the early 1950s power shifted to Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, a leftist who sought to finance social reform by nationalizing the mostly American-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
In 1953, the Iranian army, backed by the CIA, arrested Mossadegh and put the young Pahlavi in power. The fall of Mossadegh ensured a steady flow of cheap oil, but it turned most Iranians against the United States and Shah Pahlavi. His unpopularity led the shah to purchase enormous amounts of American arms. Over the years Iran became the most powerful military force in the region.
Although Iran was an enthusiastic member of the OPEC cartel, the shah was for obvious reasons a firm friend of the United States. In the troubled Middle East, Iran seemed “an island of stability,” President Carter said.
The appearance of stability was deceptive. The shah’s secret police, the Savak, brutally suppressed liberal opponents. At the same time, Muslim religious leaders were particularly offended by the shah’s attempts to introduce Western ideas and technology into Iran. Because his American-supplied army and his American-trained secret police kept the shah in power, his opponents hated the United States almost as much as they hated their autocratic ruler. The shah’s rule was not one of “constant decency.”
Throughout 1977, riots and demonstrations convulsed Iran. When soldiers fired on protesters, the bloodshed caused more unrest, and that unrest caused even more bloodshed. Over 10,000 civilians were killed; many times that number were wounded. In 1978 the whole country seemed to rise against the shah. Finally, in January 1979, he was forced to flee. A revolutionary government headed by a religious leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, assumed power. Freedom, he said, was the great enemy of Islam: “[I]t will corrupt our youth. . . pave the way for the oppressor. . . and drag our nation to the bottom.” He also claimed that Islam condoned terror: “Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! . . . The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors.”
Khomeini denounced the United States, the “Great Satan,” whose support of the shah, he said, had caused the Iranian people untold suffering. When President Carter allowed the shah to come to the United States for medical treatment for cancer, militants in Tehran seized the American embassy.
World History
