It All Started With the Hostages
Iran picked this fight 47 years ago.
Free Expression is a daily newsletter on American life, politics and culture from the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Sign up and start reading Free Expression today.
Out there it may be 2026, but in this house it’s still 1980.
When I look around I see a media universe full of pundits and prognosticators with no living memory of the Iran hostage crisis. It isn’t their fault. They’re young. But they missed the first few seasons of “The Ayatollah Chronicles,” and it shows.
The world was different then. It was bigger in some ways. The Middle East seemed more distant and mysterious than it does today. But the media world was smaller. The discourse was narrower. It was one story at a time. The nightly news, the front page, the daily conversation in hardware stores and supermarkets, at little league games and cookouts—it was all focused on the 52 Americans being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Trees in towns across the country sported yellow ribbons of hope and remembrance. Schoolchildren wrote letters to the hostages. Veterans’ organizations created makeshift memorials. Ted Koppel counted the days on TV. Eight U.S. troops—five airmen and three Marines—died in Operation Eagle Claw, the failed April 1980 rescue attempt.
The nation prayed and held its breath. Fourteen and a half months is a long time to hold your breath.
Church bells tolled to welcome the hostages home on Jan. 25, 1981. An estimated 200,000 people lined the route from Stewart Airport in Westchester County, N.Y., to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where the 52 spent their first night stateside after more than a year in captivity.
“Americans by the millions, while aware of the returnees need for gentle handling, could not suppress an outburst of celebration at their safe homecoming,” wrote Kathy Sawyer in the Washington Post. The entire episode was a national obsession, a psychological wound kept open for 444 days.
No one who lived through it, no matter how young, could ever forget—or forgive.
For that reason, I have no problem with what transpired this weekend. I welcome it. The mullahs who run Iran are murderous thugs. They kill women for showing their hair. They throw people in jail for dancing. They execute homosexuals. Death to America is their official foreign policy. They want Salman Rushdie’s head on a platter. The world is a better place without them.
I realize that’s crazy talk to anyone born in the 1990s or the 2000s. If you learned your foreign policy in a post-9/11 Ivy League classroom, or from some based online bugmold with a newsletter, that sounds like the reckless neocon warmongering that put us into a quagmire in Iraq.
But I was born in the 1970s. I remember the shocking barbarism of the fatwa against Mr. Rushdie. I remember the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism of the 1980s, the 1994 suicide attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. I remember Terry Anderson and Terry Waite. I remember that al Qaeda members, including Osama bin Laden’s son, were given sanctuary in Iran after 9/11.
The livestreamers will say this war is about oil. The Substackers will say it started with Mosaddegh. To them, this is an academic debate, something they heard about on a podcast once.
Any American over 50 knows who started it. The claim that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism is more than words. It strikes deep. The Islamic Republic has waged war on the West and Western values for half a century. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies keeps a handy tally of Tehran’s long and bloody résumé. Check it out sometime.
It’s good policy never to make fun of someone for mispronouncing a difficult or unusual word. The guy who can’t correctly say “hegemony” may, in fact, be better educated than you are. He probably learned that word from reading it in a book. But there are things in this life that you can’t learn from books. Some things you have to pick up by paying attention along the way.
Mr. Hennessey is editor of Free Expression.