MOST LIKELY TO DESERVE A PUNCH IN THE MOUTH: Iran surpasses Bush administration

If there's any country that has worked hard at earning a brushback or even a beanball pitch than our country in the war on terror, it must be Iran.

Iran likes to take hostages. And then it likes to keep them, treat them poorly -- as pawns for making the victimized nation squirm.

A great many of my countrymen can't forget the Iranian hostage crisis. And there would be little regret, as much disliked as George W. Bush is, if the military was given the green light to take a big swing at the Revolutionary Guard. Lefty blogs would bitch loudly but even more would just shrug and say, "They had it coming."

Speaking in family, it seems obvious to everyone in the household on a shady street in Pasadena that Iranians pulled this on the Royal Navy precisely because they knew what would have been more likely to happen if they tried it on the less polite USN.

However, putting this aside, it is illuminating to turn again to Dilip Hiro's account of the Iran-Iraq conflict, The Longest War.



That war, lasting eight years, was extremely bloody and ineptly fought by both sides. When either side gained tactical victories, it was because the guy on the other side of the line was taken completely by surprise, ran away, or both.

Hiro's chapter, "Conclusions," is still worth reading for its relevance to our time.

"There was a deep-seated antipathy between the two countries [Iran and the US] at the popular level, which persists," Hiro writes. "The long ordeal of the American hostages in Iran in 1979-80, played up day after day in the US media, left a deep mark on the American population. This became obvious when President Reagan's tough stance against Iran in the Gulf ... which resulted in considerable loss of Iranian fighters and civilians as well as oil rigs and naval craft -- received overwhelming backing ... "

Hiro writes one of the main reasons for the Iranians acceptance of a ceasefire in the war was "a failure to cause division between [the American] government and its citizenry."

Iranian revolutionaries considered Americans to be sick people, indicated Hiro, riddled with corruption, slaves to sexual promiscuity, beset by venereal diseases, imagined as other equally dumb and sweeping caricatures.

At the same time, Iran "visualized itself as the regional superpower."

To be "superpower" its leaders felt it would have to gain power in the Gulf at the expense of Washington. "It was this potential that Iran wished to see realized under its leadership which would have stemmed from [a] victory in the Gulf War," Hiro continues.

Of course, this didn't happen. The Iranians miscalculated as much as Saddam Hussein and seemed not expect other nations in the region, those not enthusiastic about revolutionary Shiaism, to align against them.

Then the United States Navy subsequently taught Iran a lesson, essentially opening another front on that country's southern flank. (It made a hash of the idea of using enthusiastic Revolutionary Guardsmen and patrol boats in action against the USN. Example: April 18, 1988 -- "US warships blow up two oil rigs, destroy an Iranian frigate and immobilize another, and sink an Iranian missile boat.")

The long war also cemented the position of the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran.

"It provided the clerical rulers with a platform with which to rejuvenate the drive for national unity and Islamic revolution," writes Hiro.

Hiro states the war fed into reinforcing conditions which were fertilizer for "Shiaism." These included "struggle" and "renewal through suffering."

Your friendly neighborhood GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow can't reprint all of Hiro's finishing chapter here. However, it is possible to vigorously recommend the book for those wishing more background and light when pondering potential escalations in the Persian Gulf.