Iran Hostage Crisis Isn't A 1979 Repeat
By CBS News national security correspondent David Martin
Predicting how the British hostage crisis will play out is risky business, since it requires insight into the decision-making process of the Iranian government. It's easy enough to see how the deal would work: The Iranians tout the "confessions" of the sailors as proof that Britain violated Iran's territorial waters and the British government does not admit to any wrong, but pledges to respect Iran's territorial integrity in the future.
Yet Iran won't make that deal until it has milked this crisis for all it is worth.
The West looks at those staged confessions and is outraged. Iran, or at least its hardline government, sees things differently. It sees 150,000 American troops on its western border in Iraq and another 30,000 on its eastern border in Afghanistan, plus a huge supply base in Kuwait and two aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. In other words, it is surrounded by American military power — one that is under the command of a president who has labeled Iran a member of the "axis of evil."
To Iranians, the Britons' confessions, which ran on the television channel controlled by the hardline Revolutionary Guards, prove that the U.S. and its British ally are violating Iran's sovereignty.
America's Iranian hostage crisis of a quarter-century ago dragged on for 444 days. This was partially due to the fact that the Iranian government was in the middle of a revolution and couldn't figure out what to do, and partially because the mullahs saw that it had paralyzed the administration of Jimmy Carter, who made the great mistake of stating publicly that his every waking thought was devoted to the hostages.
It's too simplistic to call this a repeat of that earlier crisis. Iran is not in the midst of a revolution, although there is still a power struggle between hardliners and moderates — and the British government seems to be trying to lower the rhetoric and get the story off the front page.
Still, it's worth remembering that the American hostages were not released until the day Jimmy Carter left office. This is Tony Blair's last year in power. Could it be that this crisis will drag on to his final day?