MUST READ: FROM KHOMEINI TO AHMADINEJAD

From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad
By Matthias Küntzel

A review of:

Mark Bowden.
Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War With Militant Islam.
Atlantic Monthly Press. 704 pages. $26.


W hen Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in New York in September 2006 for the opening of the UN General Assembly, his appointment book was full. He had breakfast at the Intercontinental Hotel with American academics and journalists; he chatted with the members of the Council on Foreign Relations about whether or not the Holocaust occurred; and he was expected up at Columbia for the university’s “World Leaders Forum” speakers series. Ahmadinejad gave his talk at the UN and later was greeted with standing ovations by 500 Iranian-American dignitaries at the Hilton. “We’ve really progressed,” he exulted before his audience at the Hilton, making allusion to his diplomatic forays to Indonesia, Cuba, and Shanghai: “118 countries have specifically supported Iran’s nuclear program.”1

The world seems spellbound in the face of this populist, who says what he wants and does what he says. Ahmadinejad’s limitless self-confidence impressed the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who in interviewing the Iranian President found himself reminded of the triumphalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini: “I sensed the same certainty that was expressed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini back when this confrontation began in the late 1970s: ‘America cannot do a damn thing’” (Washington Post, September 24, 2006).

On November 4, 1979, 400 Khomeini followers, armed with sticks and chains, broke down the door of the American embassy in Tehran, stormed the compound, and took hostage all the Americans on the grounds. It was in fact these hostage-takers who in 1979 would pose for the cameras next to a poster with a caricature of then American President Jimmy Carter and the slogan “America cannot do a damn thing.” Khomeini did not release his prisoners until January 1981. Could America really “not do a damn thing”?

This is the key question raised by Mark Bowden’s gripping account of the hostage crisis in his new book Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War With Militant Islam. The “guests” in question obviously were no guests. Not only were the Americans robbed of their liberty, but they were subjected to mock executions and beatings. Hardly any of them believed that they would get out of the compound alive. But in this “first battle,” the battle was never really joined either. Bowden’s account clearly reveals the helplessness of the Carter administration: The more assiduously President Carter sought compromise, the more contemptuously he was mocked by Khomeini.

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Pertinent Links:

1) From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad