In a meeting a few weeks ago, a member of my household asked the rest of us for advice on whether she should join her coworkers in attending ceremonies honoring the returned hostages. The fact that she was asking the question, and that none of us had a clear answer, served to summarize the deeply mixed emotions that some of us have had about the clamor surrounding the release of the hostages. We find ourselves saddened that our natural human impulse to be happy for the former captives and their families has been so complicated by the atmosphere of hostility toward the Iranian people and the public silence about the 25-year history of U.S. intervention in Iran that led to the taking of the hostages.
The way the hostages' welcome has been portrayed in the news media as a universal outpouring of patriotism and national unity has also been cause for uneasiness. Many Vietnam veterans are rightly upset that the hostages are receiving so much glory when many of them suffered much more and still haven't been welcomed back into American society. And we couldn't help but notice the conspicuous absence of yellow ribbons in our low-income, predominantly black neighborhood. For many of our neighbors, inadequate food, cramped living quarters, unjust imprisonment, and mistreatment by those in authority is the substance of daily life. They have seen little to cheer about in the release of the hostages.
The settlement that freed the hostages gives little reason to cheer either. The agreement fails almost completely to deal with the substantive political issues that lay behind the hostage drama. The United States did promise as part of the settlement to refrain from future interference in Iran's internal affairs. If the U.S. holds to that promise it will make Iran unique among the nations of the world.
Aside from the obvious benefit to the freed hostages and their families, the primary beneficiaries of the settlement were the big U.S. banks. During all the months that the Iranians were unable to withdraw their assets from the United States, the banks were free to make profitable use of the Iranian money. In the end the banks got all their old loans to the shah paid off, including some that were illegal under Iranian law. The enormity of the dollar figures involved in the settlement only served to underline the extent of the shah's dependence on U.S. business interests.
One of the hostages has said that he is convinced that the students who held him weren't really interested in getting the shah back. Indications are that the seizure was undertaken primarily to strengthen the Islamic fundamentalist "mullah faction" in Iran's internal politics and to bring before world opinion the U.S. role in Iran. There is good reason to believe that at any point in the crisis the hostages would have been freed had the U.S. acknowledged its complicity in the shah's crimes and made a public apology.
Instead, former President Carter said that U.S. intervention in Iran was "ancient history" which had nothing to do with the hostages. Carter tried to simply wait out the Iranians, and when his patience grew thin, he ordered the ill-considered military rescue attempt in which eight U.S. soldiers died.
The taking of the hostages presented the United States with an historic opportunity, one that may never be repeated. We could have learned that a policy of justice toward other nations would make us more secure than all our military might. The Iranians' demand for an apology could have been the occasion for us to turn from empire and towards peaceful cooperation with other peoples.
Instead, the conclusion being drawn by our leaders is that we must be more forceful in dealing with the "barbarians" around the world who might challenge our right to dominate their nations. In the January, 1980 issue of Sojourners, Jim Wallis wrote, "The Bible says if we sow the wind we will reap the whirlwind. If we don't change our course, the Iranian crisis will be repeated in different forms and circumstances around the world."
In Iran the whirlwind has been, at least for now, postponed. The United States has again gotten itself off the hook without us having to face the truth about ourselves. But the interventionist rhetoric that is now filling the air of official Washington insures that we will surely face the whirlwind again.
Danny Collum was an Editorial Assistant at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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