Word: tehran
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...five long weeks they have been held under threat of death in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Their arms have been bound, and they have been forbidden to speak to one another. Their captors have subjected them to intense questioning, and even threatened some of them at gunpoint. All the while, crowds of fanatical followers of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini have demonstrated outside the embassy walls...
Whether Ghotbzadeh, and presumably the Ayatullah Khomeini, can pull the militant students holding the hostages into line with this pronouncement was not known for certain. Just who is in control of the situation in Tehran has never been clear. For the moment, the students defied the Foreign Minister, vowing in a statement: "We will release nobody, nobody at all." But to calm fears in Washington that the Americans were being mistreated, the students did release photos of healthy hostages exercising on the embassy grounds...
...events at the U.N. and in Iran seemed to offer the U.S. an opening, and Carter tried to take advantage of it. Soon after the U.N. vote on Tuesday, he met at the White House with his national security advisers to outline ways of increasing the diplomatic pressure on Tehran...
...theory circulating in Washington goes like this: after the disaster in Vietnam, the U.S. grew so timid about flexing its muscles in the Third World that it lost the will and ability to defend "legitimate interests" there. As a result, when the Tehran mob broke traditional standards of international law and took the embassy occupants hostage, America felt powerless to respond. To avoid such embarassing nuisances in the future, the Pentagon's friends in Congress argue, the U.S. must develop a "quick-strike force" able to dump a motorized division anywhere in the Third World within 60 days. Congress approved...
...quick-strike force clearly appeals to their fancy and their vanity, not their common sense. Undoubtedly it stirs fond memories of the Entebbe incident, in which the Israeli government managed to save hostages in Uganda through a clean, neat military operation. But unlike Entabbe, the American embassy in Tehran is not conveniently located at an airport--and the Ayatollah Khomeini does not drive a Mercedes Benz...