Dinner With The Great Satan
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But Iran is not invited ...
The Great Satan!
I was in my mid-twenties and living in Northern California that late November of 1979 when Ruhollah Khomeini (1902 - 1989), Ayatollah and new Supreme Leader of Iran, so epithetized the United States in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919 - 1980), the former Shah and a staunch - albeit autocratic - ally and supporter of the U.S. as well as one of the few Muslim friends of Israel. Jimmy Carter, the then 39th President of the United States, was particularly irked and offended by the Ayatollah's remark.
The epithet ‘Great Satan' was tossed out at a time when Iranian revolutionary students had stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and were holding sixty-six U.S. nationals - some civilian embassy personnel, some military and intelligence officers - hostage inside the Embassy compound. The students justified taking the hostages as retaliation for the admission of the Shah into the United States, and demanded that he be returned to Iran for trial and subsequent execution. The new Iranian regime believed the Shah was in America so that Washington could carry out another coup d'etat in Iran. The U.S. claimed he had come only to seek medical attention - the Shah was suffering from cancer, which led to his death in 1980. The students also demanded that the U.S. Government apologize publicly for its interference in the internal affairs of Iran, and for the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the predecessor to the Shah.
Far from complying with their demands, the Carter Administration ordered Iran's assets frozen, and later on launched Operation Eagle Claw, the ill-fated secret commando rescue mission, which ultimately cost Carter the Presidency. The hostages were finally released fourteen months later on the day Carter left office, twenty minutes after Ronald Reagan's inauguration.
To say that the Hostage Crisis and being labeled ‘The Great Satan' ruined the Holidays Season of everybody in 1979 is possibly the understatement of the year. All the more so, since this definition was coming from a ‘man of religion' who, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, was meeting opposition to the new regime with harsh punishments. In fact, Khomeini and the new regime ordered and organized a great many systematic human rights violations, including mass executions, interrogation and torture of former members of the overthrown monarchy, of the military and of anyone who the regime perceived as opposing the new revolutionary government.
Nor was of any consolation the fact that the new Iranian regime would use a qualitatively similar appellation - ‘The Small Satan' - when referring to the then Soviet Union. In fact, if for nothing else, being thought of as worse than what Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004) would later on refer to as 'The Evil Empire' served no other purpose but to aggravate the national anguish.
There is a sinister similarity between what happened in Tehran in the Fall of 1979 and the source of the present conflict involving Israel on one side, and Hezbollah and Lebanon on the other side. Like the Hostage Crisis, the Re-engagement War - as the Israelis call this latest confrontation - has originated from an abduction - a kidnapping, to be more precise. What Hezbollah has done is kidnap Israeli soldiers in their own land, much like what the Iranian revolutionary students did twenty-seven years ago to the Embassy staff in the Embassy compound, a sovereign territory. And here too Iran is once again the dark presence, this time behind Hezbollah. A dark presence both in military terms - Iran has supplied most of Hezbollah's armaments - as well as in terms of political philosophy.
Iran's sinister influence all over the Middle East should come as no surprise to Americans. Nor to the French. On October 23, 1983, at around 6:20 am, a yellow Mercedes-Benz delivery truck drove to Beirut International Airport, where the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, under the U.S. 2nd Marine Division of the United States Marines Corps had set up local headquarters. The Marines had been deployed in Lebanon at the height of the civil war as part of an international peacekeeping force. The truck turned onto an access road leading to the Marines' compound and circled a parking lot. The driver then accelerated and crashed through a barbed wire fence around the parking lot, passed between two sentry posts, crashed through a gate and barreled into the lobby of the Marine Headquarters.
The sentries at the gate had loaded pistols but were not able to stop the driver even though they shot at him. According to one Marine, the driver was smiling as he sped past him. The suicide bomber detonated his explosives, which were equivalent to 12,000 pounds (about 5,400 kg) of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the four-story building into rubble, crushing to death 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and 3 Army soldiers inside - a total of 241 American servicemen. About twenty seconds later, an identical attack occurred against the barracks of the French Third Company of the Sixth French Parachute Infantry Regiment. Another suicide bomber drove his truck down a ramp into the building underground parking garage and detonated his bomb, leveling the headquarters. Casualty toll: 58 paratroopers killed and 15 seriously injured.
Both attacks were conducted by members identified as belonging to the Hezbollah militant group. Furthermore, following an international investigation to those events that lasted some twenty years, in May 2003, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran was responsible for the 1983 attack, on the grounds that Iran had originally founded and trained Hezbollah and had supplied the explosives used in the massacre of the American and French military personnel.
In light, therefore, of this historic context involving the dubious Beau Geste of Hezbollah and their masters, the Islamic Republic of Iran, readers of this article will forgive me if I find amusing, to say the least, the remarks of these past few days of some national and international leaders and members of the so called ‘international community'. Or perhaps they are not amusing at all. Beginning, for example, with the anti-Israeli diatribe of Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nation. The Secretary-General, in fact, has accused Israel of deliberately targeting a military post of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), thus killing four peacekeepers. For which occurrence we are, of course, all so very sad.
But as we are speaking of UN peacekeepers, the question all of a sudden comes to mind as to what has UNIFIL been doing all those years since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, while Hezbollah was fortifying its positions in southern Lebanon. It is difficult to believe that Hezbollah's bunkers, tunnels and missile sites could have been established without the full knowledge and tacit consent of the UNIFIL forces, which were stationed nearby pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1559 - which calls for both the disarming of all militias in Lebanon and the removal of all forces other than the Lebanese Army. And this fact alone, therefore, squarely shifts the moral responsibility for Hezbollah's armed build-up on Israel's northern border right on to the very same people who were supposed to make sure this would not happen - the UN peacekeepers.
And what to say about the remarks of Fouad Siniora, the controversial Prime Minister of Lebanon. Siniora wants to sue Israel for the damages it has inflicted on Lebanon's infrastructure. He denies any involvement of Lebanon in support of Hezbollah, and yet in an interview conceded to BBC late last year, the Prime Minister stated with regards to Hezbollah that "The (Lebanese) government considers the (Hezbollah) resistance a natural and honest expression of the Lebanese people's national rights to liberate their land and defend their honour against Israeli aggression and threats". Go ahead, Prime Minister Siniora, go ahead and sue Israel - besides talking, that's pretty much all you can do.
Yet, to see various members of the ‘international community' attend and participate to the Rome Conference of a few days ago was a positive signal to the world that peace is actively sought after, once again, in the Middle East. Even if those members included the hypocritical Kofi Annan and the overly loquacious Siniora, the presence of moderate Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia was a welcome respite and an indication that the ‘international community' is ready to acknowledge and respect, among other things, Israel's sovereignty and right to exist - in spite of Hezbollah.
And it was all the more inspiring and invigorating to see a resolute U.S. Secretary of State, Dr. Condoleeza Rice, stand tall and firm and dictate the terms of the joint communique issued by the participants of the ‘international community', despite pressures by the other attendees to call for Israel to stop extirpating Hezbollah's missile sites from Southern Lebanon. The long and painful history of the Middle East is clustered with the graves of a great many people, including those of a great many American servicemen. No one member of the ‘international community' has more right than America to dictate international policy in the Middle East - no matter what Kofi Annan, Faoud Siniora or anyone else have to say about it.
The ‘international community' is always welcome to join The Great Satan for dinner - provided Iran is not invited. For even though the long, dark shadow of the Mullahs may be clouding the region all over now, The Great Satan has a few old scores to settle.
Luigi Frascati
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