OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: The Bushes & the Truth About Iran

A Made-up Mind

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who reflects the thinking of influential neoconservatives, reached a similar conclusion that Bush had essentially made up his mind about attacking Iran.

Krauthammer noted that on the day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Bush responded to a question about Iran by saying: "It's very important for the American people to see the President try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."

"'Before' implies that one follows the other," Krauthammer wrote. "The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran's nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy. With the crisis advancing and the moment of truth approaching, it is important to begin looking now with unflinching honesty at the military option." [Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2006]

Yet, before making such a fateful decision, shouldn't Bush at least ask his father to finally level with him and with the American people about what happened in 1980 when the country was transfixed by Iranian militants holding 52 American hostages for 444 days?

At Consortiumnews.com, we have a special interest in that history because it was my discovery of a trove of classified documents pointing to the secret Republican negotiations with Iran that led to the founding of this Web site in 1995 and the publication of our first investigative series.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. news media was obsessed with issues such as the O.J. Simpson trial and the so-called "Clinton scandals," so there was little interest in reexamining some historical mystery about Republicans going behind Jimmy Carter's back to strike a deal with Iran's mullahs.

[The fullest account of this history can be found in Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege, which was published in 2004.]

But that history now could be a matter of life or death for thousands of people in the Middle East, including Iranians, Israelis and American soldiers in Iraq.

False History

The false history surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis also has led to the mistaken conclusion that it was only the specter of Ronald Reagan's tough-guy image that made Iran buckle in January 1981 and that, therefore, the Iranians respect only force.

The hostage release on Reagan's Inauguration Day bathed the new President in an aura of heroism as a leader so feared by America's enemies that they scrambled to avoid angering him. It was viewed as a case study of how U.S. toughness could restore the proper international order.

That night, as fireworks lit the skies of Washington, the celebration was not only for a new President and for the freed hostages, but for a new era in which American power would no longer be mocked. That momentum continues to this day in George W. Bush's "preemptive" wars and the imperial boasts about a "New American Century."

However, the reality of that day 25 years ago now appears to have been quite different than was understood at the time. What's now known about the Iranian hostage crisis suggests that the "coincidence" of the Reagan Inauguration and the Hostage Release was not a case of frightened Iranians cowering before a U.S. President who might just nuke Tehran.

The evidence indicates that it was a prearranged deal between the Republicans and the Iranians. The Republicans got the hostages and the political bounce; Iran's Islamic fundamentalists got a secret supply of weapons and various other payoffs.

State Secret

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