Donald Trump Is a Hostage to 1979
If you’re Donald Trump, it’s always 1979. Your tan is lurid, last night’s glitter sticks to your shoe, and, still a young man, you thrill to the promise of future divorces. At the first hint of trouble, Roy Cohn is at your fingertips — and you at his. New York City, at least the parts you deserve to own (The Plaza, Studio 54, 21 Club), is a bachelor’s playpen. The rest of it? Ungovernable hellscape. The climate is doing just fine, thank you. And the president of the United States? Weak; pathetically weak.
In February 1979, a revolutionary cadre led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah of Iran. Iran was a postwar client state of the United States, and its shah had been a good friend to American banks, oil companies, construction firms and weapons suppliers. A symbol of American hegemony had turned overnight into a symbol of another kind: of hubris, intelligence failure, overreach. Predictably, international markets panicked. The dollar fell, and gasoline prices spiked by 70 percent. This came on top of previous oil shocks that raised prices by a factor of five.
As 1979 turned into an “annus horribilis,” President Jimmy Carter became a scapegoat for all the failures of a decade. The fall of Saigon, Watergate, stagflation, gas lines — a miserable era was already reaching its orgiastic summa when, in early November, a group of Iranian college students occupied the American embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. Over the course of their 444-day captivity, a set of images and phrases penetrated America’s conscience — burning flags, chants of “Death to America” — and sunk deep into the country’s collective psyche. The indelible images of ’79 were surely on Mr. Trump’s mind when he flabbergasted his generals and decided to eliminate Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s clandestine operations, by a drone strike.
Only a few days before General Suleimani’s assassination, an angry mob breached Baghdad’s Green Zone and surrounded the American embassy, an act for which Mr. Trump held Iran, and by implication General Suleimani, responsible. The event seems to have triggered an episode of déjà vu in the commander in chief: The 52 Iranian sites Mr. Trump subsequently threatened to destroy represented, he said, “the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago.” A hostage crisis would be intolerable for any holder of the office, but for President Trump, it bears an extra, profound significance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion/sunday/trump-iran.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
