Assignment Paper

Assignment: Required is a 4-5 page (approximately 1000-1250 words) essay based on your reading of Taken Hostage; the Iranian Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter With Radical Islam by David Farber. In this book, Farber discusses the Middle East crisis of the 1970’s that resulted in a revolution in Iran, worsening ties between the United States and Iran, and the taking of US hostages. The hostage crisis itself lasted from November 4, 1979 until January 20, 1981.

What you are being asked to do is to write a free form “meditation” on the Iranian situation. As you do so, you might wish to think about the following questions:

1) What special challenges was the United States facing in the 1970’s?
2) What is your sense of US-Iranian relations from 1953 to the late 1970’s?
3) What do you make of the revolution that overthrew the Shah? Was the United States correct to have supported his regime for so long? Should the United States have been more sensitive by the 1970’s to the growing Islamic fundamentalist influence in Iran? Should we have opened lines of communication to the Ayotollah Khomeini even before the Shah was overthrown?
4) What do you make of US actions towards Iran after the Shah was overthrown but before the hostages were taken? Should we have given asylum to the Shah? Why or why not?
5) What is your opinion of President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the hostage crisis once it occurred? Of media coverage of the on-going event? What US actions went right? Wrong?
6) What lessons, if any, did the United States learn from the crisis in Iran?

Not all of these questions can be answered in a single paper. But try to think coherently about US policy in the Middle East. In a larger context, how did the situation in Iran set the stage for future US dealings in the Middle East?
Please double space your essays and number your pages. Formal footnotes/endnotes are not required should you quote from Farber. Place page numbers in parentheses (p. 150) after a quote. Feel free to consult the instructor for further assistance.