How disgusting.
When they’re not trying to give some obscure house democrat credit for ending the Cold War…They’re blaming Reagan for the Iranian hostage crisis.
Ted Koppel wrote this bizarre commentary at the Washington Post on Friday.
30 years after the Iran hostage crisis, we’re still fighting Reagan’s war
By Ted Koppel
Friday, January 21, 2011; 1:00 PMOn Jan. 20, 1981, 52 American diplomats, intelligence officers and Marines were finally released after being held hostage for nearly 15 months at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Americans saw it as the end of a long national nightmare. Iranians saw it as a successful phase in what the Pentagon would come to call the Long War.
We were wrong; they were right.
On the face of it, the Iranians achieved what they wanted. President Jimmy Carter had labored with key advisers through the last night of his presidency, desperately trying to bring about the hostages’ release before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president. The Iranians, though, were determined to humiliate our 39th president and were not about to free the captives on Carter’s watch.
As the television networks began their Inauguration Day coverage, the expected moment of release became the theme. TV screens were split to accommodate parallel images from Washington and Tehran. Just outside the Iranian capital, camera crews were taken to Mehrabad International Airport, where the soon-to-be-former hostages would board their flight to freedom…
…The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians’ message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America’s sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.
That was hardly the interpretation that the Reagan administration put on the event. The new president portrayed the hostage release as a long-overdue act by which the Iranians acknowledged the obvious: There was a new sheriff in town. The feckless days of the Carter administration were over, and the Iranian mullahs had bowed to the inevitable. Indeed, the administration seemed to be saying that Iran’s greatest concern was now the possibility of U.S. retaliation for the humiliation of the preceding 444 days.
That last point probably was a part of Iran’s strategic calculus. Iran was not then, and is not now, any military match for the United States. Without the American hostages in Tehran, Iran was plainly vulnerable to U.S. power…
It gets worse. You can read the whole unhinged leftist rant here.
Really, Ted?… Really?
Does Koppel really think this way? And to think people trusted this loon with the news for so many years. That’s just frightening.
John Simpson added:
For those of you who don’t know, former ABC News and Nightline anchor Ted Koppel has published a new oped in the WaPo (via Hot Air) that lays the blame for the Islamist Iranian regime squarely at President Reagan’s feet. It’s predictably titled, 30 years after the Iranian Hostage Crisis, we’re still fighting Reagan’s war. WTF? I lived through that dark period of American history. It is seared in my brain. I entered the US Navy six days after the Hostage Crisis began and thought America was going to war, and followed events closely at the time because of that ominous situation.
Carter’s disaster of a presidency, which I could perceive most clearly even as a teenager, is why I became a staunch Republican. It was Carter’s malfeasance and vacillation that led directly to where we are today with Iran. Reagan could only mop up Carter’s mess as best he could, and the Iranians even screwed him over royally. All Carter did was get American special forces killed in a botched rescue attempt. He showed nothing but weakness, and it is still killing us today, not to mention the Iranian people themselves.
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