ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: January 20

The Iran Hostages are released

Twenty minutes. That’s how long Ronald Reagan had been president, On January 20, 1981, when Iran released the fifty-two American hostages it had held for 444 days. Fuck yeah, Reagan! Took him only twenty minutes when Jimmy Carter couldn’t do shit to secure their release for over a year.

What a load of horseshit.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 20, 1981--

Reagan was kinda busy at the time swearing on a Bible that he’d uphold the constitution and not negotiate with terrorists or destroy the American middle class with his trickle-down bullshit. It was President Carter who secured the release of the hostages. Not to hear Republicans tell it though.

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The right-wing fantasy is that Reagan just glared menacingly in the direction of Iran and the nation’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini crapped his clerical robes in fear and shrieked holy fucking ass crackers release the goddamn hostages before he turns our country into a radioactive parking lot! Except that’s not what happened.

The real important day in history was the day before, when Jimmy Carter got that shit done.

The myth about the hostage crisis is that Carter was seen as weak, and the Iranians held on to their captives until Reagan was in office because they were feared he was such a badass he’d bomb them back to the Stone Age. It perpetuated the right-wing concept of threatening enemies rather than making any efforts at diplomacy, but it was Carter’s diplomacy that made it happen.

The hostages had been held since November 4, 1979, when militant Iranian college students stormed the U.S. embassy like it was the Capitol Building on January 6. Anyway, the United States had been fucking over Iran for decades, what with helping overthrow their democratically elected prime minister in 1953 to install an American puppet because oil.

Said puppet, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had been overthrown the previous February and fled to the United States. Iran was all send that fucker back to answer for his crimes and ‘Murica said nope we need our puppets to know we’ll stand by them or it will make it tough to get new puppets.

A few months into the crisis, six American diplomats managed to sneak out of Iran mostly with the help of Canada and not Ben Affleck. The other 444 owe their freedom to Jimmy.

Negotiations were protracted because Khomeini was a fucking dick. The Iranian government was a mixture of militant hardliners and moderates. Several times Carter’s administration was sure they’d reached an accommodation to release the hostages and then Khomeini said yeah how about no? But Carter and his team kept at it, and on the final day of his administration the Algiers Accords were signed. The hostages would be released in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against Iran and the unfreezing of Iranian assets.

It was later revealed that Iran delayed to the last moment because they hated Carter and didn’t want him to have the victory of announcing the release of the hostages.

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