November 19, 2004

The Lessons of the Iran Hostage Crisis

By PETER MONAGHAN

American officials failed, in 1979, to see that Iranian revolutionary leaders' anger over U.S. foreign policy might cause the abduction of dozens of Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Studying newly declassified documents, David Farber, a professor of history at Temple University, suggests in Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter With Radical Islam (Princeton University Press) that the incident holds lessons for U.S. policy in the region.

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