On Nov.4, 1979, I was serving as duty officer at the headquarters of the 8th Infantry Division in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany.
Late that day, a message arrived: Radical Iranian revolutionaries had stormed the U.S.Embassy in Tehran and seized dozens of Americans.
My job was to carry that report to the division commander, Maj.Gen.
William J.Livsey, and keep him informed as the situation developed.No special orders came down.
No one fully grasped that we were watching the birth of a geopolitical problem that would outlast the Cold War, consume seven American presidencies, and remain unsettled half a century later.That seizure exposed something beyond a diplomatic humiliation: When the embassy fell, America did not even have a military command responsible for the Persian Gulf.CENTCOM did not yet exist.
The hostage crisis, followed weeks later by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forced the realization.President Carter stood up the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in March 1980 — the organization that became today’s CENTCOM in January 1983.
The 1979 embassy seizure did not merely embarrass a superpower.It restructured how America organizes itself to fight in the Middle East.FROM HOSTAGE CRISIS TO ASSASSINATION PLOTS: IRAN’S NEAR HALF-CENTURY WAR ON AMERICANSToday, as Washington negotiates a tentative 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and establish a framework for nuclear talks, I keep returning to that November evening in Bad Kreuznach.
The particulars have changed.The fundamental dynamic has not.Washington’s current headlines focus on ceasefires, sanctions relief, Iran’s 440-kilogram stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% — a short technical step from weapons-grade — and competing memorandums of understanding.
Those details matter.But they are not the central story.Survival is not a byproduct of Iran’s strategy — it is the strategy.
Understanding that distinction is what separates clear-e...