Who Is More To Blame For Iran's Influence, Carter--Or Reagan?

We are all used to the idea that Jimmy Carter is responsible for the influence that Iran exerts today in the Middle East. After all, the Iranian hostage crisis--and the US failure to rescue them--happened during his watch and it was during Carter's term that America's reputation around the world went into a downward spiral.

But what about Ronald Reagan. While Iran supposedly returned the hostages out of fear of what Reagan might do, that did not stop Iran from using their proxies against the US.

In his article, World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win, Norman Podhoretz outlines the terrorist attacks against US targets carried out by Hezbollah during the Reagan years:

• In April 1983, Hizbullah exploded a truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon--killing 63 employees, including the Middle East CIA director. 120 were wounded.
  
  
• In October 1983, a Hizbullah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81.
  
  
• In December, the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed.
  
  
• In March 1984, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered.
  
  
• Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity).
  
  
• In September 1984, the U.S. embassy annex near Beirut was hit by yet another truck bomb (also traced to Hizbullah).
  
  
• In December 1984, a Kuwaiti airliner was hijacked and two American passengers employed by the U.S. Agency for International Development were murdered.
  
  
• The following June, Hizbullah operatives hijacked still another airliner, TWA flight 847. An American naval officer aboard the plane was shot, and his body was hurled onto the tarmac.

Podhortez notes that while Reagan was prepared to retaliate in response to the October 1983 attack that killed 241 Marines, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger convinced him to cancel it--"because it might damage our relations with the Arab world, of which Weinberger was always tenderly solicitous".

Later, Reagan pulled the Marines out of Lebanon. Finally, the kidnappings of Americans--

led Reagan, who had sworn that he would never negotiate with terrorists, to make an unacknowledged deal with Iran, involving the trading of arms for hostages. But whereas the Iranians were paid off handsomely in the coin of nearly 1,500 antitank missiles (some of them sent at our request through Israel), all we got in exchange were three American hostages—not to mention the disruptive and damaging Iran-contra scandal.

While at one point Reagan had one of Libya's Qaddafi's residences was bombed by US forces, when it came to Iran--the US gave them weapons.

If the US, under Reagan, had taken a strong stand against the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah, which was at the time still working on making a name for itself, who knows how the Middle East today might be different.

The answer of course is that no one knows.
But the thought should be enough to avoid blaming the failed Carter presidency for everything.

Technorati Tag: Carter and Reagan and Iran and Hezbollah.