Johnny99
Senior Reporter
Carter defends his handling of Iran hostage crisis
(Agencies)Updated: 2009-11-17 09:19 Comments(479) CHIANG MAI, Thailand: Former US President Jimmy Carter:drool: said he was pressed by his advisers to attack Iran during the hostage crisis there more than 30 years ago but resisted because he feared 20,000 Iranians could have died. I can't wait for this mental defective to kick the bucket. Of natural, painful causes, of course. The country would be better off.
Islamist militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and seized its occupants. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
Carter said Monday that one proposed option was a military strike on Iran, but he chose to stick with negotiations to prevent bloodshed and bring the hostages home safely.
"My main advisers insisted that I should attack Iran," he told reporters in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where he was helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity. "I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry. But I felt in the process it was likely the hostages' lives would be lost, and I didn't want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn't attack."
The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, just minutes after the swearing in of President Ronald Reagan, whose victory over Carter is largely attributed to the crisis.
The former president has commented in the past on how military action had been an option but that he feared a death toll in the tens of thousands, according to Carter spokeswoman Deanna Congileo. These ragheads do not respect diplomacy. The Somali pirates seem to be sticking to attacking non-American ship recently. Negotiations do not work. Negotiations = weakness.The only thing they understand is strength. The liberals in this country and elsewhere have not gotten this through their concrete skulls even now. The only thing that works is massive retaliation. Overkill. Truman understood this in 1945. Was it just a coincidence that the hostages were released just moments after Reagan was inaugurated? Maybe there was some back channel communication between the Reagan camp and the "students". My opinion is that they were scared sh--less of Reagan. My negotiation would have been: If the hostages are not released in 24 hours, we will drop one bomb on Tehran for every hostage still held. If they are not released after that, every 12 hours the count will double, 2, then 4, then 8, and so on, until they are released. For every hostage killed we will drop 50 bombs. We will not attempt rescue. YOU will release them. No helicopters. No ground troops.
