Guests of the Ayatollah

Today is the anniversary of the Desert One disaster

during the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran.

A fantastic excerpt from Mark Bowden's book on

this event is here.

How many things would be different if that mission had

succeeded? No 911, gulf wars 1 and 2, no president Reagan?

Here in one paragraph was a key problem with the mission:

The question of what to do with the passengers was relayed all the way to the White House. The president and his staff were deliberately going through the late-afternoon motions of a typical workday but secretly hanging on every update from the desert. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national-security adviser, relayed the unexpected problem of the bus to the president, and Carter agreed that the only thing to do was to fly all the Iranians out that night on one of the C-130s and then return them to Iran when the mission was complete.