Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Some time ago, Reuel Marc Gerecht reviewed Mark Bowden's book on the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis -- Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam . This is what Gerecht said in the Wall Street Journal about the behavior of Americans taken prisoner after Iranian students – one of whom may have been the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the merciful – stormed the American embassy in Iran: “John Limbert, an academically trained, Persian-speaking diplomat -- who probably has the softest heart for Iran among the hostages -- is in solitary confinement in the city of Isfahan, 200 miles from Tehran, after the failed Desert One rescue mission. (President Carter, after long delay, had sent fuel-tanker planes, gunships and helicopters to recapture the embassy; in a night-vision-goggle debacle set into motion by a sandstorm, a helicopter and a plane collided in the desert; the aborted the mission left the burnt remains to be toyed with by revol...