Waning Gibbous Into Spring

Spring is breaking early along the Potomac.

Across the river, the Washington Post promises to explain the Middle East to us again. David Ignatius and Jason Rezaian will hold forth this week on what Iran means today.

We could walk over to the Post HQ on K Street and listen, as if the paper still mattered like it did in the old century..

Or we could summarize the matter in a few other, even older memories.

Modern Persia’s story runs from the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979) to the clerical revolution that replaced it. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ruled with strong backing from the West after the 1953 intelligence operation that removed Prime Minister Mossadegh.

By 1979, the order of the Shah’s White Revolution collapsed and the clerics banned the secular future.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran. The Shah fled. And the revolution that still defines the region began. Oh, did we mention that the sizable and sometimes vocal Kurd minority in Iran is Sunni, not Shia like the radical clerics who have ruled since the Shah departed?

At the time, the Chairman happened to be at sea.

USS Midway was operating off Perth, Western Australia, when the Shah arrived in the United States for medical treatment. Within weeks the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun and American diplomats were held hostage for 444 days.

Four thousand of them watched it unfold from the Indian Ocean.

Routine operations weren’t always routine.

That was the afternoon we nearly lost Big Bucks and Chief, when a rudder failure pitched their F-4J Phantom nearly vertical off the catapult. Thankfully the Martin-Baker seats worked, and the SAR helo plucked them from the drink.