In an article on the anniversary of the US 1980 abortive Operation Eagle Claw, known as Operation Tabas in Iran, Ali Bahadori Jahromi wrote, “The sands were agents of God,” a sentence once made by the Father of the Islamic Revolution the late Imam Khomeini referring to the failure of the Tabas Operation in Iran’s eastern desert.
The Tabas Operation was a US Armed Forces operation ordered by the then president Jimmy Carter on 24 April 1980 to attempt to rescue 52 embassy staff held captive at the US embassy by the Iranian revolutionary students.
Referring to an article that appeared in the Time Magazine on May 5, 1980, Jahromi quoted: “Carter's mission to rescue the hostages goes down in flames.”
“For Carter in particular, and for the U.S. in general, the desert debacle was a military, diplomatic and political fiasco. A once-dominant military machine, first humbled in its agonizing standoff in Viet Nam, now looked incapable of keeping its aircraft aloft even when no enemy knew they were there, and even incapable of keeping them from crashing into each other despite four months of practice for their mission,” read the Time cover story dubbed, Debacle in the Deseret”.
“It was the Tabas fiasco which led to Carter’s failure in the second round of the US presidential elections from Iran’s newly-born Islamic Revolution,” said the spokesman.
He added that one of the reasons for the US' repeated failures from Iranians and its miscalculations is that the Islamic community is protected by God. “One of the most recent examples of the Iranians’ victory is the failure of the [the US unilaterally imposed] sanctions.
In 2018, the US launched what it called a maximum pressure campaign against Iran, under former president Donald Trump’s administration after Trump abandoned a historic nuclear deal called the Joint Comprehensive Nuclear Action (JCPOA) which was signed in 2015 between Iran and world six powers (US, Russia, UK, France, China and Germany). The maximum pressure campaign targeted the Iranian nation with the “toughest ever” restrictive measures.
“The Americans have repeatedly said that Iran’s society will collapse from within under the unprecedented sanctions. Even in their joint meetings with the [terrorist] Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO), they had also planned to conquer Tehran. On the contrary, the sanctions are now in a phase that even the Western powers admitted that they have been abortive,” Jahromi said in his article.
He further recalled a statement by Ned Price, spokesman for the US Department of State, who had once said the maximum pressure policy was a fiasco.
Noting that the US and other ill-wishers of the Iranian nation have for many years been accustomed to being defeated by Iran, the government spokesman concluded by saying, “But it seems that they are not to learn their lesson.”
MNA/5474663