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 The crisis began in the Fall, with a few dozen Islamic extremists - most of them students - striking out against America, the entity they likened to Satan. In targeting innocent civilians, the Islamic militants had violated every international law extant, and they had stirred the rage of the most powerful nation on Earth. But they did not care. Every night, flickering television images showed their supporters burning American flags, and chanting: “Marg bar Amerika” - death to America. The President reacted swiftly and decisively. He froze billions in assets and started making preparations for military action, moving hardware and troops into the Persian Gulf region. The Islamic regime started to suggest that it was prepared to make a deal - but, every time, the regime’s spokesmen would renege on the promises made the day before. With each passing day, the rage of Americans - and their allies - grew more palpable. Sound familiar? It should. The two paragraphs above describe another confrontation between Western democracy and Islamic state-supported terrorism, but not the current one. They recall the events of 21 years ago, when Iranian students seized 66 hostages at the U.S. embassy in Teheran. Back then, Jimmy Carter was president, and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the Islamic fanatic who dared to defy the United States and its allies. But some of the fundamentals remain the same. For those who are too young to remember the events of that Fall - and even for those who do remember - it is worth noting what happened next. Having concluded that the Iranian regime (like the Taliban) would never give him what he wanted, President Carter sent troops into Iran aboard eight military helicopters on a clandestine mission to rescue the hostages. It was April 24, 1980. One of the helicopters crashed in the Iranian desert, killing eight soldiers, while the remainder hurriedly retreated to base. At that point, the Carter presidency was effectively over - and the hostages were only released on January 20, 1981: the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as Mr. Carter’s successor. This cautionary history lesson is not intended to suggest that America, or its allies, ought to step back - that we should recoil from giving Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime what they most seem to desire, which is a speedy return to the stone age. Far from it. War is inevitable, and Canada must be - will be - part of it. Terrorists regard Canada as a target, too, just as the Air India mass murder conclusively demonstrated in June 1985. We must eliminate those who practice terror, and we must do it without delay. That is so obvious it barely merits saying. But there is a moral at the centre of the Iranian hostage crisis story (and the Persian Gulf crisis, and Hezbollah’s campaigns, and so on), and that is this: it is foolhardy to regard our enemies as mere caricatures, who we will obliterate with a few cruise missiles in a single weekend. As foreign as they are to our way of life - and as committed as they are to methods that are utterly evil - they are not Hollywood cartoons astride camels, waiting to be punched silly by some Indiana Jones equivalent. They are, instead, well funded, well organized and more committed to their cause than many of us are to our own. And it should never be forgotten that the Iranian regime that defied Jimmy Carter still exists, while the man himself is long forgotten. Or that Saddam Hussein remains in power, unchallenged. Or that Hezbollah, and its equivalent criminal organizations, still murder innocents in Israel and elsewhere, with virtual impunity. In this context, is it wise to raise expectations that the battle against terrorism will be swift, and clean, and decisive? President George W. Bush, at the outset of this historic conflict, likened bin Laden to a Wild West outlaw, declaring that he was wanted “dead or alive.” More recently, Britain’s Tony Blair using apocalyptic terminology to rally his nation - and, seemingly, other nations, too. Subsequently, both men have been observed adopting a strikingly different tone, and employing language that is much more modest. The rhetorical change suggests Messrs. Bush and Blair are now aware that this war will be neither easy nor without its costs. Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who has taken that approach from the outset - and has been unfairly pilloried for it, by media pundits across Canada - knows that it is politically foolhardy, and cruel, to raise expectations that what lies ahead will be easy. It won’t be easy, not any of it. This war will be a struggle that is long, and brutal, and bloody. Just ask Osama bin Laden, who - along with a few thousand others just like him - broke the back of the Soviet Union’s armed forces, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself, in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Better yet, ask Jimmy Carter, too. He’ll tell you: none of it is ever as easy as it seems at first.
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