American Decades

Afghanistan and Iran.

In 1980 U.S. policy toward the Third World was dominated by two ongoing events that had begun in late 1979: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Iran by militants who held the embassy staff hostage. The Soviets' move into Afghanistan was especially trouble-some to the United States because of the proximity of Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf, from which mideastern oil is shipped to the west, and because of political instability in neighboring Iran. Since 1953 the United States had been closely allied with the Iranian government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and in 1978 there were some fifty thousand Americans in Iran helping to train the military and operate the oil fields and other industries. Opposition to the shah's government began to grow in early 1978 and eventually became unified under the leadership of the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, a nearly eighty-year-old...