The Marines Are Ruled Out

The frustration was almost palpable. There was the U.S., long a superpower, being nakedly blackmailed last week by a mob of fanatical Iranian students. The whole world, so it seemed, was witnessing Washington's humiliation as the Carter Administration desperately struggled to find an acceptable solution.

What could Washington do? Diplomacy did not seem to be getting very far, nor were appeals--via many channels --to the Iranian students to be reasonable. It was no wonder that an increasing number of Americans, in private conversations and in thousands of calls and telegrams to their elected representatives, began raising an old, familiar cry: send in the Marines. Or at least, they exclaimed, do something tough, such as dispatching warships to the Persian Gulf or dropping paratroopers into the embassy grounds.

Why can't the U.S., they asked, act as boldly as did Israel in July 1976, when its commandos rescued Israeli hostages at Uganda's Entebbe Airport?

Indeed, such a move by the U.S. would scarcely be without precedent. A handful of Marines, for example, were landed in Tripoli in 1801 to punish the Barbary pirates, and a century later some 2,500 American servicemen were rushed to China to help put down the Boxers who had been attacking diplomatic missions in Peking. It was in part to protect American lives that Dwight Eisenhower dispatched Marines to Lebanon in 1958, and Lyndon Johnson sent them to the Dominican Republic in 1965. In Washington's most recent use of force, Gerald Ford ordered U.S. units to retake the merchant ship Mayaguez, which had been seized by Cambodia's new Communist regime in May 1975.

Would it thus not be natural, if the Americans continued to be held hostage, for Washington to dispatch commandos to rescue them? TIME put this question to nearly two dozen experts in and out of Government. Their near unanimous negative conclusion was summed up by Elmo Zumwalt Jr., the former Chief of Naval Operations: "I think it's pretty much out of the question." Added Robert Cushman Jr., the retired Marine Corps Commandant: "You could kill a lot of Iranians, but you wouldn't save the Americans."

As in most military actions of this kind, surprise is essential. But in a case like Iran's, it would be very difficult to achieve. Without surprise, hostages could be killed once their captors discovered that a rescue was under way. One major problem last week was that no U.S. combat units were near Iran. The 51,000-ton carrier Midway, with its 75 warplanes, was about 2,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean, and the closest Marine Amphibious Force was in the Mediterranean.

While the Army's 82nd Airborne Division is trained for quick deployment to global hotspots, its base at Fort Bragg, N.C., is 6,500 miles from Tehran. It probably would not be possible to keep secret the dispatching of even a few of its elite units. Said a senior Pentagon official: "You alert the 82nd, and within minutes someone would call his mama to tell her that he was going. Then the news would be out."

Surprise is also difficult because U.S. planes would be detected as they neared Iran. Even though the Iranian air force's capability has deteriorated dramatically in the past year, its radar units might well be able to pick up approaching aircraft. In any event, the Soviets would surely spot the American planes. Observed Zumwalt: "The Russians would alert the Iranians just to cause us trouble." There would also be the possibility, though not great, that U.S. planes could be shot down by Iranian antiaircraft missiles--all of course supplied by the U.S.

Even if a rescue force managed to land undetected at Mehrabad Airport, the chances of saving the hostages would still be slim to none. In contrast to the Entebbe situation, where the Israelis were being held at a relatively lightly guarded airport on the outskirts of Kampala, a city with a population of only some 350,000, the American hostages were in downtown Tehran. To get to the embassy, U.S. forces would have to fight their way through streets probably clogged deliberately by huge crowds called out by the Ayatullah Khomeini. Many Iranians would undoubtedly have weapons, including perhaps a few of their army's armored cars and even tanks. By the time the rescuers reached the embassy, there would be scant hope of finding any hostages alive--or even of finding them there at all.

In fact, through most of last week, U.S. officials were not even sure exactly where all the hostages were, although it was assumed that they were inside the sprawling, 27-acre embassy compound. Because Washington had no direct communication with the embassy, U.S. knowledge of the situation in Iran depended mostly on secondhand information, relayed by other diplomatic missions in Tehran or monitored from Iranian radio broadcasts. There thus was the chilling possibility that a daring rescue operation, after enormous risk, might reach the embassy only to find it empty.

This was a key argument against dropping paratroopers into the compound.

So enormous would be the problems of using force, therefore, that the Carter Administration could never seriously consider the military option.

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