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exist, while Israel agreed to return Sinai to Egypt and to negotiate Palestinian
independence and promised to return the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two
areas still very much, and violently, in contention today. In reality, the Camp
David agreement was but a pause; Israeli aggression never really slowed down.The Rise of Islamist Politics
Just as it seemed that conditions in the Middle East might be less dangerous
with the Camp David deal, politics in Iran became a powderkeg. The Shah,
put in power by the U.S. in 1953, had become less responsive to his people’s
needs and more brutal, and was supported with over $19 billion in U.S. arms
between 1973-78. Iran, like Israel, served as a “proxy,” a “cop on the beat” to
look after American interests in the region and got huge levels of U.S. money
to do so. But inside Iran, the Shah was losing his grip on power and came
crashing down in 1978 when a group led by young Iranian mujahedeen, or
“freedom fighters,” forced his overthrow. Ultimately, the Ayotollah Khomenei, a
fundamentalist Muslim who had been exiled in Paris, came to power and
established an Islamic country in Iran–the first Middle Eastern state to be
based overtly on Islam. Worse for the Americans, the Iranians stormed the U.S.
embassy in Tehran, took it over, and took over 50 workers there as hostages–
and they would remain captive for well over a year. Given the U.S. history in
Iran, the Americans became the Number 1 enemy, the “Great Satan,” as
Khomenei and others called them. Iran had always been America’s most reli-
able ally in the region after Israel, and now was its biggest problem. But Iran
had another main enemy as well, and the U.S. would make common cause
with it against the new Islamist regime in Tehran, and that was Iraq!
Iran, however, was not the only trouble spot in that general area in 1979.
On Christmas Day, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan–a country in the
news every day for the past decade–to overthrow the government of
Hafizullah Amin, who himself had seized power just months earlier. The
Americans immediately began an international campaign to condemn the
Russian attack, seeing it as an aggressive move in the context of the Cold War.
The media and other politicians [especially Charlie Wilson, a Texas represen-
tative, about whom a movie was made] bought the story, and the U.S. would
eventually spend billions to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. The real
story, however, was not that simple. Amin’s government was, in fact,