How Hostages, Ayatollahs, Eisenhower, Trump, and Kinkos Lead to Santa Barbara

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PAST IS PROZAC: Back when the U.S. embassy in Tehran got stormed and 52 of its employees were taken hostage for 444 days, I was working as a Xerox machine jockey in Madison, Wisconsin, at a Kinko’s copy shop there. That’s when the Shah of Iran, our political sock puppet for the prior 26 years, got chased out of his own country. And when he was allowed into ours. And when the Hostage Crisis dominated the news.

I won’t say I saw Hostage Crisis coming, but actually, I did. What else did anyone think would happen?

All this happened four years before I moved to Santa Barbara. At the time, I had no idea who or what a Kinko was. Or that the guy after who owned and founded the chain lived here in town. Or that I might later meet him, a peripatetic twitchy-brained entrepreneurial genius.

Back then, the Kinko’s where I worked had tons of Iranian customers, mostly wealthy anti-American, anti-Ayatollah commie activists who were exceptionally brave and entitled. If and when they ever got shipped back to Iran, they’d be killed dead fast.

Even in the face of such odds, they were agitating against Iran’s new theocratic dictators, far bloodier, the world would discover, even than the Shah and his not-so-secret police. They were mailing off voluminous packages — which was my job to put together — of reprinted books written by the Ayatollah that detailed (or so they said) under what circumstances one could have sex with camels and what level of provocation was required before stoning one’s daughter to death.

When I expressed interest or incredulity, I would be met with a sputtering chorus of imprecations: “Bourgeois fascists! Bourgeois fascists!”

I mention all this because Donald Trump repeatedly cites the hostage crisis of 1979 as the starting point for what he describes as 47 years of uninterrupted depredations inflicted on the United States by Iran’s ayatollahs as justification for the willfully blind incompetence with which he unilaterally and impetuously launched yet another forever war — a war now threatening economic ruination of any country that does not cut all economic ties with Iran. Not to mention our own country.

I also dredge this up because it demonstrates a law of the universe: Whatever happens anytime, anywhere, intersects directly with Santa Barbara.

Let’s start with something obvious but trivial. Kinko’s started right here in Santa Barbara — Isla Vista, to be precise.

More profoundly, the Hostage Crisis led inexorably to a Santa Barbara ranch owner and part-time resident named Ronald Reagan being elected as President of the United States. While he was a candidate for president, emissaries of this Santa Barbara resident went intentionally abroad to sabotage negotiations then taking place between Jimmy Carter and Iran. These negotiations might have resulted in the release of the hostages. As it turns out, the hostages would eventually be released, strikingly, on the very day Reagan put his hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution.

Not exactly subtle.

Later, President Reagan would engineer a near-total global economic freeze against the mullahs running Iran, describing them as “sponsors of international terror” who engaged in “outright acts of war” against the United States. He would also characterize them as “the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.”

I’m not arguing with the characterization. But it’s worth recalling the National Security Council for the same Ronald Reagan was secretly selling missiles to the same Iranian government Reagan was so passionately denouncing. Proceeds from these secret — “covert” was then the word of choice — sales would be secretly funneled by White House operatives and the National Security Council to anti-communist guerillas forces known as the Contras then fighting the socialist regime in Nicaragua.

This funding was in direct violation of a law Congress had just passed — known as the Boland Amendment — banning the White House and the Department of Defense from trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Eventually, 11 high-ranking government officials would be indicted. One would actually serve time. Sixteen months. For tax violations, wouldn’t you know? Reagan was not named.

All this, I recognize, is very old news. You almost have to be senile now to still be outraged.

Nevertheless, a key middle man orchestrating these surreptitious missile sales was international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. His brother, Essam Khashoggi, then happened to live in — and would for decades to come — Hope Ranch.

So, too, did one of the shah’s sisters.

Sooner or later, all roads lead to Santa Barbara.

Does the world really want Iran — a country that killed 30,000 of its citizens in the last years — equipped with nuclear capabilities? It’s a relevant question. Barack Obama spent the better part of his administration negotiating a treaty — imperfect as it may have been — that helped keep that genie in the bottle. Against the strenuous advice of his advisors, Trump ripped that treaty up as soon as he got in the White House on his first term.

In his second term, Trump would once again ignore the advice of his advisors, military and otherwise, who emphatically warned that Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply is shipped, should the United States to attack.

As usual Trump knew better.

So here we are, nine months into a forever war, and about a week past the expiration date of the 60 day “cease-fire” Iran and the United negotiated. When Trump is not otherwise occupied with plans for his grand new ballroom-bunker, his helipad, his Arch de Disaster, and his Beautiful Blue Reflecting Pool, he is busy threatening allies he never saw fit to consult before he launched the attack.

At the risk of quibbling, I’d say the real timeline for the toxic dysfunction between Iran and the United States started, not in 1979, but in 1953. That’s when President Dwight Eisenhower launched a coup against the democratically elected president of Iran, a guy named Mohammad Mosaddegh, because Mosaddegh had the temerity to nationalize the vast oil wealth of his nation.

As coups went, it was more sudden than bloody. But it put the Shah of Iran’s ass back on Iran’s Peacock Throne. And there he stayed ’tll 1979.

I could go on, but why bother? But I have just one final question: How many wars have we fought in because of Persian Gulf oil now? Desert Storm; the Iraq War; 9/11; the Afghani War. The war we’re fighting now. Profits for the oil companies have reportedly quadruped and quintupled since this latest war started. Last I looked, $93 billion is not chump change.

To state the obvious, national security considerations should be paramount when it comes to energy policy. Guess what, the coast off San Luis Obispo County has been described as the Saudi Arabia of wind energy. Trump recently canceled the offshore tracts already, unless they invest that money in traditional petrochemical energy sources.

Nobody wants to hear some aged-out former Kinko’s copy clerk from Madison, Wisconsin, crowing how he saw it all coming. But actually, I did.