President Donald Trump dismissed claims that he’s under any pressure to end the war with Iran, insisting he wants “to get a great deal,” while announcing the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire despite ongoing rockets and airstrikes amid a furious 24-hour news cycle with frequently changing narratives.
On January 3, 2020, Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by an American drone strike ordered by Trump. On June 22, 2025, the United States Air Force and Navy attacked three nuclear facilities in Iran as part of the Twelve-Day War.
Eight months later, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated on February 28, 2026, the first day of an unprovoked and undeclared war started by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the urging of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
But more important than sorting out the lies from the White House that have enhanced the fog of this undeclared war, citizens must understand that today’s events did not start in the recent past.
Over the past century, a tangled web of complex events has driven the ongoing conflict and deep-rooted hostility between the United States, now celebrating its 250th anniversary, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a civilization whose history stretches back 5000 years.
On this day in 1980, a quarter past the stroke of midnight, eight American helicopters rose from the deck of the USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea. They were headed for a rendezvous with destiny and with fire. That rendezvous occurred not in the halls of the American embassy in Tehran, but in the salt flats of a distant desert.
It was there that the American presidency crashed amidst the twisted metal of its finest intentions. And in the ashes of that failure, a darker conspiracy was born, one that redefines the ancient notions of heroism and treachery for a modern age.
When Iranian students captured fifty-two Americans in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, the Joint Chiefs of Staff quickly realized that the United States lacked the military capability to launch a rescue of those held hostage.
The mission was called Operation Eagle Claw. Born out of a 444-day national nightmare, its objective was simple: bring 52 American diplomats and citizens home. But the desert, the great equalizer of all human ambition, had other plans.
As the assault force of Delta Force commandos assembled at a remote staging site dubbed “Desert One,” a haboob—a fierce wall of sand and heat—descended.
In the blinding chaos, one helicopter nursed a cracked rotor blade, another succumbed to hydraulic failure. Mission commanders, bound by the strict logic of predetermined rules, had no choice but to abort.
“It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. It was my decision to cancel it,” President Jimmy Carter told a stunned nation the next morning, shouldering the full and solitary weight of the military defeat. “The responsibility is fully my own.”
It was a stark image of executive accountability that has rarely been matched since, but while Carter spoke of responsibility, the reality on the ground was one of horror.
One of the retreating helicopters, disoriented in the blinding dust, slammed into a C-130 transport plane. The resulting explosion carved a wound into the American soul.
Eight service members—five airmen and three Marines—lay dead in the Iranian sand.
They died before a single shot was fired in anger. They died not in battle, but in a predictable accident that had not been fully considered.
Yet it is in this very failure that we find the purest definition of heroism.
Heroism is not merely the act of winning. It is not the tally of a body count or the planting of a flag.
True heroism is the cold calculation of risk against a duty that transcends the self. It is the decision, as those men lifted off from the carrier deck, to serve an imperative larger than their own comfort or safety.
“None of us wanted to die; none of us expected to die, but we knew the risk,” one of the soldiers recalled.
Heroism is the willingness to walk into a dust storm fully aware that you may never walk out, all for the sake of a stranger’s freedom. The eight who perished at Desert One did not fail the nation; they served it with a valor so absolute that it transcended the operational failure that claimed their lives.
Theirs was the heroism of the broken body, not the unfurled victory banner.
But heroism requires a foil.
And in 1980, that foil was not the students holding the embassy walls. It was a plot hatched in the shadows of American politics, a plot so cynical it would make Machiavelli blush.
Following Carter’s public concession of defeat and the loss of eight American lives, the political dynamics shifted.
The hostage crisis became an anchor around the president’s neck. As the 1980 election approached, whispers turned into shouts of an “October Surprise”—a last-minute deal that would free the hostages and sweep Carter to victory.
According to decades of historical investigation and recent firsthand testimony, the campaign of Republican challenger Ronald Reagan was determined to prevent any such miracle.
William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager and a former OSS spymaster, ran the covert operation to manipulate the election’s outcome. In the summer of 1980, Casey sent former Texas Gov. John Connally on a secret mission to the Middle East, accompanied by Ben Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Texas from 1969 to 1973.
Barnes used his political influence to convince Brigadier General James Rose to secure for future President George W. Bush a Texas Air National Guard pilot spot at the request of Bush family friend Sidney Adger.
Senior Reagan administration officials secretly conspired to traffic arms to Iran from 1981 to 1986, using the proceeds to illegally fund the Contras in violation of the Boland Amendments, while publicly justifying the scheme as an attempt to free U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah.
These instances of treason, abusing political influence, and lawbreaking are included here to exhibit the arrogance displayed among those who might now be called the “Epstein class” —showing that America’s ruling elite routinely operate under a different set of rules than ordinary people.
Reagan’s campaign not only sabotaged Carter but also betrayed the nation by encouraging Iran to hold American hostages until after the election.
The mission was breathtaking in its audacity and obscene in its intent: ask Arab leaders to pass the word to revolutionary Iran that they should delay the American hostages’ release. Let Carter stew in the juices of his own impotence. Let the 52 families suffer a few months longer, so that power might change hands.
The “October Surprise” theory was once brushed off by the mainstream as just another conspiracy tale, but the evidence is starting to solidify. In 2023, Barnes, a Democrat who was unwittingly involved and had witnessed the trip, broke his silence at the age of 85, saying, “History needs to know that this happened.”
President Jimmy Carter said during a 1989 interview, “After the Iranians announced they would not release the hostages… this devastating negative news swept the country. That Election Day, I have always been convinced this was a major factor.”
Carter’s communications director Gerald Rafshoon was blunter: “If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won, I really believe that.”
Stuart Spencer, a top strategist for Reagan, told researchers he did not doubt that the hostages being released would have won the election for Carter, and that Casey was “obsessed” with preventing it.
And the smoking gun? The hostages were released at 10:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 20, 1981—exactly 33 minutes after Ronald Reagan concluded his inaugural address.
The timing implicated Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, as an active participant in the electioneering. The delay was reportedly his final thumb in the eye to Carter, the deeply religious man who showed compassion to the ousted, cancer-stricken Shah of Iran, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi needed to enter the United States for medical treatment in October 1979.
This act—placing a political campaign above the safety of American citizens—represents the very definition of treachery.
Treachery is not simply treason; it is a violation of faith and confidence, a perfidious betrayal of trust for personal gain.
Treachery is the calculated decision to abandon the duty of care owed to a fellow citizen. Treacherous treason is the willingness to weaponize the suffering of innocent people to carve a path to the Oval Office.
While the eight soldiers at Desert One showed their bravery by rushing into the unknown, these operatives showed their cowardice by manipulating the hostage crisis as if it were a chessboard.
There is a grim symmetry to this tale. The heroes were the ones who moved toward the fire. The treacherous were the ones who lit the match and then pretended not to see the smoke.
The eight service members of Operation Eagle Claw gave their lives in a failed attempt to end a crisis. The Republican conspirators worked to ensure that the crisis endured for their own political survival.
We are left, then, with a singular, unsettling truth: The failure of American power in the desert was a tragedy. But the success of political treachery in the boardrooms and backchannels was a conscious crime.
That treachery, in turn, traces its deepest roots to a 1953 operation when American spies orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected secular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, setting off a cascade of hostility that would culminate decades later in Trump’s unprovoked war.
A Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, approved of the CIA’s plot to overthrow Mossadegh and install the brutal Shah in power. A Republican president, Ronald Reagan, conspired to delay the freedom of the 52 American diplomats, and then to trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon by Hezbollah. A Republican president, Donald Trump, murdered the Iranian general, killed the Iranian Supreme Leader, and started an unprovoked and undeclared war.
In the tough, unforgiving reckoning of the republic, the wrongs of the past will always overshadow the transgressions of the present, even if the magnitude of these sins grows greater.
We honor the memory of the five Air Force personnel and three Marines who gave their lives during Operation Eagle Claw: Maj. Richard L. Bakke, Maj. Harold L. Lewis Jr., Tech. Sgt. Joel C. Mayo, Maj. Lyn D. McIntosh, Capt. Charles T. McMillan II, Sgt. John D. Harvey, Cpl. George N. Holmes Jr., and Staff Sgt. Dewey L. Johnson.
We fool ourselves by pretending that Republicans have any patriotism.
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