In The Footsteps of Jimmy Carter?
As President Barack Obama is heading into his re-election bid for the 2012 elections, many political scientists and historians are seeing a number of similarities between the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. President Carter had listed three reasons for his defeat in the 1980 Presidential Election. The first was the Iranian Hostage Crisis and his shortcomings on retrieving them. During the revolution in Iran that ousted the Shah of Iran, the rebels would overrun the U.S. Embassy and take American hostages. It has also become knowledge, through recently declassified CIA documents, that the CIA helped fund these rebels in the early stages of the Iranian Revolution due to the Shah falling out of favor with the American government. The covert operation to rescue the hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, was a failure. The Iranian Hostage Crisis is still considered among many historians as the most devastating diplomatic incident in contemporary United States Histor