Carter'a Harg Adası'nı İşgal Baskısı ve Reddedilen Savaş Planı

They pressured Carter to invade Kharg Island too. He didn't.

The president was in a humiliating bind. The American people were obsessed with the harrowing images of blindfolded and bound hostages beamed into their homes by the nightly newscasts, and they prayed their government would find a way to free them. Desperate for a way out, some White House advisers prodded the president to go to war. This is not the story of the Trump administration, which is trapped in a quagmire of the president’s own creation. It is the dilemma that swallowed President Jimmy Carter from November 4, 1979, when hundreds of militant Iranian students overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 63 hostages. Three more were seized at a nearby building. Of the many possible parallels between then and now, one is the importance of a small coral island in the northern Persian Gulf about 20 miles from the Iranian coast. Kharg Island is home to a major oil terminal through which nearly all Iranian oil exports pass. President Donald Trump says he’s thinking about seizing it, a threat he has made numerous times since he launched a war with Iran on February 28. But Trump is not the first president to mull such an operation. In a largely forgotten footnote to his presidency, Jimmy Carter was presented with plans to capture the island but rejected them. The reasons for his restraint still hold force today. In a top-secret memo in late December 1979, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski asked Carter “to consider military actions which contribute to [Ayatollah Khomeini’s] downfall, and thus secure the release of the hostages.” Seizing Kharg and two other islands near the Strait of Hormuz’s entrance could, in Brzezinski’s estimation, impose “a protracted humiliation on Khomeini, which could only be terminated through the release of the hostages.” He hoped to “mesh” military action “with covert political action designed to create an alternative to Khomeini.” In other words, regime change. As the Washington Post revealed the following March, the risky plan called for amphibious assault ships to steam up the Persian Gulf and disembark U.S. Marines. “Once on the island, they or technicians with them would take over the oil lines,” the Post reported, noting that backers of the plan hoped that cutting off oil revenue “would put tremendous pressure on the Iranian leader without reaping the whirlwind of criticism” that would result from bombing mainland Iran. As Edward Luce wrote in his 2025 biography of Brzezinski, Carter dismissed the idea of deploying military force to pressure the ayatollah to free the hostages: “Such actions would only rally Iranians around Khomeini, he said.” Brzezinski grew frustrated at Carter’s “stubborn instinct to do what he thought was right, even if it damaged his reelection prospects,” Luce noted. Four months later, on April 10, 1980, with the hostages still in captivity and Americans obsessing over their fate, Brzezinski wrote another memo to Carter lamenting the lack of diplomatic progress and proposing military strikes. In Brzezinski’s six-step plan to save the hostages, step 5 was “Closure of Kharg Island and/or occupation of the Tunbs and Abu Musa at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.” Once again, Carter chose restraint. “President Carter recognized that military action in the Persian Gulf was too risky and could trigger a wider war,” University of Texas historian Jeremi Suri tells RS. “The best leverage Carter had was to try to work with the new government behind the scenes to protect and release American personnel.” Luce tells RS that Carter had a “radically different” view of military force than Brzezinski. “In spite of the latter's ceaseless efforts to get Carter to take kinetic action — seizing Kharg Island, imposing a naval blockade, bombing Iranian oil refineries, and various other proposals — Carter did not come close to approving military action, except for Operation Eagle Claw. No US president before or since has been so reluctant to deploy the Pentagon.” Under withering pressure to do something to save the American captives, Carter authorized on April 24, 1980, the long-planned Eagle Claw rescue mission that crashed and burned in a desert 200 miles from Tehran, another humiliation piled upon a seemingly impotent administration. Eagle Claw’s failure led to the same consequence that bombing Iran or seizing Kharg Island might have produced, according to historian John Ghazvinian. “If there had been any possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough in the hostage crisis, it was now gone,” Ghazvinian wrote in his history of U.S.-Iran relations. There are no hostages to rescue in Iran today. President Trump is hostage instead to his judgment, having attacked Iran twice in eight months during negotiations. Trump may be desperate to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran’s new hardline leadership cadre has proven itself capable of withstanding immense pressure. Seizing Kharg Island as leverage, therefore, seems destined to fail. This won’t stop some in Washington from supporting it. Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on July 12, Former CENTCOM Commander Ret. Gen. Frank McKenzie echoed Brzezinski’s long-discarded advice. “What we're talking about is modifying the views and actions of an extreme hardline regime,” and seizing Kharg Island could well do the trick, McKenzie argued. “Possession of Iranian soil would be a significant factor in future negotiations with Iran.” National security analysts agree that the U.S. military can capture the island, but doing so would create more military and diplomatic problems — and many more American casualties. “An invasion of Kharg would be fraught with danger, no matter what kind of forces are used. An amphibious landing would include a good deal of immediate support in the form of naval fire and aviation. But that also means there would be a flotilla of ships parked well within range of Iranian missiles and drones based on the mainland,” said Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center. “The American ground forces would be under constant threat from the same Iranian assets.” Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army major and Defense Intelligence Agency official who now works at the progressive group Win Without War, says McKenzie’s reasoning is divorced from reality. “He’s imagining that if the U.S. takes an Iranian island, it becomes a bargaining chip. That idea is predicated on the assumption that taking an island is less costly for the U.S. than for Iran. Putting a bunch of U.S. troops on an island next to Iran becomes a casualty-generating machine.” It took until the last day of Carter’s presidency, with the help of Algerian intermediaries and a deal to unfreeze nearly $8 billion in Iranian assets, to free the 52 remaining hostages. Carter had been, Ghazvinian wrote, seemingly prepared to stake his entire presidency on his ability to get them released. Through it all, he avoided war even as his political career imploded. We might contrast Carter’s attitude with that of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who never miss an opportunity to remind us of their toughness and willingness to use massive violence to bend Iran to their will. Their delusions are no match for geography. “The parallel with today is that neither Brzezinski nor Carter — nor anyone in the administration — understood the ayatollah's psychology, let alone the blood and martyrdom that suffused Shiite fundamentalist ideology. They kept misreading Khomeini's resolve,” Luce tells RS. “Seizing Kharg Island, as Brzezinski kept urging, and Trump keeps being tempted to do (he has repeatedly raised it in several phone calls with me), would not be the Hail Mary of their dreams. The continuity here is in U.S. misreading of Iran.” Trump has threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants and other civilian infrastructure nine times, only to step back from the precipice while blustering about imminent deals to restore peace and commerce. Any prudent minds left in Trump’s inner circle might take a cue from Carter and tell him to avoid Kharg Island at all costs.