Humiliated, Carter dispatched commandos in Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages, but the choppers crashed in a sandstorm, killing eight soldiers, whose wizened bodies became props in a macabre Iranian show. ‘Who crushed Mr Carter’s helicopters?’ asked Khomeini. ‘We did? The sands did! These sands are agents of God. Let them try again.’ They did not. American commanders-in-chief require the laurels of victory: Carter was tainted with defeat and misfortune, but he did nurture the first Arab–Israeli peace treaty.
On 19 November 1977, Sadat, confident after his early successes against Israel, had courageously flown to Jerusalem.
JJ OF GHANA AND SADAT IN JERUSALEM
Sadat told the Knesset: ‘Let’s put an end to war.’ His Israeli host, Menachem Begin, a dour Polish-born nationalist who had used terrorism to undermine the British Mandate, had overturned thirty years of Labour government, winning the votes of the neglected Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries. Begin returned Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace that outraged the rest of the Islamic world. In March 1979, when the deal was signed in Washington, Assad of Syria and Qaddafi of Libya denounced Sadat’s betrayal along with Imam Khomeini.
Khomeini’s first foreign visitor was Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, who had trained many Iranian radicals in his Soviet-funded Lebanese camps. Faith is contagious and fungible: the revolution of 1979 changed the world as much as those of 1789 and 1917. Secular westerners saw Khomeini as a spectre from the obscurantist, intolerant past. Actually, he was the future. Khomeini’s ambitions were pan-Islamic, unbounded by Shiism or Iranian history, embracing the secular Palestinians (‘Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine’) as well as Sunnis. Khomeini had been inspired by the Egyptian Sunni, Qutb, hanged by Nasser; now Qutb’s followers were inspired by him. President Sadat had granted asylum to his friend the dying deposed shah, who moved from America to Panama, pursued by Khomeini’s agents demanding his murder or extradition. When he died in Cairo, Sadat buried him in al-Rifai Mosque beside Ismail the Magnificent and Farouk. Sadat’s peace with Israel and loyalty to the shah aroused Islamicist hatred.
In Pakistan, on 4 April 1979, the elected former prime minister Bhutto was hanged on the orders of the Islamicist general who had deposed him. The chief of staff, General Muhammad Zia, had in July 1977 deposed Bhutto, whose high-handed autocracy and manoeuvres between socialism, Islam and the feudal lords, not to speak of the murder of his opponents, had alienated all sides. Bhutto himself had appointed Zia and encouraged the brisk, moustachioed British-trained officer to promote Islam in the army, but the general loathed him, later trying him for murder. Now the Shiite Iranian revolution encouraged the Sunni Zia to Islamicize Pakistan and impose sharia law.
Khomeini’s influence was powerful, but he faced a present threat: he despised Saddam Hussein and called for the destruction of the ‘godless Baathists’. Saddam despised him back.
On 22 July 1979, Saddam Hussein, newly minted president of Iraq, puffing on a cigar, strolled on stage at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council to launch a purge, videotaped and later shown throughout the country. After Sadat’s peace with Israel, President al-Bakr had proposed a union with Assad, his fellow Baathist in Syria: al-Bakr would be president, Assad his deputy, and Saddam would lose his position. Saddam therefore undermined the deal. This led to a schism with Assad of Syria, who instead made an alliance with Iran, an alliance that would ensure the survival of his dynasty into the 2020s.
After finessing al-Bakr’s retirement, Saddam emerged from the shadows, a half-educated radical whose easy rise, ingenious cruelty and sycophantic court convinced him of a providential destiny to be a new Saladin and Nasser, Nebuchadnezzar and Stalin rolled into one. On taking the presidency, he arrested his enemies and tortured them to incriminate others in ‘the Syrian plot’.
Now on stage, he presided over the naming of ‘brothers who betrayed us’ in the audience with the insouciance of a diabolical game-show compere. As they were named, Saddam shouted ‘Get out!’ and the cameras showed suited Mukhabarat agents escorting them out of the room as the survivors displayed their loyalty by cheering, shouting and hailing Saddam. When it was over, Saddam and his henchmen wept, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs, and later led the survivors down into the cellars where they were given pistols and forced to shoot some of the prisoners; others were reprieved and forced to kill more.
Khomeini and Saddam were not the only leaders who sought to use murder to cleanse their nations. On 26 June 1979, a thirty-two-year-old Ghanaian flight sergeant, Jerry Rawlings, set up a line of stakes on the beach in Accra, Ghana, and invited the press to a macabre spectacle. ‘There were six stakes, each with a rope dangling from it,’ recalled a journalist. ‘Sandbags were piled behind each stake.’ Then an ambulance drew up. ‘The door was flung open’ and out stepped two ex-presidents, Generals Akuffo and Afrifa, and four top officers. ‘A sudden hush fell on the teeming spectators’ as the men were tied to the stakes. ‘Hardly anyone saw the firing squad enter the tents, all attention was on the condemned officers …’
Son of an Ewe mother and a Scottish pharmacist from Galloway, ‘JJ’ Rawlings was a flashy, tall pilot disgusted by the venality and incompetence of the military and civilian rulers who had followed Nkrumah. But, recently married to Nana and with three children, he kept failing his officer examinations and was about to be dismissed from the military. Capricious and impetuous, Rawlings joined a secret organization, the Free Africa officers, planning coups across the continent.
His own coup was devised by him and his best friend from Accra’s famous British-style Prince of Wales boarding school, Major ‘JC’ Kojo Boakye Djan; as boys they had rebelled against the English headmaster. In May 1979, Rawlings burst in on his friend: ‘JC, let’s go for a drink.’
Over cocktails at the Continental Hotel, Rawlings suddenly declared, ‘JC, we’re ready to take over.’
‘You and who?’ asked JC.
‘I’ve got a lot of boys,’ said JJ. JC warned him against it. ‘You temporize too much,’ warned JJ, ‘you risk being seen as a coward.’
The coup was a disaster. Rawling and his ‘boys’ were captured, and were facing execution. ‘The options were clear,’ said JC. ‘We had to release Rawlings before he was executed.’
On 4 June 1979, JC stormed the prison and liberated Rawlings; they then seized the Castle and overthrew General Akuffo. Setting up an Armed Forces Revolutionary Committee, Flight Sergeant Rawlings declared ‘a house-cleaning exercise’, arresting three ex-presidents and five generals. The first shootings were in private, but on the beach in Accra crowds were gathered.
‘There was no audible order to fire,’ recalled the journalist. ‘Just a sudden: ko.ko.ko. I could see the blood soaking through …’ Years later, Rawlings reflected that it was ‘very painful and regrettable, but there was no other way out’. A hit list of 300 was compiled and all were killed, before Rawlings amazed everyone by letting a free election take place, won by a respectable diplomat and Nkrumahite, Dr Hilla Limann. Rawlings returned to the barracks, but after two years of weak, corrupt rule, on 31 December 1981 he retook the Castle. ‘Fellow Ghanaians,’ he announced, ‘this isn’t a coup. I ask for nothing less than a revolution … Nothing will be done from the Castle without the consent of the people.’
Rawlings presided over the revenge killing of three judges who had dared to challenge his repressions during his first rule. Faced with an outcry, Rawlings arrested his own junta henchman and had him shot. Meanwhile he ruined the economy with Marxist nationalizations, encouraged by his allies Castro and Qaddafi. Rawlings resembled many of the pro-Soviet tyrants in Africa, but he was not one of them: ultimately this maverick would surprise everyone.