The face-off

Bowden's book is a page-turner, but its final chapters do not do justice to the epic story he has gone to great trouble to reconstruct. He has narrated the events of those 444 days from a bird's-eye view, without interview quotes or attribution, but hewing closely to the experiences of each of the story's great many characters. It's an absorbing and effective technique -- until it abruptly ends after the hostages board the plane that will take them to freedom. Then we get a chapter that tells us what became of each hostage in what feels like a brisk run-through of their résumés, one piled atop another.

Bowden then travels to Tehran, which, by his description, is colorless, dirty, smelly, bland and desolate, scarred by ugly architecture and choked with traffic -- a suffocating place where nothing grows and Allah forbids every hue but Islamic green. It's a superficial impression, guided by preconception, and not a surprising one from someone who has clearly spent countless hours immersed in the bitter memories of the hostages. But since he has gone to the trouble to take us back to Iran, one wishes Bowden evinced more feeling for the density and variegation of contemporary Iranian life, for its contradictions and lyricism, for the sophistication and dignity of its intellectual culture and politics, let alone the last decade's striving for reform, however stymied.

Bowden might have rendered some of the country's recent history through the hostage takers he went to see in Tehran. Instead, we get a catalog of their whereabouts and long, undigested quotes from their political diatribes. Some of the hostage takers have remained true to the hard line they championed in 1979, while others became leaders of the movement for incremental reform. But we don't get much narrative or political context for these currents. Bowden has gone to the hostage takers essentially looking for a renunciation of the embassy takeover, which has become one of the founding myths of the Islamic Republic; and he only passingly acknowledges that "perhaps" this mea culpa might not be forthcoming in a country where dissidents are routinely jailed and tortured. (He has even told us that he traveled under the auspices of an Iranian agency that required him to turn over tapes of all his interviews before departing the country.)

What exactly is the significance of the hostage crisis today? Why, in the year 2006, as tensions mount between the United States and Iran, should we return to that fateful moment in the history of our relations, and what will be illuminated there?

The obvious answers are unsatisfying, and Bowden doesn't really get us beyond them. His subtitle asserts that the hostage crisis was "America's first encounter with militant Islam." But then we are left to wonder exactly what this encounter touched off, and how, as well as what it might tell us about later encounters. Bowden informs us that militant Islamism is a traditionalist backlash against modernity -- the "death throes of an ancient way of life." The Iranian example, he writes, presents a pattern for the future of Islamism everywhere: A "fanatical fringe" will seize on popular discontent, offering a vision of paradise but leading only to corrupt and ineffectual dictatorship that the people will grow to hate.

There is nothing ancient about the way of life Iran adopted after its revolution, which introduced an entirely new vision of the state onto the world scene. And Bowden's generalized musings on utopianism have little bearing on the American encounter with the hostage takers, let alone with militant Islam. Neither of these superficial arguments follows from the 600 preceding pages, which have addressed the Americans' experiences almost exclusively. Bowden hasn't really figured out what the significance might be of the events he recounts, and this thick tome threatens to float away without an anchor.

Reliving the hostage crisis outside any convincing matrix of meaning is sure to leave many American readers with nothing but outrage, especially considering that Iran's current president is an anti-American hardliner whose rhetoric harks back to 1979. At a time when some in American political circles are calling for military strikes against Iran, rekindling that anger without purpose or context hardly seems a service. Between the present moment and the one Bowden narrates, there is a facile and dangerous parallel at hand. To make it is to pass over the last quarter century of Iranian politics, which has witnessed a unique fermentation of Islamist rule and democratic yearnings. It is also to misrepresent the meaning of the 2005 presidential election in Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not ride to power on a wave of popular enthusiasm; he did so on a wave of despair. Bowden writes that no reformist candidates were permitted to run in that election, but in fact there were three, by some counts four. Their constituency was divided, demoralized and angry. Ahmadinejad's ascendance reflected not a resurgence of revolutionary purism in Iran, but the political failure of the reform movement, as well as widespread frustration with economic hardship and government corruption. Iran remains, confoundingly, the country in the Muslim Middle East with the government most overtly hostile to American interests and the populace most open to democratic values. That's partly why Iran is such a puzzle for American policymakers, more now than in 1979.

Today, the former American embassy compound crouches behind a wall daubed with the revolutionary murals many young Tehranis have come to regard as the kitsch of their parents' youth. It is almost impossible to imagine American diplomats cruising through its gates and out into the clangorous Iranian capital. What might the world be like if they did? Bowden's book captures a precarious moment, a final point of contact between an Islamic Republic of Iran that was, in that instant, bloody and new; and a United States that was a world-weary Goliath, little suspecting that the world it had grown weary of was shifting beneath its feet.

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