Obama wins where Carter lost: why both could prove equally dangerous!

Nothing so scars an American President as un-success. Contrast the fortunes of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Helicopter failure afflicted both in their high profile rescue missions, it destroyed the Presidency of one, and may well have forged a second term for the other.

I well remember standing in what the Americans dubbed Iran’s Desert One, one of a tiny handful of reporters to reach the crash site of Carter’s doomed effort to rescue 52 US hostages held by Iranian students at the American Embassy in Tehran. The carcasses of five incinerated US choppers still smouldered in the sand. The corpses of dead US service men littered the ground. The Iranian Justice Minister Ayatollah Khalkhali was running around the edge of the wreckage wielding the burnt thigh bone of a dead US airman.

In that moment, as our camera rolled, an image of American failure was being humiliatingly etched across the world. An image that the US electorate and the world at large would not forget. American power, so eroded by Vietnam, was brought still lower by this one night of foolhardy bravery. “Mechanical malfunction” was the excuse given for the chopper fire that engulfed the rescue effort.

“Mechanical malfunction” is the phrase Obama’s White House has used of the second of the two special forces helicopters that failed at Abbottabad in Sunday’s mission to take out Osama Bin Laden. But unlike Carter, Obama was in some way blessed with better military planning. A third helicopter was scrambled to make good the loss. I’m wondering even now whether the forty minutes that it took to kill Bin Laden was in part extended to await the arrival of that back-up machine. Obama was blessed with the military incompetence of the very Pakistan forces they and we have trained.

This fantastic violation of Pakistan airspace triggered, it seems, no military response. Whilst Carter’s mission was destroyed by sensational US military incompetence, Obama’s was facilitated by Pakistan’s comparable failure. Carter’s choppers were incinerated by the refuelling tanker which, blinded by the dust storm kicked up by the reverse thrust of its engines as it landed, clipped the last of a line of choppers parked too close together, awaiting their refuelling.

Unlike Carter, waiting anxiously for a remote phone call, Obama watched the action of his mission live from a special forces helmet. Imagine the Carteresque intake of breath as he learned that the operation was a helicopter down. But Obama’s luck was in. The mission succeeded.

Iran became an American pariah after the rescue failure. Had it succeeded, history in the entire region might have been profoundly different. Instead, there has been a US/Iranian freeze ever since.

So where will Obama’s success take relations with Pakistan, and the other regional player Saudi Arabia? Pakistan is revealed as the Osama/al Qaida host she has always been suspected as being. She is unveiled – her military/intelligence incomptence laid bare as never before. What will flow from that? And Saudi – her most prominent citizen outside the Royal Family, is dead.

Carter failed and lost. Obama has a much bigger challenge now than even the prospect of losing. He has the wind of winning in his sails. Has he the breadth of imagination to go further – to challenge the historical alliances and hatreds that are the bedrock of our current circumstance? Is oil-rich, Bahrain-protester-repressing Saudi really our wisest alliance? Is impoverished Pakistan the sensible bulwark in the region? Is the freeze on Iran best continued?

Make no mistake, this is a dangerous crossroads in history from which Obama and the West can still emerge winner or loser.