India, April 3 -- the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. Enemy forces have captured seven key military bases, cutting off the major oil supplies of the free world. Your challenge is how you are going to respond. You fly a McDonnell Douglas VTOL BA Harrier, and your mission is to destroy all seven bases without losing your carrier. Your opposition consists of MiG-21 fighters. That was 37 years ago. Have you heard anything about this? I doubt it.

That was Operation Hormuz. This was ten years after the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew a pro-American autocrat and replaced him with a theocrat. It was the final year of the decade-long Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, an intervention whose consequences still haunt the region and its p...